Abstract
Urban rainwater management is the terrain of varied initiatives that challenge existing drainage systems. The initiatives that this article refers to as Urban Rainwater Harvesting (URH), promise a more sustainable urban water approach; however, they remain isolated “niche” projects. The article aims to investigate challenges and opportunities for mainstreaming alternative URHs as sociotechnical systems (STS). It identifies six analytical categories: context, actors, instruments, processes/dynamics, outputs and impacts as a framework for the analyses of URH projects in Stockholm, Berlin and Barcelona. Despite the diversity of socio-spatial contexts, driving forces, purposes, instruments used, technical designs and scale of URH projects, relevant factors for a breakthrough of these systems are discussed. Even though URHs have not yet become a common component of rainwater management in any of the cities, context-specific combinations of these factors are found to be essential if these systems are to become complementary options for the sustainable management of rainwater in cities.
Highlights
Current systems of water management in cities are increasingly exposed to a variety of socio-environmental stresses, including climate change, which contest the dominant linear approach of the modern urban water cycle from water supply to water disposal
We are aware of the multiplicity of terms regarding urban water flows (Fletcher et al 2015) but we believe that Urban Rainwater Harvesting (URH) better encapsulates the diverse possibilities for capturing and reusing water in urban contexts
We present our conceptual framework for developing the analysis, which is based primarily on theoretical contributions provided by the transitions approach and its critics
Summary
Current systems of water management in cities are increasingly exposed to a variety of socio-environmental stresses, including climate change, which contest the dominant linear approach of the modern urban water cycle from water supply to water disposal. In particular, is the terrain of multiple and varied initiatives that challenge the dominant large-scale sewer systems and offer a more circular approach to replicating the natural water cycle in which urban runoff may be temporarily stored and/or used within the city, reducing the risk of flooding and pollution. The objective of this article is to investigate challenges and opportunities for mainstreaming alternative URHs in Europe through an inter-city comparison and a crosscase analysis of nine case studies of planning and implementing such systems in Stockholm, Berlin, and Barcelona. We are interested in revealing the wide diversity of pathways towards alternative systems of managing rain in the city—ranging from rainwater tanks for watering gardens to large-scale runoff collection and storage structures in new neighbourhoods—and elucidating how transitions of these sociotechnical systems are conceptualised and critiqued in the literature. We conclude with the most relevant insights gained from the comparative analysis
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