Abstract
Waterlogging is one of the major water issues in most cities of China and directly restricts their urbanization processes. The construction of Sponge City is an effective approach to solving the urban water issues, particularly for the waterlogging. In this study, both the urban issues emerged at the stage of rapid urbanization in China and the demands as well as problems of Sponge City construction related with the water issues were investigated, and the opportunities and challenges for the Sponge City construction in the future were also proposed. It was found that the current stormwater management focused on the construction of gray infrastructures (e.g., drainage network and water tank) based on the fast discharge idea, which was costly and hard to catch up with the rapid expansion of city and its impervious surface, while green infrastructures (e.g., river, lake and wetland) were ignored. Moreover, the current construction of Sponge City was still limited to low impacted development (LID) approach which was concentrated on source control measures without consideration of the critical functions of surrounding landscapes (i.e., mountain, river, wetland, forest, farmland and lake), while application of the integrated urban water system approach and its supported technologies including municipal engineering, urban hydrology, environmental science, social science and ecoscape were relatively weak and needed to be improved. Besides, the lack of special Sponge City plan and demonstration area was also a considerable problem. In this paper, some perspectives on Good Sponge City Construction were proposed such as the point that idea of urban plan and construction should conform to the integral and systematic view of sustainable urban development. Therefore, both the basic theoretical research and the basic infrastructure construction such as monitoring system, drainage facility and demonstration area should be strengthened, meanwhile, the reformation and innovation in the urban water management system and the education system should also be urgently performed. The study was expected to provide a deeper thinking for the current Sponge City construction in China and to give some of suggestions for the future directions to urban plan and construction, as well as urban hydrology discipline.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abido M A. 2006. Multiobjective evolutionary algorithms for electric power dispatch problem. IEEE Trans Evol Comput, 10: 315–329
Beijing General Municipal Engineering Design & Research Institute. 2006. Water Supply and Sewerage Engineering Design Handbook. Vol 5. 2nd ed (in Chinese). Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press
Benedict M A. 2000. Green Infrastructure: A Strategic Approach to Land Conservation. American Planning Association. Chicago: Planning Advisory Service Memo
Chen H P. 2013. Projected change in extreme rainfall events in China by the end of the 21st century using CMIP5 models. Chin Sci Bull, 58: 1462–1472
Coello C A C, Lamont G B. 2004. Applications of Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms. Singapore: World Scientific. 761
Coombes P J, Argue J R, Kuczera G. 2000. Figtree place: A case study in water sensitive urban development (WSUD). Urban Water, 1: 335–343
Deb K, Goel T. 2001. A hybrid multi-objective evolutionary approach to engineering shape design. Lect Notes Comput Sci, 1993: 385–399
Fletcher T D, Shuster W, Hunt W F, Ashley R, Butler D, Arthur S, Trowsdale S, Barraud S, Semadeni-Davies A, Bertrand-Krajewski J L, Mikkelsen P S, Rivard G, Uhl M, Dagenais D, Viklander M. 2015. SUDS, LID, BMPs, WSUD and more—The evolution and application of terminology surrounding urban drainage. Urban Water J, 12: 525–542
Jefferies C. 2004. SUDS in Scotland-The Monitoring Programme of the Scottish Universities SUDS Monitoring Group. Environment Agency
Liu C M, Zhang Y Y, Wang Z G, Wang Y L, Bai P. 2016. The LID pattern for maintaining virtuous water cycle in urbanized area: A preliminary study of planning and techniques for Sponge City (in Chinese). J Nat Resour, 31: 719–731
Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. 2014. The construction guideline of sponge city in China-low impact development of stormwater system (trail)
Pan J H, Li E P, Shan J J, Wang Y Q, Shen G Y. 2015. Urban Blue Book: City Development Report of China (in Chinese). Beijing: Social Sciences Literature Press
Qiu B X. 2015. The connotation, approach and perspective of Sponge city and LID (in Chinese). Water Wastewater Eng, 41: 1–7
Suen J P, Eheart J W. 2006. Reservoir management to balance ecosystem and human needs: Incorporating the paradigm of the ecological flow regime. Water Resour Res, 42: W03417
United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). 2000. Low impact development (LID): A literature review. EPA-841-B-00-005
Xia J, Wang G S, Tan G, Ye A Z, Huang G H. 2005. Development of distributed time-variant gain model for nonlinear hydrological systems. Sci China Ser D-Earth Sci, 48: 713
Xia J, Zhai X, Zeng S, Zhang Y. 2014. Systematic solutions and modeling on eco-water and its allocation applied to urban river restoration: Case study in Beijing, China. Ecohydrol Hydrobiol, 14: 39–54
Xue L F, Tan H Q. 2009. Flood and waterlog and rainwater hydrological cycle rehabilitation during urbanization (in Chinese). J Agric Sci, 23): 11058–11061
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41571028), and Key Programs of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. KFZD-SW-301).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Xia, J., Zhang, Y., Xiong, L. et al. Opportunities and challenges of the Sponge City construction related to urban water issues in China. Sci. China Earth Sci. 60, 652–658 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-016-0111-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-016-0111-8