Building water-wise cities is a pressing need nowadays in both developed and developing countries. This is mainly due to the limitation of the available water resources and aging infrastructure to meet the needs of adapting to social and environmental changes and for urban liveability. This is the first book to provide comprehensive insights into theoretical, systematic, and engineering aspects of water-wise cities with a broad coverage of global issues. The book aims to (1) provide a theoretical framework of water-wise cities and associated sustainable water systems including key concepts and principles, (2) provide a brand-new thinking on the design and management of sustainable urban water systems of various scales towards a paradigm shift under the resource and environmental constraints, and (3) provide a technological perspective with successful case studies of technology selection, integration, and optimization on the “fit-for-purpose” basis.

Today’s urban water managers are faced with an unprecedented set of issues that call for a different approach to urban water management. These include the urgent changes needed to respond to climate change, population growth, growing resource constraints, and rapidly increasing global urbanization. Not only are these issues difficult to address, but they are facing us in an environment that is increasingly unpredictable and complex. Although innovative, new tools are now available to water professionals to address these challenges, solving the water problems of tomorrow cannot be done by the water professionals alone. Instead, the city of the future, whether in the developed or developing world, must integrate water management planning and operations with other city services to meet the needs of humans and the environment in a dramatically superior manner. Water Sensitive Cities has been developed from selected papers from 2009 Singapore Water Week “Planning for Sustainable Solutions” and also papers taken from other IWA events. It pulls together material that supports the water professionals’ need for useful and up-to-date material. Authors: Carol Howe, UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, The Netherlands Cynthia Mitchell, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

This book features expert contributions on key sustainability aspects of urban water management in Chinese agglomerations. Both technical and institutional pathways to sustainable urban water management are developed on the basis of a broad, interdisciplinary problem analysis.

Droughts, global warming and rising infrastructure costs have brought new attention to water as both an urban planning and an environmental issue. This volume presents many best-practice case studies to show how cities and towns throughout the United States are restoring their wetlands, watersheds, rivers, beaches, and harbors even as rapid urbanization has put more stress on water supplies. These collected accounts are designed to educate citizens and public officials about water-related issues and future concerns. Regional and national resource directories are included.

Approximately 80 per cent of the population of Latin America is concentrated in urban centres. Pressure on water resources and water management in cities therefore provide major challenges. Despite the importance of the issues, there has been little systematic coverage of the topic in book form. This work fills a gap in the literature by providing both thematic overviews and case study chapters. It reviews key aspects of why water matters in cities and presents case studies on topics such as groundwater management, green growth and water services, inequalities in water supply, the financing of water services and flood management. Detailed examples are described from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, and there is also a chapter comparing lessons which might be learnt from US cities. Contributing authors are drawn from both within and outside the region, including from the Inter-American Development Bank, OECD and World Bank to set the issues in a global context.

'This is surely the most impressive and important publication to come out of the UN system for many years.' Peter Adamson, founder, New Internationalist, and author and researcher of UNICEF's The State of the World's Children from 1980 to 1995 The world's governments agreed at the Millennium Summit to halve, by 2015, the number of people who lack access to safe water. With rapidly growing urban populations the challenge is immense. Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities is a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of the problems and how they can be addressed. This influential publication by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) sets out in detail the scale of inadequate provision of water and sanitation. It describes the impacts on health and economic performance, showing the potential gains of remedial action; it analyses the proximate and underlying causes of poor provision and identifies information gaps affecting resource allocation; it outlines the consequences of further deterioration; and it explains how resources and institutional capacities - public, private and community - can be used to deliver proper services through integrated water resource management.

This book is developed from and includes the presentations of leading international experts and scholars in the 12-14 July, 2006 Wingspread Workshop. With urban waters as a focal point, this book will explore the links between urban water quality and hydrology, and the broader concepts of green cities and smart growth. It also addresses legal and social barriers to urban ecological sustainability and proposes practical ways to overcome those barriers. Cities of the Future features chapters containing visionary concepts on how to ensure that cities and their water resources become ecologically sustainable and are able to provide clean water for all beneficial uses. The book links North American and Worldwide experience and approaches. The book is primarily a professional reference aimed at a wide interdisciplinary audience, including universities, consultants, environmental advocacy groups and legal environmental professionals.