Managing urban flood resilience through the English planning system: insights from the ‘SuDS-face'

In academic and professional circles, ‘resilience thinking’ has emerged as the dominant paradigm in flood risk management, which emphasizes the need to plan and design cities that can absorb water and replicate natural processes more closely. In this paper, we explore how planners in England are expected to respond to the resilience agenda against the realities in practice, zoning in on the delivery of sustainable (urban) drainage systems (SuDS). Our exploration highlights that, while SuDS are being implemented, they are largely characterized by a ‘bog standard’ design. We found that there are three main institutional factors that are constraining the implementation of SuDS: the lack of legislative backing, the power afforded to private commercial interests in the neoliberalized planning process, compounded by the severe lack of resources in local authorities. What is missing at the moment is SuDS process and design that is flexible, integrated, collaborative and innovative. There are clear implications that, without the necessary institutional support, resilience thinking will remain largely aspirational, and professionals will struggle to gain traction and translate the larger flood resilience policy agenda into England's future climate-resilient places

A participatory process to support sustainable water resources management in the Ebbsfleet Garden City

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IAHR via the link in this recordThe present work describes the development of a participatory System Dynamics Model (SDM) aiming to explore sustainable urban water management (UWM) in a structured way and to understand where policy interventions might be best focused. The proposed multi-step process is useful for supporting decision-making at a strategic, system-wide level and for exploring the long-term consequences of alternative strategies. The strongly participatory base of the SDM allows both to include local knowledge held by relevant stakeholders, and to support a collective learning process, which should improve the effectiveness of the selected strategies. In the following sections on the SDM co-development to enhance sustainable urban water management in the Ebbsfleet Garden City are provided.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

The blue-green path to urban flood resilience

Abstract Achieving urban flood resilience at local, regional and national levels requires a transformative change in planning, design and implementation of urban water systems. Flood risk, wastewater and stormwater management should be re-envisaged and transformed to: ensure satisfactory service delivery under flood, normal and drought conditions, and enhance and extend the useful lives of ageing grey assets by supplementing them with multi-functional Blue-Green infrastructure. The aim of the multidisciplinary Urban Flood Resilience (UFR) research project, which launched in 2016 and comprises academics from nine UK institutions, is to investigate how transformative change may be possible through a whole systems approach. UFR research outputs to date are summarised under three themes. Theme 1 investigates how Blue-Green and Grey (BG + G) systems can be co-optimised to offer maximum flood risk reduction, continuous service delivery and multiple co-benefits. Theme 2 investigates the resource capacity of urban stormwater and evaluates the potential for interoperability. Theme 3 focuses on the interfaces between planners, developers, engineers and beneficiary communities and investigates citizens’ interactions with BG + G infrastructure. Focussing on retrofit and new build case studies, UFR research demonstrates how urban flood resilience may be achieved through changes in planning practice and policy to enable widespread uptake of BG + G infrastructure.EPSR