Abstract
Theorists tell us that infrastructure is linked to the cultural and economic base of the city (Graham and Marvin, 2001), so it should come as no surprise, as the information age follows and transforms the industrial era, that concepts about water and the city should also change. A major paradigm shift is underway in the water industry with implications for planning in terms of urban design, neighborhoods, zero emissions, energy, and transportation. A new paradigm, the Fifth Paradigm, seeks a balanced urban hydrology by means of an integrated and decentralized approach to major infrastructure systems that use each other’s outputs as inputs. The new vision sees flows of water, waste, energy, and other materials combining with the landscape as part of the metabolism and design of the city.
Driven by a deteriorating industrial-era infrastructure, climate change, and population growth, leading-edge practitioners are exploring new ways of designing water systems that are integrated with sustainable transportation modes, the landscape, food, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure. Despite the interest in green infrastructure (just one component of the new vision), there are few comprehensive treatments of the new paradigm. Architects have recently begun to promote and design buildings with integrated systems at the site and neighborhood level, but there is little written about the concept as it relates to entire cities and infrastructure systems.
The two books that are the subject of this review are exceptions. Both arose from the seminal “Green Cities, Blue Waters” workshop held in July 2006, also called the “Wingspread Workshop on Cities of the Future.” This interdisciplinary workshop was held at the Wingspread Conference Facility in Racine, Wisconsin, operated by the Johnson Foundation, whose mission is to convene groups to explore new ideas that will impact the future of the environment and community. Along with the Baltimore, Maryland, conference, “Water for All Life: A Decentralized Infrastructure for a Sustainable Future,” in 2007, a group of experts in water and wastewater infrastructure, landscape architecture, economics, and law came together and the (fifth) paradigm of ecocity urbanism was conceived (International Water Association, undated). The bonds formed by attendees and the concept resulted in an outpouring of other research, papers, events, and coalitions to explore and promote a holistic and sustainable vision of water and the city. Among these were: IWA’s City of the Future program, a joint conference by the American Institute of Landscape Architects and the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2009, UNESCO’s Sustainable Water Management Improves Tomorrow’s Cities’ Health (SWITCH), the Water Environmental Research Foundation’s One Water program, and the Water Alliance.
Water Centric Cities presents the essentials for the design of water–energy–waste infrastructure for the city of the future, with the eco-district as the totally integrated exemplar whereas The Water Environment of Cities contains overviews of water topics for the non–water specialist. Both books embrace the normative concept that water, energy, wastewater, and storm water must be planned holistically to produce a more natural environment and with sustainable flows of materials in and out of the city.
Water Centric Sustainable Communities is intended as a sourcebook for planners, architects, engineers, and landscape designers. Its strength is the presentation of the vision of the Fifth Paradigm and translation into a detailed description of best practices and technical documentation for each element of the water–waste–energy infrastructure. It is copiously illustrated with photographs, charts, statistics, diagrams, and examples. Each chapter has an extensive bibliography. In the first two chapters, the authors trace the history of water infrastructure as it evolved from the first paradigm, basic water supply from local sources; through the second paradigm of engineered water supplies; to the third, where massive investments in urban water infrastructure occurred to provide water long distances from the city, and to convey storm water and sewage quickly out of the city. The fourth paradigm is the one dominant in the U.S. today, which is “based on long distance predominantly subsurface transfer of water and wastewater, fast conveyance of storm water and end of pipe treatment” (Novotny et al., 2012, 73). The conceptual basis of the Fifth Paradigm is the eco-city, which is “dedicated to minimization of . . . inputs of energy, water and food, and waste output” (Novotny et al., 2012, 124). It is a city where wastewater is recycled and nutrients recovered, rainwater harvested, peak flows slowed, and energy use minimized. It is a city where there are no wastes, only resources. The new paradigm favors decentralized and distributed systems that serve multiple purposes and are integrated with the design of the city.
Three of the chapters focus on eco-systems, including one that describes best practices in landscape design to retain storm water on site, including green infrastructure systems, such as the Staten Island Bluebelt, Street Edge Alternative (SEA) Seattle, and several European cities. Another chapter provides a scientific description of storm water problems, the current infrastructure, and comprehensively explains best practices such as porous pavement; extensive and intensive green roofs; and winter stormwater roadway pollution. A chapter on restoring urban streams contains a chilling explanation of the transformation of streams into sewers and canals during the Third Paradigm era. The chapter notes the difference between beautifying a day-lighted stream section and actually restoring its ecological function.
