Erik Christian Porse
Published: 2014
Total Pages:
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Urban water management strategies evolve with changes in technology, environmental conditions, development patterns, and social attitudes. At the same time, available options are constrained by prior decisions and existing infrastructure. In coming decades, urban water systems will face many challenges, including more stringent pollution regulations, water scarcity, increasing flood risks in coastal cities, and growing maintenance needs. Planners must design cost-effective systems that combine aging infrastructure with newly built components. Importantly, engineers and designers can learn from studies of infrastructure development in past eras, which also responded to rapid changes. Yet, earlier eras of urban water infrastructure expansion in industrialized cities emphasized different environmental priorities for habitat protection and water availability. Historical understanding can usefully inform the development of new analytical approaches and technologies to address urban water needs for the future. This dissertation analyzes evolution in urban water infrastructure, focusing on innovation and resilience through interdisciplinary analysis and modeling. It explores change and growth in urban water supply and drainage systems, drawing on theory and techniques from water resources engineering, operations research, ecological "resilience" theory, urban environmental history, public policy analysis, and complex systems science. It uses several specific research and analysis approaches. First, it presents a historical survey of development in North American urban water infrastructure from 1800-2010, which identifies emerging trends in current urban water management. Second, it develops an illustrative model to optimize stormwater management allocations throughout an urban region based on economics, regulatory policies, and environmental characteristics. The model draws on theory and techniques from studies in urban geography, but incorporates contemporary understandings of development in complex urban systems. The model is applied to two regulatory cases: a target-based approach for runoff removal and a risk-based approach that minimizes expected damages. Third, the dissertation uses ecological and resilience theory concepts to analyze persistence and change in regional water distribution systems. Finally, it applies network science techniques to assess connectivity and resilience in a model of the California statewide water distribution system (CALVIN). Together, the chapters demonstrate novel theoretical and applied techniques to improve planning of future urban and regional water systems. Results yield both quantitative and qualitative insights. Emerging trends in urban water management include: Integration across sectors of drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater; Hybridization in new technologies and management approaches; Resilience to address uncertainty; Innovation driven by individual cities; and Complexity in system design and analysis. The metropolitan-scale stormwater model revealed patterns in the cost-effective allocation of sewers, surface channels, landscape infiltration, and green infrastructure across a city. Current stormwater systems are largely explained by local climates and low-cost designs. In particular, land values drive optimal allocations and green infrastructure is effective in dense areas when cities avert land acquisition costs. At the regional scale, applying ecological resilience concepts to water management identifies thresholds in the supply and cost of water. After exceeding these thresholds, existing systems likely reorganize into new configurations. Finally, analyzing a large water system using network theory uncovers important system characteristics for connectivity and resilience in water infrastructure. The dissertation concludes with a summary of contributions for integrated planning and risk analysis in urban water resources