Regenerating Sponge City to Sponge Watershed through an Innovative Framework for Urban Water Resilience

Abstract

In recent years, cities universal are advocating ‘resilience’ in terms of water-related challenges. Accompanied by the development of sponge city construction, several emerging stormwater management practices are prevailing worldwide. This paper proposes a regenerative argument for sponge city construction from the urban scale towards the watershed scale by strengthening the urban water resilience and sustainability. An innovative framework is established to address urban water issues and human livability via 20 conventional and advanced indicators and the interrelations between the modules of water resilience, water resource, water treatment, water ecology, waterscape, and water management. Six representative cities from the sponge city construction pilot in South China have been selected, and the compatibility and divergence between their guidelines and the sponge watershed framework are revealed through pair analyses and parameter calculation. The diverse perspectives behind the scores have been discussed carefully, and the successful experiences of excellent cities are systematically summarized and promoted. The analyses and findings in this research have significant methodological implications for shifting the sponge city practice towards linking urban development with watershed ecological conservation. The proposed framework and strategies provide a reference for an integrated solution of watershed health and wellbeing in the next generation sponge city practice.

Integrating Sponge City Concept and Neural Network into Land Suitability Assessment: Evidence from a Satellite Town of Shenzhen Metropolitan Area

“…(2) The municipal department should strengthen the construction of drainage systems following the danger of waterlogging [34,35,42]. Measures that can be taken include rationally laying underground pipelines, constructing drainage pumping stations, treating urban inland rivers, and constructing sponge facilities used for infiltration reduction and accumulation [13,48,49].…”

“…The significance of evaluating the suitability of sponge city construction lies in the possibility of choosing a suitable space for construction investment at the early stages of urban development planning, which reflects the foresight of planning and the tendency to maximize advantages and avoid disadvantages. Considering the definition of the three elements of risk, the three criteria of the rule layer, namely risk to environment, the vulnerability of the hazard-bearing body, and rain-flood resilience of sponge city, were considered comprehensively [3,34]. The ten subcriteria of the child rule layer are normalized and mapped in the range of 0-1 to eliminate the influence of dimension.…”

Science-design loop for the design of resilient urban landscapes

“…This disconnection between implementation and resilience objectives in policy has been stressed by some authors (Cai, 2017;Ma et al, 2020). Without scientists testing the design in a dialogue with designers, water resilience indicators among different sponge cities projects indicate quite diverse outcomes (Wang et al, 2021). On the contrary, bioretention gardens built in Detroit, which voluntarily integrated science and design within clear objectives set by policy-makers, were able to demonstrate their capacity to deliver good resilience outcomes.…”

Perception of sponge city for achieving circularity goal and hedge against climate change: a study on Weibo

“…To improve the assessment of the hydrological cycle and sponge city's options, Jiang and McBean (2021) used the concept of "One Water" to demonstrate structured thinking about how each dimension of the hydrological cycle could be used to study the degree of interrelationships. Some scholars discussed the relationship among water elasticity, resources, treatment, ecology, waterscape and management modules based on sponge cities to solve urban water problems and human livability (Wang et al, 2021a). Based on the sponge city plan, six critical processes of water circularity include retention, infiltration, storage, purification, emission and utilisation (Liu et al, 2022) are applied in more than 30 cities in China.…”