Urban Hydrology and Water Management – Past Research and Future Directions
A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Urban Water Management".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 3769
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Urban floods, water shortages, and pollution of coastal waters frequently cause significant damage and impacts to social and economic activities, raising a general concern about the best way to mitigate such events.
Present and future challenges posed by climate change and growth of the number of people living in urban and peri-urban areas lead to the need to find new ways to manage the development of cities, in order to mitigate not only floods, but also threats like heat waves, landslides, water supply security, water scarcity, pollution, etc.
Hydrologists, hydraulic engineers, urban planners, IT specialists, sociologists, and economists are called upon to cooperate and identify new opportunities, with the aim of making the best use of existing technological infrastructures, and to make people aware of the importance of the choices made.
Climate change and growing urbanization direct us towards creative planning of new urban settlements, and towards the use of retrofitting techniques to improve existing urban areas, so as to increase resilience to their negative effects.
Defence and water management have been the main objectives of urbanization for a large part of human history. The first objective was always achieved in the broad sense, i.e., defending the population from other humans and natural events. “Design against nature” was also applied to stormwater drainage, looking, at first, at the fastest and cheapest way to deliver urban runoff to the nearest receiving water body. The limitations of such an approach have been highlighted in recent decades, thus introducing sustainability in urban drainage design to protect nature from uncontrolled discharges, although the damage from large and/or recurring flooding remains an issue in many urban areas. Resilience was then introduced to focus not only on defence but also on the ability of urban areas to recover, even though structural resilience is not always accompanied by social and economic resilience.
The second objective (water management) has been implemented, but not really achieved so far, in order to satisfy water needs: Protecting the environment from pollution and water withdrawals resulting from the misuse or waste of resources requires a paradigm shift in the design and management of urban systems.
Thus, the aim of this Special Issue is to find strategies targeted at fostering interdisciplinary research and, in a broad sense, cooperation among different disciplines, in order to face future challenges, and setting a paradigm shift in the design or redesign and management of cities.
Prof. Goffredo La Loggia
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- Urban drainage
- Climate change
- Resilience
- Flood mitigation
- Sustainability
- Urban hydrology
- Urban systems design
- Interdisciplinarity
