Transitioning to sustainable urban water management systems: how to define expected service functions?

Abstract

Sustainable water management is a worldwide challenge for the twenty-first century. It involves replacing traditional management approaches with a new concept, often referred to as sustainable urban water management (SUWM). This paradigm shift means that SUWM systems must include new services, some of which have already emerged. However, no publications have presented the expected SUWM system in terms of the full range of services it would need to include, and no publications have proposed a method for identifying the services the system must provide. This paper proposes a method for identifying these services and presents a generic petal diagram to represent the service functions of the SUWM system. Moreover, this paper presents a new method for defining these services in a specific territory. This method is based on the confrontation between a general representation and the objectives of the stakeholders in a given system in a given territory. The method is illustrated with a full-scale case study on the Doua eco-campus (Lyon University). This method is intended to aid practitioners to manage its system and to transition to SUWM. It is designed to improve the transparency of decision formulation and to involve stakeholders in the process.