Water sensitive cities
Water Sensitive Cities (WSCs) are the objective of Water Sensitive Design. They are cities that are sustainable, resilient, productive and liveable through a combination of physical infrastructure, governance arrangements and social engagement.
Three fundamental pillars of practice underpin a WSC:
- Cities as water supply catchments: access to a diversity of water sources underpinned by a diversity of centralised and decentralised infrastructure;
- Cities providing ecosystem services: provision of ecosystem services for the built and natural environment; and
- Cities comprising water sensitive communities: socio-political capital for sustainability and water sensitive decision making and behaviour.
Transitioning to a WSC requires a major socio-technical overhaul of conventional urban water management approaches. It requires a change in the hydro-social contract - the pervading values and often implicit agreements between communities, governments and business on how water should be managed.
The transition to a water sensitive city can be measured on the Urban Water Management Transitions Framework, developed by Brown and colleagues in 2009, and adapted for South Africa by Armitage and team.
The framework illustrates a classification of six city states in the evolution of urban water management from the ‘Water Supply City’ to the ‘Water Sensitive City’. The transition states are presented in a nested continuum - a continuous sequence where each state is contained in the next-, and indicate the dominant socio-political drivers and service delivery functions of each state.
