Abstract
Creating sustainable, resilient, and livable cities calls for integrative approaches and collaborative practices across temporal and spatial scales. However, practicability is challenged by institutional, social, and technical complexities and the need to build collective understanding of integrated approaches. Rapid urbanization along the United States-Mexico border, fueled by industrialization, trade, and migration, has resulted in cities confronted with recurrent flooding risk, extended drought, water pollution, habitat destruction and systemic vulnerabilities. The international border, which separates natural and built ecosystems, is both a challenge and an opportunity, making a unique social and institutional setting ideal for testing the integration of urban planning and water management. Our research focuses on fusing multi-functional and multi-scalar green infrastructure to restore ecosystem services through a strategic binational planning process. This paper describes this planning process, including the development and application of both a land suitability analysis and a hydrological model to optimally site green infrastructure in the Nogales, Arizona, United States—Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, cross border region. We draw lessons from this process and stakeholder feedback focused on the potential for urban green infrastructure, to allow for adaptation and even transformation in the face of current and future challenges such as limited resources, underdeveloped governance, bordering, and climate change. In sum, a cross border network of green infrastructure can provide a backbone to connect this transboundary watershed while providing both hydrological and social benefits.
Highlights
A cross-border urbanization formed by Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona, “Ambos Nogales,” embodies the complexities and challenges of urban planning and water management on the United States-Mexico border
This paper addresses the interaction between urban planning and hydrological modeling for stormwater management in the context of Ambos Nogales
One of the elements that has hampered the progress of cross-border environmental cooperation in the region has been the lack of programmatic approaches to planning and implementation, addressing some of the most urgent challenges for sustainable water management in border cities
Summary
A cross-border urbanization formed by Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona, “Ambos Nogales,” embodies the complexities and challenges of urban planning and water management on the United States-Mexico border. The two cities were settled simultaneously at the end of the ninteenth century in the eastern section of the Santa Cruz River Basin and along the narrow valley formed by Integrating Planning and Water Management the Nogales Wash (Figure 1). The steep topography includes wooded hillsides, rock outcroppings, and seasonal arroyos that are typical of the Sonoran Desert landscape. Ambos Nogales contains an urban corridor that originates at the border gateway and expands north and south for ∼12 km. While the two cities are separated by the border, they are highly interconnected by geography and ecohydrology. More than any other natural event, make this paradox evident
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