Analyzing Evidence of Sustainable Urban Water Management Systems: A Review through the Lenses of Sociotechnical Transitions

Blal Adem Esmail,Lina Suleiman

doi:10.3390/su12114481

Abstract

Sustainability concerns and multiple socio-environmental pressures have necessitated a shift towards Sustainable Urban Water Management (SUWM) systems. Viewing SUWM systems as sociotechnical, this paper departs from eight factors previously identified by transition research: Pressures, Context, Purposes, Actors, Instruments, Processes, Outputs, and Outcomes as a methodological framework for a structured review of 100 articles. The study seeks to analyze empirical cases of planning and implementing SUWM systems worldwide. A wide range of public actors—driven by social and environmental factors rather than by economic pressures—have initiated SUWM projects so as to locally fulfill defined social and environmental purposes. We provide evidence on the emergence of new actors, such as experts, users, and private developers, as well as on the diverse and innovative technical and societal instruments used to promote and implement SUWM systems. We also explore their contexts and institutional capacity to deal with pressures and to mobilize significant financial and human resources, which is in itself vital for the transition to SUWM. Planned or implemented SUWM outputs are divided into green (wet ponds, raingardens, and green roofs) and gray (rain barrels and porous pavements) measures. The outcomes of SUWM projects—in terms of societal and technical learning, and their institutional uptakes—are often implicit or lacking, which seemingly reduces the rate of desirable change.

Highlights

A wealth of socio-economic and environmental issues—in terms of resource scarcity and sinks, as well as climate change impacts—are placing a great amount of strain on conventional infrastructure systems, forcing them to overstep their sustainability limits [1,2,3,4]
We considered the sample of 100 articles to be sufficiently large as to gain useful insights into the empirical evidence on the planning and implementation of Sustainable Urban Water Management (SUWM) systems
The remaining 17 countries were covered by one article (Figure 3)

Summary

Introduction

A wealth of socio-economic and environmental issues—in terms of resource scarcity and sinks, as well as climate change impacts—are placing a great amount of strain on conventional infrastructure systems, forcing them to overstep their sustainability limits [1,2,3,4]. Open spatial systems mimicking natural principles are advocated as alternative system solutions that could restore natural hydrological flows These systems could reverse the impacts of urbanization and alteration of engineering-based water flows, close the urban water cycle, enhance water security, and act as structural measures for urban climate change resilience [7,8,9]. The envisioned solutions are commonly referred to as Sustainable Urban Water Management (SUWM) [3,6,10] These new systems encapsulate hydrological principles of detention and conveyance, retention, and infiltration of rainwater and runoffs, integrated into designed nature-based facilities, such as ponds, wetlands, porous pavements, swales, trenches, open canals, green roofs and walls, and bio-retention systems [7,11,12,13]. Urban water systems are viewed as sociotechnical systems that imply seamless interconnectivity of physical artefacts, economics, politics, actors, and structures, and are resistant to radical change

Methods

Results

Conclusion