Modeling the urban water cycle as part of the city
Abstract
Experts in the areas of society, economics and urban planning fields joined water engineers to take up the interdisciplinary challenge of understanding the urban water cycle within the context of the city at a workshop in Obergurgl, Austria – denoted as ‘Interurba III – Modeling the water cycle as part of the city’, held in June 2013. A key conclusion of their discussion was that the focus of integrated urban water management must expand to the complete urban system, and modeling has to see the water system as part of a city and its engineered, environmental, social and economic systems.
This special issue, which features fully peer reviewed contributions from the Obergurgl workshop attendees and other leaders in this area, reports on modeling urban water management in interaction with urban development and under consideration of socioeconomic effects. The special issue presents a state of the art in this maturing field by presenting the most recent findings of high quality research. The contributions from an open call to the research community are structured as following: based on a review article, methods and tools are presented in a series of seven papers. Next, six case studies of different size and scope are presented, followed by a compilation of five examples where research attempts have been brought into practice.