In highly urbanized areas in Germany and around the globe, water management is an essential part of public services. The infrastructures of water management not only ensure a safe supply of drinking water and hygienic conditions, but also play a central role regarding flood protection and the general protection of ground and surface water bodies. They contribute significantly to health care and environmental protection and are thus a mainstay of prosperity.
For consumers, these benefits are a matter of course. Each and every one of us turns on the water tap several times a day, without being familiar with the infrastructure ‘behind the scene’. This infrastructure – pipes, sewers, pumping stations and treatment plants – are well hidden in the house wall, in the ground or on the city outskirts. The effort and expenditures required for water supply and sanitation remain literally hidden, in contrast for example to the readily visible road network. More often than not, users are not even aware of their own annual water and water disposal costs.
Yet urban water management infrastructures are built up over decades, represent billions of Euros of fixed assets and are one of the largest items in municipal households. And they are currently under great pressure to change. Driven by current developments – demographic change, energy transition, scarcity of resources, environmental pollution and, above all, climate change – far-reaching adaptations of water infrastructures will be necessary in the coming decades. The primary goal must be to secure sustainable water services at affordable prices.
The consequences of the challenges and the speed with which the framework conditions change vary from region to region. Future changes cannot be predicted with certainty. What is needed are measures that are adapted to the specific challenges on the ground and that take uncertainties into account. Not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution, but a differentiation of solutions and systems is required. The future viability of cities and urban areas is increasingly defined by the fact that solutions are found in the joint consideration of different branches: eg. energy, agriculture, housing and urban development. In concrete terms, this means that the complexity of the task is increasing.
The following contributions present and discuss current approaches to adapting urban water infrastructure in the face of uncertain future developments. A majority but not all of the papers present research results of the funding measure ‘Intelligent and Multifunctional Infrastructure Systems for Sustainable Water Supply and Wastewater Disposal’ (INIS) funded by the Germany Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The INIS projects and the following contributions cover a wide range of topics, from water supply through urban drainage and wastewater disposal to future-oriented integrated concepts for water, wastewater and energy, and take both technical and socio-economic aspects into consideration to shed some light on how we might together manage water in the city of the future.