Research
Sustainable Developement of Urban Water
Systems
The goals of sustainable urban water management involve the careful and economical use and handling of water resources in cities and other constructed sites (roads, airfields, etc.) as well as the establishment of acceptable material flows on a long-term basis. Special attention is given to hazardous constituents from urban areas, such as pesticides from facades or heavy metals from construction materials.
To be able to develop the urban water system as an integral system, we focus on:
- Future concepts: We focus on future concepts for urban water and wastewater management. These concepts are not frequently encountered in the engineering business and generally have a time horizon of several decades. They introduce a new way of thinking about (waste-)water handling and introduce the aspect of system development.
- Water infrastructure development: The proper management and the sustainable development of existing water infrastructures require new tools and concepts. The evaluation and future development of existing buried investments is an especially challenging task, where mathematical simulation and optimization tools are developed.
- Evaluation of data and pollutant fluxes in urban catchment areas: Upcoming problems can only be solved if we analyze the rather diffuse pollutant sources such as roofs, paint and cladding materials, roads, railroads, private gardening, etc. which are becoming increasingly important sources of biocides, heavy metals, and engineered nano-particles. Any modeling efforts will have to be supported by enhanced data collection methods with which data can be made more readily available, as well as remote sensing and new on-line measurement devices.
Past efforts toward the optimization of urban water management
were predominantly limited to improvements in the technical infrastructure. In
future, political, administrative, economic and legal boundary conditions as
well as decision making, organisational structures, processes and mechanisms of
decision making have to be included in the analysis and optimization
procedures.
The Urban Water Management departement is organized and active in
these fields: