Sponge City Innovation Park

The Jiangsu-Victoria Sponge City Innovation Park is a 10 hectare site that will exhibit cutting edge water sensitive infrastructure and technology, with facilities for validating emerging sponge city technologies and products. The CRC for Water Sensitive Cities (CRCWSC) and its partners have been commissioned to lead the park’s development and masterplanning, and to undertake landscape and building concept designs that will showcase CRCWSC innovation at building and public open space scales.

The Jiangsu-Victoria Sponge City Innovation Park will link with Kunshan City’s Sponge City Performance Assessment and Testing Facilities; the two will collectively serve as the research demonstration and technology validation facility for Australian innovation for application in China. The CRCWSC will guide the operation of both the innovation park and technology validation facility. The project includes a range of water sensitive city initiatives, which will be built immediately, together and at scale – an opportunity which is rare in an Australian context.

• Industry development: Collaborate with international partners and catalyse water sensitive transitions for the world's cities and towns.
• Access to new markets: Strengthen pathways to market for Australian expertise and facilitate new partnerships with additional cities and associated China-based enterprises.
• New learnings: Learn from Jiangsu's approach to implementing programs that address urbanisation challenges at a large scale.
• Demonstrate expertise: Showcase Australian expertise in urban water management and water sensitive urban design (WSUD).

• Water quality management: The recirculation wetland manages water quality and keeps water moving in the adjoining polder canal.
• Best practice riparian restoration: The riparian ecotone establishes the exemplar template of how a riparian zone can be restored. It shows the diversity of ecological transition from aquatic, deep marsh and shallow marsh to terrestrial plants.
• Streetscape interventions: The central median biofilter shows how the streetscape will capture road runoff for stormwater attenuation and pollution reduction.
• Resource recovery: The nutrient recovery glass house will produce nursery plants irrigated using nutrient-rich recycled water from the decentralised wastewater treatment facility. Excess heat and CO2 gas from the wastewater treatment facility will be captured to improve the productivity of nursery plants.
• Stormwater treatment tree pits: The structural soil tree pit will provide sufficient quality soil volume for healthy tree roots and growth in an urban environment, as well as treat stormwater.
• Swamp forest wetlands: The swamp forest wetland will add a vertical dimension to the traditional stormwater wetland and provide visual screening for the overhead power lines.
• Wetland integration: Together, the sub-surface wetland and surface wetland will form an ecological landscape around the administration building precinct. It will also help to clean up the canal, which is subject to black and odour problems.

• Collaboration with international partners can facilitate introduction of techniques and products in a different environment and at a large scale, and provide additional test sites for research.
• Introduction of Australian water sensitive city knowledge and expertise to other cities can assist cities in 'leap frogging' stages of transition, jumping to delivery of infrastructure with better performance and broader benefits at a lower cost.

Validate the success of a variety of technologies at range of scales, both in China and in Australia. Demonstrate the value of mutual benefitting partnerships and how they may be grown and managed.