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Urbanisation greatly changes the natural environment-city growth may cause urban sprawl, increasing land consumption and infrastructure demands, with consequent built and natural environments degradation. To face this challenge, the supporting capacity of the natural environment needs to be addressed in the urban planning process. This chapter will particularly discuss urban drainage role in the planning context, integrating engineering, urbanism and landscaping in order to set the basic conditions towards a sustainable city development. Urban drainage systems (and the related urban rivers) play a crucial role in city planning, once it intermediates the needs of the built environment, providing safe areas free from flooding, and the demands of the natural environment, giving space and passage to floods. This particular feature gives to the drainage system a spatial structuring characteristic and it provides opportunities to revitalise city areas, improving biodiversity and recovering environmental values. On the other side, a city open spaces system is the main reserve of urban areas for sustainable urban drainage interventions. The adequate land use planning and consequent management of these open spaces shall be in the core discussion to produce integrated and functional solutions for built and natural environments.

Urban floods can threaten citizens’ quality of life, produce socioeconomic losses, and act as an urban degradation driver. Restoring urban rivers, however, is not simple and its results are usually limited. It would be desirable to enhance urban fluvial systems, control flood risks, and increase city resilience while improving the city itself. This work suggests that river restoration, when applied to an urban watershed, should be supported by sustainable urban drainage measures to compensate for the negative effects induced by city growth in the water cycle, in a systemic approach to the entire watershed. A methodological framework is proposed to verify this hypothesis intending to assess urban flooding projects in a wide sense. This framework uses a hydrodynamic mathematical model and a set of multicriteria indices. A case study in Dona Eugênia Watershed, in Brazil, was developed. Two different design concepts were considered: the usual drainage design and the river restoration combined with sustainable urban drainage. Both solutions were designed to completely solve the problems, leading to virtually zero flooding in the present situation; however, environmental and urban gains were greater when using the proposed combination. Besides, when testing resilience behavior, it was also shown to be more consistent over time.

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Observa-se um modelo de urbanização e propostas de intervenção nos cursos de água que ignoram tanto seus valores ambientais, como culturais e sociais, potencializando um dos principais problemas da atualidade nas cidades brasileiras: as cheias urbanas. Este trabalho tem por intuito colaborar com a gestão sustentável das cidades, apresentando soluções paisagísticas, visando à requalificação urbana e ambiental de corpos hídricos, a partir do reconhecimento sistêmico das relações físicas, históricas, sociais e ambientais, levando a concepção de soluções multifuncionais, prática essencial frente à escassez de espaços livres que uma cidade de urbanização consolidada normalmente oferece. Diante de sua complexidade, o estudo foi estruturado em base interdisciplinar, principalmente, entre o paisagismo e a engenharia. Esta abordagem permitiu avaliar os impactos da urbanização, e posteriormente, avaliar as soluções paisagísticas propostas, com indicações capazes de representar hidráulica e hidrologicamente o comportamento sistêmico da bacia de estudo. O trabalho está centrado no rio Dona Eugênia em Mesquita, RJ, região da Baixada Fluminense, onde é comum o problema de cheias.