Abstract
Abstract Despite being widely implemented, sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) do not always function flawlessly. While SUDS have been tested extensively and seem to perform well on a laboratory or pilot scale, practitioners' experience is different: failures in SUDS occur regularly in practice, resulting in malfunctioning systems, water nuisance and high costs. To anticipate their malfunctioning, and thus to improve their performance, a better understanding of failures occurring in SUDS and their underlying causes is needed. Based on an explorative case-study approach, consisting of site visits and semi-structured interviews with urban water professionals, this study presents an inventory of technical failures in SUDS and an analysis of their root causes. In total, 70 cases in 11 Dutch municipalities have been documented. The results show that the interfaces between SUDS and other urban systems are prominent failure locations. In addition, we found that failures originate from the entire development process of SUDS, i.e., from the design, construction and user/maintenance phase. With respect to the causes underlying these failures, our results show that these are mainly socio-institutional in nature. These are valuable insights for both practitioners and scholars, contributing to a renewed socio-technical urban water system with more sustainable water management practices.
Highlights
Urban water management has focused on providing safe, reliable, and cost-effective water services
sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) are widely implemented systems that form an essential part of contemporary storm water management
Like any other part of the urban water infrastructure, piped or non-piped, SUDS are subject to failure
Summary
Urban water management has focused on providing safe, reliable, and cost-effective water services. Growing societal attention to pollution control and environmental protection, has led to the questioning of the effectiveness of traditional sewer systems (Chocat et al 2007) In response to these environmental concerns, a push towards more integrated storm water solutions has emerged in the past decades (Qiao et al 2018). Throughout this paper, we use the term SUDS, which can be broadly defined as technologies and techniques used to manage storm water and surface water in a manner that is more sustainable than conventional solutions (Fletcher et al 2015) These SUDS use principles such as infiltration and storage, thereby processing water, and contributing to the urban environment in an environmental, as well as a social and economic sense (Zhou 2014; Cohen-Shacham et al 2016)
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