Decision-Making and Sustainable Drainage: Design and Scale

Abstract

Sustainable Drainage (SuDS) improves water quality, reduces runoff water quantity, increases amenity and biodiversity benefits, and can also mitigate and adapt to climate change. However, an optimal solution has to be designed to be fit for purpose. Most research concentrates on individual devices, but the focus of this paper is on a full management train, showing the scale-related decision-making process in its design with reference to the city of Coventry, a local government authority in central England. It illustrates this with a large scale site-specific model which identifies the SuDS devices suitable for the area and also at the smaller scale, in order to achieve greenfield runoff rates. A method to create a series of maps using geographical information is shown, to indicate feasible locations for SuDS devices across the local government authority area. Applying the larger scale maps, a management train was designed for a smaller-scale regeneration site using MicroDrainage ® software to control runoff at greenfield rates. The generated maps were constructed to provide initial guidance to local government on suitable SuDS at individual sites in a planning area. At all scales, the decision about which device to select was complex and influenced by a range of factors, with slightly different problems encountered. There was overall agreement between large and small scale models.

Community Involvement in the Implementation of Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDSs): The Case of Bon Pastor, Barcelona

“…Both Brown [13] and Perales Momparler [18] argue that the redesign of the stormwater administration will allow the participation of more actors, and social organizations might gain a new position of power. Because of its decentralized nature [9,27,32,37], the ownership of these assets can belong to local actors, but, until today, urban stormwater management interventions are located in public areas and developed by city councils or private entities. With the local scale approach of SUDSs, it makes more sense to involve communities to seek alternatives for urban drainage at a [16,37], something harder to do in the case of conventional urban runoff management (URM).…”

Conceptualization and Schematization of Mesoscale Sustainable Drainage Systems: A Full-Scale Study

“…In this type of implementation, SCMs are connected to each other so that the collected stormwater could flow from an upstream SCM to a downstream SCM. Mesoscale, in this context, has been referred to as "SuDS management train" by [13]. The extensive implementation of SuDS over the entire city catchments could be considered a macroscale approach (Figure 1c) through which the city could be transformed to a sponge city [14].…”

“…The extensive implementation of SuDS over the entire city catchments could be considered a macroscale approach (Figure 1c) through which the city could be transformed to a sponge city [14]. In contrast to microscale, studies regarding the hydraulic performance of SuDS at meso-scales and macroscales, as the train of several individual SCMs, are comparatively rare in the literature, e.g., [13,15,16].…”

Coupling GIS with Stormwater Modelling for the Location Prioritization and Hydrological Simulation of Permeable Pavements in Urban Catchments

“…Still, they must be implemented at strategic sites to maximize their potential to mitigate flooding, for which Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are highly recommended. The identification of suitable sites wherein to install SuDS has been previously addressed by several authors [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] with different levels of detail in terms of the types of systems studied: infiltration, stormwater disconnection opportunities and integrated approaches for the location of all kinds of SuDS.…”

“…Charlesworth et al [16] focused on the large-scale analysis and proposed a series of map-based recommendations to indicate feasible locations for SuDS at a whole city (Coventry, UK). Sudsloc [17,18] was designed to go one step further, since it combined a GIS-based selection system with 1D/2D hydrological modelling software for the location and assessment of 16 different SuDS devices.…”