Green Infrastructure and Sponge City Research

Abstract

The special collection on Green Infrastructure and Sponge City Research is available in the ASCE Library (https://ascelibrary.org /page/jswbay/green_infrastructure_sponge_city).Green infrastructure (GI) and sponge city construction (integrating green and gray) principles have become the new paradigm for a sustainable urban stormwater management strategy (Jia et al. 2017). It has become a widespread focus in urban water management research and practices globally.Specifically in China, over the past decade built-up areas have increased by 17,252 km 2 . This roughly equates to an addition of 165 million people dwelling in urban areas in a decade. This rapid urbanization, sometimes lacking adequate planning and design, has led to a worsening city syndrome situation, such as urban flooding, water pollution, heat-island effects, and ecologic deterioration (Jia et al. 2013).In order to promote a sustainable urbanization strategy, in 2013 the Chinese government announced a new urban drainage infrastructure building paradigm, branding it the sponge city initiative. Deviating from the traditional rapid-draining approach, the new paradigm calls for the use of natural systems such as soil and vegetation as part of the urban runoff control strategy. The six-word principle, which includes infiltrate, detain, store, cleanse, use, and drain, forms the basis of the guidelines for urban stormwater management.In this context, in order to provide an international forum for stormwater management professionals to present the latest developments, technologies, and case studies related to GI and sponge city technology, the 2016 International Low Impact Development (LID) Conference was organized and held in Beijing. More than 1,200 delegates from over 20 countries attended the meeting with more than 400 papers presented orally or as posters.For this special collection, we have invited selected participants at the conference to highlight some of the important aspects of LID-GI and sponge city implementation. These papers cover the following areas: case studies on sustainable urban design and management using LID-GI principles and practices, methods of quantifying benefits of sustainable drainage system (SuDS) implementation, rainwater utilization, practices that mitigate urban flooding and soil erosion, and LID applications in managing highway runoff.In more detail, this special collection contains seven papers. Within the context of frequent extreme weather events that led to dramatic urban waterlogging and flash flood hazards in mountainous cities, Ma et al. (2018) use the city of Fuzhou, China, as a case study and discuss comprehensive defense measures to prevent and/or mitigate the impacts of these hazards. They first review the progress of preventive measures of these two types of hazards in China, such as those employed in the nationwide construction of sponge cities and national flash flood prevention projects. They analyze the characteristics of waterlogging and flash flood hazards in China using 25 years of records from the Chine...

Smart management of combined sewer overflows: From an ancient technology to artificial intelligence

“…Sponge city program (SCP) was first announced by the Chinese government in 2013 as a new urban drainage infrastructure building paradigm in order to endorse a sustainable urbanization strategy (Jia et al, 2018). SCP encourages the use of natural systems including soil and vegetation as a part of the urban runoff control strategy.…”

“…SWMM was used in several studies for runoff and hydrological modeling (Knighton & Walter, 2016;Niemi et al, 2017;Ouyang et al, 2012;Ress et al, 2020;Samouei & Özger, 2020). Runoff simulation is important for CSO management (Field & Cibik, 1980), flood management (Ouyang et al, 2012;Rabori & Ghazavi, 2018), impact of climate change on urban drainage systems (Kovacs & Clement, 2009), sponge city (Jia et al, 2018) and sponge airport (J. applications, and low-impact development (LID) applications (Chui et al, 2016). SWMM is frequently applied in CSO modeling and control studies (Barone et al, 2019;Crocetti et al, 2021;García et al, 2017;Jean et al, 2018;Liao et al, 2015).…”