The Role of Constructed Wetlands in Creating Water Sensitive Cities

Abstract

Water is essential in cities for water supply and sanitation, but also for environmental protection and providing amenities. Urban water management faces many challenges in the coming years that are driven by population growth, rapid urbanisation and climate change. These drivers are challenges to providing water services, but also to ensuring that our cities are resilient to extreme weather and to the changing availability and quality of water resources. Globally, there are development agendas and policies that provide a vision for how to meet these challenges, and also provide a template for the kinds of services that cities should provide for their inhabitants. This chapter presents three sets of theoretical frameworks that describe the role of water and the guiding principles for urban water management in a city of the future. In Australia, urban water managers have been working with other urban stakeholders to ensure that cities are ‘water sensitive’, such that they use resources sustainably, are resilient to the challenges of climate change and are places where people want to live. A “Water Sensitive City” consists of diverse urban water management solutions developed in the context of the social values, and the institutional and regulatory structures and processes within the city. While there are diverse approaches to creating appropriate water management solutions, the focus of this chapter is on water sensitive urban design (WSUD). WSUD is concerned with the interactions between the urban water cycle and both the built and natural urban landscapes. This concept seeks to integrate the management of drinking water, wastewater and stormwater, and to connect this with urban design. This chapter shows that constructed wetlands are a key technology in the design of water sensitive urban centres, and illustrates this point by examining a case study in Sydney, Australia. The Cup and Saucer Wetland case study demonstrates the impact of a small-scale urban retrofit project in providing some water quality improvement, enhancing the liveability of the area, positive community engagement, creating recreational space, contributing to natural cooling, building inter-agency rapport and increasing each agency’s capacity and appetite for future similar WSUD projects. This case history illustrates the contribution of the wetland to the transition of Sydney towards a water sensitive city. This journey requires a shift in current water management practices and so the chapter also presents tools for cities to benchmark the state of urban water management, prioritise actions for water sensitive initiatives and use available indicators to track progress. The case is made that these tools can help cities in countries with both developed and developing economies to transition to a more sustainable state of urban water management.