Urban Water Management 2.0: a review

Soil, landscape, water, air, biodiversity, climate: in many areas of the planet the degradation degree of such resources requires a virtuous process of reconversion, regeneration and, in some cases, de-urbanization. Recent research on Mediterranean metropolitan areas has shown, in fact, that de-urbanization constitutes a need that is now an essential requirement of these territories. Where to find necessary financial resources? The North European examples of urban renewing, from the Bo01 of Malmö to the Hammarby Sjöstad of Stockholm, from the London GMV to the Vauban of Friborg, show that the response to housing problems constitutes a privileged catalyst for innovative environmental and social policies on an urban scale. Indeed, they demonstrate that urban planning has the potential to find in itself the financial sources necessary to reverse the processes of ecological degeneration that have affected cities. Some authors believe also that it is too late for an approach limited in preventing new land take and environmental impacts. Furthermore, they think we need widespread building substitutions and the technological adaptation of the infrastructural system. High density would seem to lend itself to become a criterion for the design of such interventions. But high density also needs for an efficient urban water management in order to face both: the increased soil sealing and the increase in rains intensity, that is an effect of climate change. In this contribute, introducing next issue of UPLanD, we focus on upgrading the WSUD approach toward a planning scale one, usually referred as Water Sensitive Urban Planning.