Emerging Issues

Emerging Sponge Cities

19 January 2018
English
  • As global populations converge steadily into cities (UN, 2017), fast growing cities are suffering with intensified hydroclimatic hazards. In China, more cities are facing challenges associated with urban sustainability and urban water issues such as aging/outdated water and wastewater infrastructures, urban flooding and a high frequency of extreme weather (Li et al., 2017; Lv and Zhao, 2013). The emerging concept and construction of “sponge cities” is an effective approach to solving urban rainstorms(Liu et al., 2015; Xia et al., 2017) and seeks to enhance cities capacity on flood prevention.
  • More effort is still needed to promote implementation of sponge cities. Further development in the future will be needed to integrate land use, topographic and geologic conditions in the planning of an urban master plan to suit the actual situation of cities (Liu et al., 2017).