Last week this blog covered four articles on Cities and Water: Flooding, Green Infrastructure, SuDS, Resilience, Awareness & Climate change. This week another four case studies from Richard Ashley highlighting the way cities across the world a reframing and transforming the urban environment to meet the challenges of water, flooding and climate change in a more resilient manner.

1.  Copenhagen – A network of sunken basins and water-purifying planting has been developed by landscape studio SLA and engineering firm Ramboll to help avert flooding in a Copenhagen neighbourhood (+ slideshow). The 140 million DKK (£16 million) project called The Soul of Nørrebro aims to regenerate the city’s Inner Nørrebro area, establishing new ecosystems to ease flooding, and creating new social spaces in the process.

2.  Toronto, Canada – Urban Green space and health Studies showing how natural environments can enhance health; this study looks at greenspace metrics and health. How much is a tree near where you live worth?

3.  City water management   New research funded by those pesky faceless European bureaucrats includes analysis of best practices in city water management. Case studies including Leicester (flood risk) and Milton Keynes (water scarcity) consider the impact of climate change and other challenges, and outline the high costs of inaction. 

4.  Dispersed Storage as Stormwater Runoff Control in Consolidated Urban Watersheds with Flash Flood Risk

This article presents the results of analyzing the use of dispersed storage tanks as a low impact development (LID) alternative to mitigate the flash flood risk in consolidated urban watersheds in Barranquilla, Colombia. Fieldwork, rainfall and flow rate monitoring, and numerical modeling were conducted to evaluate different scenarios combining storage tank capacity, two types of storage operations, and different locations by land use and watershed sectoring. These results showed that it is possible to reduce significantly the peak flow with small-capacity tanks distributed in the urban watershed with hydraulic structures that divide the discharge during the peak-flow time interval. By storing 3–17% of the runoff volume, equivalent to a dispersed storage capacity from 4 to 19 mm rainfall, it is possible to reduce the peak flow from 25 to 75%. These results demonstrate the advantages of using low impact development for stormwater management in consolidated cities with limited space, if regulatory policies encourage the massive use of LID in existing buildings.