Friday, March 29, 12noon-1pm, this on-line event requires advance registration

Cities across the globe are increasingly suffering from flooding by extreme rainfall, drought, and related heat stress. Climate change, ongoing urbanization and aging/decay of existing water management infrastructure together are the major drivers of this process. New approaches to integrated urban water management (IUWM) are continuously being tested and revised to address these challenges in an effective way, such as Water Sensitive Urban Design and the Sponge City approach. These approaches all foster the widespread deployment of multi-beneficial nature-based, blue-green infra solutions for creating protection up to a certain service level, while maximizing ecosystem services and other benefits provided by these solutions. One of these emerging approaches is the Three Points Approach (adapted from Fratini et al, 2012). This approach provides a basis for integrative planning and design of urban, regional and river basin water management interventions (Geldof and Kluck, 2008; Fratini et al., 2012). The 3PA divides stormwater management into three domains: (1.) Design domain; (2.) Extreme domain; (3.) Everyday domain.

It is becoming increasingly clear that this switch from an adaptive planning (incremental) to an integrated, planned adaptation (transformative) approach requires envisioning a desired future beyond the transition. This calls for a renewed attention for (spatial) design both as a method and a product in urban planning. In this context, it aims to complement the current, traditional largely model-based approaches by visualizing desired futures, including the spatial translations and consequences from multiple (including bottom-up) perspectives, which allows identifying sustainable pathways leading to these futures.

In this lecture, Dr. Zevenbergen will address the question of “What are the major features and challenges of taking a long-term perspective assuming that climatic conditions will drastically change in the future? And what does the 3PA approach bring to developing a strategy?”

Chris Zevenbergen is professor at the Water Engineering Department of IHE Delft and at TuDelft, The Netherlands.

RSVP for this event by using this link.

Hosted by CURA [Center for Urban and Regional Analysis] at The Ohio State University.