Water and the city: risk, resilience and planning for a sustainable future

Urban water infrastructure is designed to provide protection from waterborne disease and hydrological stability for urban citizens to be able to maintain everyday life despite daily and seasonal rainfall variation. Since the emergence of modern forms of urban governance and planning in the nineteenth century, controlling the flow of water through cities has largely been viewed as a technical problem to be solved by professional engineers, who account for hydrological variability in designing and managing water infrastructure. Reservoirs are built to store water for distribution during dry months. Drains are sized for high flow rates to quickly remove water from streets and buildings during storm events. Flood defences are constructed to protect buildings and other assets from water levels which can be anticipated to occur with known probability. Risks associated with the unlikely failure of these systems or extreme events that fall outside their operating conditions have been covered by the insurance industry, providing financial protection to enable citizens and businesses to recover from disasters. Despite its overall success, this approach to managing water in cities is now reaching its limits. Burgeoning urban populations and climate change are increasing the complexity of water management such that it is no longer a technically tractable problem, requiring greater attention from urban planners, designers, politicians and citizens. Iain White’s book Water and the city: risk, resilience and planning for a sustainable future makes the case for the importance of spatial planning within a framework of risk reduction and resilience as the foundation for a new approach to managing water in cities. Although focused on contemporary challenges, his analysis is positioned within a broad historical context of urban planning and water management. The main purpose of this book is to develop a conceptual framework for urban risk and resilience, which may prove applicable to other sectors but emerges from his analysis of the particular nature of urban flooding and water scarcity in modern cities, with emphasis on the UK context. The book begins by challenging perceptions of drought and flood as ‘natural disasters’, demonstrating the interactions between people and the environment in creating these hazards and adapting to the risks they present. Throughout history, urban form has been shaped by efforts to reduce risks posed by environmental and other hazards. In the modern period this has been dominated by technocentric adaptation based on quantitative assessment of risk and cultural ambitions of mastery over nature. Human activity increasingly exacerbates rather than mitigates the environmental risks, even though disasters such as floods and drought are often designated as natural events beyond the influence of urban planning and engineering. White presents population growth and climate change as the major driving forces further entangling human activity and environmental hazards in enhancing urban risk. White presents the key problems of flooding and water scarcity in the city, with analysis of how urban planning and engineering have contributed to both mitigating and enhancing these