Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Systems (SUIS)
Department of Urban Water and Sanitation
A major challenge in the water and sanitation sector is to improve the levels of service in low-income countries where many people spend considerable time and money collecting water from irregular and often contaminated supplies. These same communities often live in poorly drained areas, where urban runoff mixes with sewage from overflowing latrines and sewers, causing pollution and a wide range of health problems. The water utilities in these countries often do not have sufficient financial resources to maintain and operate these systems.
Water utilities also often lack appropriate tools to prioritize their investments in a way that maximizes the benefits to poor communities. Hence an integrated approach needs to be developed for the design, control and management of urban water networks.
The Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Systems (SUIS) core group aims to develop decision support tools that recognize the interactions between the urban water networks. The work focuses on developing an integrated approach for the design, control and management of urban water networks.
Activities
The activities of this core group are based on the recognition of the importance of the interactions between urban water networks in the design, control and management of these systems. Also, as these networks are complex and their behaviour not intuitive, there is a need to update and develop appropriate modelling tools. These tools will enable the analysis of these networks under a range of conditions and allow the most efficient operational management strategies to be developed.
Two elements of this long-term goal are of key importance: firstly a focus on the specific sustainable infrastructure problems and challenges faced by cities in the developing world; and secondly a focus on decisions based on an integrated approach to urban civil infrastructure systems.
The research undertaken within the core group focuses on three areas:
· integrated urban water networks, including network flow and contaminant balance models, a whole life cost optimization model, and a decision support system for contaminant ingress;
· water distribution, including non-revenue water (NRW), risk analysis of water networks, and water quality modelling; and
· urban drainage and flooding, including urban drainage and solid waste interactions, sustainable urban drainage, and flood-resilient planning and building.
Flood Resilience Group
The issues of flood-resilient planning and building are dealt with in depth in the flood resilience sub-group (FRG). The group is responsible for organising a summer course and module on flood resilience (in cooperation with other academic departments and with the Delft University of Technology and the Technical University of Hamburg Harburg), and also contributes to the National Research Programme Knowledge for Climate. The work of this group focuses on the understanding of flood vulnerability and resilience, and on the development of holistic approaches in which the resiliency of the urban system is enhanced. Urban areas are particularly susceptible to flooding, and the most vulnerable communities of developing countries already struggle to cope with current extreme hydrological events. For the future, climate and socio-economic change cause flooding to occur more frequent and severe, and this repeatedly erodes coping capacity. Hence, a major adaptation challenge is to strengthen traditional mechanisms to cope with floods, whilst promoting flexibility and innovation to deal with uncertainty and change.
The FRG is supported by an international network. This Flood Resilience Network (FRN) aims to share knowledge and build capacity among researchers, practitioners, stakeholders, and policy makers in this emerging scientific domain.