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Urban Design and Urban Water Ecosystems

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The Water Environment of Cities

This chapter addresses the role of urban design in the performance of urban water ecosystems, with an emphasis on urban rainwater runoff and future urban infrastructure systems. The main thesis is that new designs must be supported by an integrative framework for analysis and application in order to significantly change overall urban hydrologic performance. Designers, planners, and scientists do not currently share such a framework. A straightforward landscape-based heuristic is proposed here which uses simple categories of hydrological function to sort, map, and propose changes to diverse urban land uses within an urban drainage basin.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the editor, Larry Baker, and two reviewers, Doug Johnston and Lance Neckar, for suggestions that improved this chapter significantly.

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Correspondence to Kristina Hill .

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Hill, K. (2009). Urban Design and Urban Water Ecosystems. In: Baker, L. (eds) The Water Environment of Cities. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-84891-4_8

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