Slow water: can we tame urban floods by going with the flow?  As we face increased flooding, China’s sponge cities are taking a new course. But can they steer the country away from concrete megadams? Guardian Erica Gies  Tue 7 Jun 2022  After epic floods in India, South Africa, Germany, New York and Canada killed hundreds in the past year, droughts are now parching landscapes and wilting crops across the western US, the Horn of Africa and Iraq. The responses have included calls for higher levees, bigger drains and longer aqueducts. But these concrete interventions aimed at controlling water are failing. Climate extremes are revealing a hard truth: our development choices – urban sprawl, industrial agriculture and even the concrete infrastructure designed to control water – are exacerbating our problems. Because sooner or later, water always wins. Water might seem malleable and cooperative, willing to flow where we direct it. But as human development expands and the climate changes, water is increasingly swamping cities or dropping to unreachable depths below farms, often making life precarious. Signs of water’s persistence abound. Supposedly vanquished waterways pop up in inconvenient places. Seasonal creeks emerging in basements are evidence that those houses encroach on buried streams, while homes built on wetlands are the first to flood.

The answers that the detectives are finding – in cities, fields, swamps, marshes, floodplains, mountains and forests – are that we should be conserving or repairing natural systems, or mimicking nature to restore some natural functions – and not building more concrete infrastructure. These reparative approaches go by various names: nature-based systems, green infrastructure, low-impact development, water-sensitive urban design. In China, the “sponge cities” initiative aims to make urban regions better able to absorb rainfall and release it when needed. Because these kinds of solutions are based on working with or simulating natural systems, they offer benefits beyond just reducing floods and droughts. They can help us address the dramatic declines of animal species. They can help us adapt to climate change, or even slow its progression. Protecting biodiversity and storing carbon dioxide are not just peripheral effects of solving water problems – they are integral to healthy natural systems. 

So what does water want? In its liquid state, with sufficient quantity or gravity, water can rush across the land in torrential rivers or tumble in awe-inspiring waterfalls. But it is also inclined to linger to a degree that might surprise many of us, because the infrastructure of the modern world has erased so many of water’s slow phases, instead confining it, containing it, or speeding it away. These slow stages are particularly vulnerable to human interference, because they tend to occur in flatter places – once floodplains and wetlands – that we blocked or drained so that we could settle. But when water slows and stalls on land, that’s when the magic happens, providing habitat and food for many forms of life above and below. The key to greater resilience, say the water detectives, is to find ways to let water be water, to reclaim space for it to interact with the land. Innovative water management projects aim to slow water on land in some approximation of natural patterns. For that reason, I’ve come to think of this movement as “Slow Water”. Like the Slow Food movement – founded in Italy in the late 20th century, in opposition to fast food and all its ills – Slow Water approaches are bespoke: they work with local landscapes, climates and cultures rather than try to control or change them.....read on         https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/07/slow-water-urban-floods-drought-china-sponge-cities

What has led highly paid professionals to swap a freestanding house and garden in the suburbs for high-density living in urban centres? Multiple factors have been at work.For an emerging educated elite that blended the aesthetic of the counterculture with the economic advantages bestowed on them by the transition to a knowledge economy, the mark of success is not a double-garage home in the suburbs, but a home in an inner-city neighbourhood surrounded by creativity, culture and convenience. Indeed, the lifecycle of gentrification in recent decades has tended to follow a predictable pattern: first come the artists, then the real estate developers and then the professionals. This same story has played out everywhere from London’s Shoreditch to New York’s SoHo to Sydney’s Surry Hills. The great inversion has taken an immense toll on many of society’s most disadvantaged. As wealthy urbanites move in, the existing poor residents are pushed away. For those who happen to own their properties in gentrifying neighbourhoods, this process can create a windfall financial gain. Unfortunately, the most disadvantaged in these areas tend to be renters, who find themselves confronted with rapidly rising housing costs. While the effects of gentrification may be more muted in cases where the neighbourhood in question was once made up primarily of industrial and commercial real estate, the stock of such property has rapidly been exhausted in New York, Chicago and London. The result is a combination of increasingly concentrated disadvantage in a small number of inner-city neighbourhoods.....the Long Read....continue on       https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2023/jun/29/how-to-reduce-the-damage-done-by-gentrification.......and then there's Vienna- explore the site......

Transformations are a common task......As the climate and innovation agency of the City of Vienna, we promote sustainable change processes in the city. We collaborate with partners from different sectors to shape the future of the city. Transformation is a process that can only take place through dialogue. At UIV Urban Innovation Vienna, we support the development of strategies, but also their implementation by supporting and coordinating steering structures, advisory committees and platforms. As Smart City Ambassadors, when supporting international delegations or on themed city walks, we make the transformation understandable and tangible.Public events are an important tool for bringing people together and opening up echo chambers. Whether solution-oriented workshops, inspiring discussions or conferences with impact: we regularly organize events for our customers both inside and outside the City of Vienna that enable encounters, promote exchange and inspire action....explore the website and check out solutions        https://urbaninnovation.at/platforms-and-communities/