Building effective Planning Support Systems for green urban water infrastructure—Practitioners’ perceptions

Analyzing Evidence of Sustainable Urban Water Management Systems: A Review through the Lenses of Sociotechnical Transitions

“…First, the mapping exercise of involved actors shows the key roles of four types of actors: Water engineers, urban planners, landscape architects, and environmental (and, to a lesser extent, social) scientists. This resonates with the ideals of SUWM that place water as visible features of a city, and has thus required the early integration of water infrastructure, as well as urban and land use planning, for the design and implementation of SUWM projects [1,5,67,94]. This shift in the roles of traditional actors is supported by other studies.…”

“…One explanation for the lack of case studies addressing urban water challenges at the watershed/catchment scale may be due to our selection criteria, which limited our review to include case studies of urban water. Another explanation could be due to the lack of an integrated approach for urban water management because of organizational challenges regarding intra-municipalities and multi-scale collaborations-challenges often perceived as impediments to desirable transformation and outcomes [6,8,13,75,93,94]. As explained by others [95,96], these challenges from the mismatch of political/judicial and hydrologic boundaries, if resolved, have the potential to significantly transform the policies and practices of governmental authorities towards sustainable outcomes, according to [8].…”

“…Prior studies have also highlighted the critical need for socioeconomic and environmental assessment tools by incorporating socio-economic factors alongside biophysical and planning factors [3,6,13,59,99]. Contemporary efforts are being made to cover these research spots and construct decision support tools and methods for a holistic analysis approach by incorporating urban planning polices and socio-economic factors alongside biophysical models for optimal and long-term outcomes [22,67,94].…”

“…This shift in the roles of traditional actors is supported by other studies. Indeed, a shift from the current water infrastructure planning approach that often occurs in isolation from the broader planning of our urban environments and other social services has become a prerequisite for the optimal and effective system design, location, and management of space [49,55,94].…”

Evaluating a Planning Support System’s Use and Effects in Urban Adaptation: An Exploratory Case Study from Berlin, Germany

“…This is not to say that tool use in practice is underrepresented in PSS research. There are numerous assessments of the adoption of tools in planning practice [15,24,25], practitioner perceptions of tools [10,[26][27][28] and the gap between what tools provide and what practitioners need from tools [27,29,30]. Nevertheless, most current evaluations are not based on real applications of tools in practice.…”