Abstract
Rapid urbanization, inappropriate urban planning and the changing climate in many countries have resulted in flooding, water shortage and water pollution around the world. Although the sponge city concept has been applied in both macro-scales and micro-scales to address those challenges, research on the heterogeneity of different cities for sponge city construction and the collaborative management between cities is insufficient. Therefore, this paper proposes a multivariate cluster analysis framework and conducts an empirical study using 96 Chinese cities. By considering the local infrastructure, economic development, water resource distribution, water quality and precipitation characteristics in each city, and integrating the principal component analysis and a self-organizing feature mapping network, this paper shows the potential of regional and interregional sponge city collaborative management. This will provide an opportunity for developing a new sponge city management mechanism and will promote the establishment of multi-functional departments for urban flood control and water quality improvement.
Highlights
The rapid urbanization and increasingly extreme weather events make urban flood a significant concern in scientific communities around the world [1]
A systematic framework based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Self-organizing Feature Map (SOM) was developed by considering critical aspects involved in the sponge city construction
102 sub-indicators reflecting characteristics regarding the natural environment, economic development, infrastructure construction, water pollutant, water resources and precipitation characteristics were selected for 96 cities
Summary
The rapid urbanization and increasingly extreme weather events make urban flood a significant concern in scientific communities around the world [1]. The construction of buildings, roads and grounds have removed the natural rainwater-retaining infrastructures (e.g., woodlands, green spaces, natural lakes and wetlands), created impermeable surfaces, changed their ecological and hydrological characteristics and caused floods [2]. Traditional urban water management mainly focuses on the rapid-draining of rainwater to downstream rather than retaining and reusing it as a resource, and is considered unsustainable [5,6]. Have been developed for sustainable urban water management [7]. Those strategies are useful for reducing runoff and peak flow. Challenges such as high construction cost, increasing demand for urban land, and low public perceptions hindered their application [8]
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