Other chapters provide detailed descriptions of advances in technologies and practice that make the Fifth Paradigm possible. Alternate sources of water, such as rainwater harvesting, gray water, and desalination, are presented along with water-recycling systems. The Orange County reverse osmosis plant and the Singapore Integrated Reclamation and Reuse system are highlighted—both are exemplars of centralized water recycling facilities. A subsequent chapter outlines traditional sewage treatment methods before describing more sustainable alternatives including source separation of urine and feces, membrane bio-reactors, and nutrient and energy recovery from sludge. The last chapter in this sequence explores the water–energy–water nexus and provides a menu for making the water treatment system carbon neutral. The final chapters in the book describe the integrated model and provides case studies of exemplars in the United States and abroad.
Water Environment of Cities complements the book reviewed above. It is a collection of fourteen short essays by authors with backgrounds in economics, law, engineering, sustainability, and urban design. The most useful for teaching purposes are four that describe the institutions, markets, and regulations affecting water. The legal chapter takes a complex field and provides a clear description of water supply legal regimes for the “front end,” water treatment and distribution; sewage and storm water disposal—the “back end”; as well as for the legal aspects of waterways for recreational and environmental assets. I especially appreciated the author’s explanation of the riparian rights doctrine, more useful for the eastern wet half of the United States, and the prior appropriations doctrine, developed for the arid West. In the following chapter, the author provides a description of key institutions and regulations from the federal to the local level. Two other chapters on institutions address watershed planning in the eastern United States and southwestern states’ efforts to maximize water supplies. Both chapters recognize the current difficulties with the present fragmented system. A chapter on demand management explores mechanisms to encourage users to reduce water use including fees, markets, and privatization—and notes how the latter two can help reduce water pollution.
A second set of chapters are concerned with water eco-systems. The chapter on the landscape and urban water argues that the narrow planning frameworks used by the various fields of planning, architecture, and engineers fail to look at the landscape as a whole, and consequently miss significant opportunities to improve urban water performance. The author presents an integrated framework that could be used by practitioners, and illustrates it with examples from Seattle. Another chapter explains how streams work along with design solutions for mitigation and restoration. A short but important chapter reminds us that water is a major recreational amenity, and is key for a sense of place for the community.
Another group of chapters, presented at the beginning of the book, contains concepts probably not familiar to most planners—water budgets, mass balances, and material flows analyses that represent the state of modeling practice for water and wastewater. The authors argue for a holistic view of the various water infrastructure components instead of the current “silo” models used by water engineers. The first chapter links the water cycle to a “water budget” of a city and argues that water policy interventions should not be implemented unless their impacts are evaluated against the total water picture of the community. The two following chapters operationalize this concept. One describes the four major water infrastructure systems (general water use, drinking water, sanitary sewers, stormwater) and models the quantity and quality of water and salt in and out of Scottsdale, Arizona, in a year using all of them. The author finds that the integrated model can be used to simulate water supply and the buildup of contaminants over time under different climatic conditions, policy interventions, and growth scenarios. Another chapter describes how material flows analysis (MFA) works and uses it to evaluate programs in Minneapolis to curb phosphorous runoff from lawns, lead in the urban environment, and road de-icing salt.
A further chapter on groundwater is noteworthy because so little is known about this important water source. The author describes the basics and then provides a vivid description of how groundwater depletion and subsequent restoration negatively affected the built environment of London.
There are two issues with the books that are beyond control of the lead author/editor. First, they are both very expensive, although they can be obtained less expensively than from the publishers online. Second, with the exception of the landscape chapters, the books are written and edited from the point of view of the water industry. There are, however, many concepts and tools in these books that could be adopted by planners as part of the comprehensive plan preparation, the review of a development project, or as part of an economic development plan for the city. The modeling chapters in the book edited by Baker, for example, are especially intriguing. These techniques could be used as part of scenario planning for water in a comprehensive plan or environmental impact assessment, or as part of a city’s sustainability indicator system.
Nonetheless, these two books are valuable for planning academics who wish to teach water and the built environment or who are conducting research at the cutting edge of water infrastructure thought. For far-seeing practitioners, these books should provide a ray of hope that traditional boundaries between planners and engineers can be crossed. For all these uses, they are valuable sourcebooks.