How cities around the world have approached thinking about how water management fits in to urban planning.

What does "design with water" mean? To Vincent Lee, Associate Principal and Technical Director for Water at ARUP, it is "a framework for rethinking the place of water in the urban design process, and putting it back at the heart of the design process for the built environment."

In The Planning Report, Lee explains that the design strategy of "blue-green" infrastructure, which addresses not just water or energy use, but also the inherent connections between two. Lee explains how places like Seoul, South Korea; Cardiff, Wales; and New York City have leveraged blue-green infrastructure.

Lee's overall message is simple: "Implement not just green infrastructure and green design, but blue-green infrastructure and blue-green design."

Vincent Lee: What does “design with water” mean?

It’s a framework for rethinking the place of water in the urban design process, and putting it back at the heart of the design process for the built environment. It means thinking about how water management fits in to a project at the very beginning—because if you do that, your project outcomes will be very different. To think about water, you have to think about all the different facets of water: water supply, flooding, drought risk, wastewater treatment, etc. All are aspects of one integrated urban cycle. Water is also linked to energy.  In the US, 49 percent of water use is for electric plants. That relates to carbon. And water is linked to health, climate change, economic growth, and biodiversity.

The idea is to implement not just green infrastructure and green design, but blue-green infrastructure and blue-green design.  Green thinking means designing places with vegetation and thinking about how nature can be a prominent part of your site—not just something that’s back of house. Blue thinking means working with the water cycle and designing places that could use water, could store water, or leverage water as an asset and a resource. Blue-green infrastructure and design use both blue and green space, and serves multiple functions for both of these purposes. What could that look like? 

I’m going to take you on a global journey of case studies of cities, some of which ARUP helped to scale up blue-green design. 

Songdo City, South Korea

Songdo City is a brand new city in South Korea—a $35-billion city built on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land. It’s intended to be an aerotropolis; it’s located 10 minutes from an airport, and just a few hours’ flight from Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, and other major urban centers in Asia. 

It was planned and built within a span of 10 years, and Arup was involved in the design process. The fantastic thing about Songdo is that it is one of the most sustainable cities in the world. The city is only 65 percent complete and already has 106 LEED-certified buildings—19.5 billion square feet. By the time all is said and done, it’s going to have a lot more than that.

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