Achieving integrated urban water management: planning top-down or bottom-up?

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Urban Planning
• Sustainability Studies

Background:

• Integrated Urban Water Management (IUWM) aims for broad environmental and socio-economic benefits, but a clear link between design and operational performance is often missing.
• A lack of shared principles hinders consistent assessment of IUWM operational performance, introducing bias and inconsistency.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the development of shared principles for assessing IUWM operational performance.
• To examine shared objectives and indicators within integrated frameworks for urban residential developments pursuing IUWM and sustainable development.

Main Methods:

• Applied a framework method to two distinct approaches: a top-down urban planning process and a bottom-up community consultation process.
• Analyzed objectives and indicators within these frameworks to identify commonalities and differences.

Main Results:

• Both frameworks revealed IUWM as part of a larger social and environmental system.
• Core environmental performance objectives and indicators were highly similar across both approaches.
• Socio-economic indicators exhibited significant variability, influenced by process and context.

Conclusions:

• There is strong potential for developing shared principles to report and benchmark the environmental performance of neighborhood developments.
• The influence of IUWM on socio-economic variables may be limited by social context unless urban water management expands its responsibilities beyond physical infrastructure.