Transitioning to sustainable urban water management systems: how to define expected service functions?

Abstract

Sustainable water management is a worldwide challenge for the twenty-first century. It involves replacing traditional management approaches with a new concept, often referred to as sustainable urban water management (SUWM). This paradigm shift means that SUWM systems must include new services, some of which have already emerged. However, no publications have presented the expected SUWM system in terms of the full range of services it would need to include, and no publications have proposed a method for identifying the services the system must provide. This paper proposes a method for identifying these services and presents a generic petal diagram to represent the service functions of the SUWM system. Moreover, this paper presents a new method for defining these services in a specific territory. This method is based on the confrontation between a general representation and the objectives of the stakeholders in a given system in a given territory. The method is illustrated with a full-scale case study on the Doua eco-campus (Lyon University). This method is intended to aid practitioners to manage its system and to transition to SUWM. It is designed to improve the transparency of decision formulation and to involve stakeholders in the process.

Keywords:

• urban water
• service function
• stakeholders
• eco-campus

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their suggestions which improved the quality of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. OTHU: Field Observatory for Urban Water Management.

2. GRAIE: Rhone-Alps Research Group on Infrastructure and Water.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the French National Research Agency [ANR-09-VILL-004–01] within the framework of the OMEGA project, and the OTHU (Field Observatory for Urban Water Management). This work was also supported by the LABEX IMU [ANR-10-LABX-0088] of Université de Lyon, as part of the programme ‘Investissements d'Avenir’ [ANR-11-IDEX-0007] operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR), under the project OMEGA ECO-CAMPUS.