Abstract
Climate emergency and exponential population growth threaten urban water
security in cities worldwide. In the UK, London aims to build more than
half a million households over the next 10 years to cope with a growing
demand for housing. These new urban developments will significantly
increase the consumer water demand, urban flood risk, and river water
pollution levels; therefore, a sustainable approach to development is
urgently required. Urban Water Neutrality (WN) has emerged as a concept
to frame these concerns about rising water stresses in cities. We adapt
the definition of WN as a design process aimed to first minimise the
impact of every new development and then offset any remaining stresses
with interventions external to the development, so the current overall
impact levels are not increased after the project completion. Despite
several studies related to WN, little evidence is available on how urban
water neutrality might be achieved to tackle predicted pressures at city
scale. In this work, we present a novel urban design and evaluation
module called CityPlan. It integrates spatial data with an integrated
urban water management model, enabling urban design at systems level and
delivering a new index that assesses possible future scenarios. Urban
form properties and urban water security indicators are improved with
design options that deliver different scores of the Water Neutrality
Index (WNI). The results from the WNI indicate the potential of a
particular urban design scenario to achieve water neutrality and how
multiple interventions should be combined at city scale. In London,
CityPlan’s results suggest that it will be necessary to retrofit almost
the same number of existing homes with WN design options outside the
planned development areas to completely offset the forthcoming water
stresses. CityPlan provides a clear vision of how water neutrality can
be achieved for urban water systems and is a powerful tool for urban
planners and other stakeholders to effectively promote new policies and
drive sustainable development. Moreover, it provides a framework to
contextualise water neutrality and its key role in urban water security.