https://e360.yale.edu/features/copenhagen-sponge-cities
"In just two hours on July 2, 2011, a torrential, once-in-a-millennium storm
battered and flooded Copenhagen, pounding parts of Denmark’s capital with more
than 5 inches of rain. Critical infrastructure at the city’s largest hospital
was swamped, as were major roads, basements, and businesses. The city that had
been engaged with advanced sustainability planning for decades, it turned out,
was woefully unprepared for the fierce rainfall, which caused $1.8 billion in
damages.
Shaken by the calamity, the city and its citizens grasped that such climate
disasters — and deluges even more severe — were inevitable and required a rapid
and strong response. To that end, Copenhagen brought together its top urban
planners, landscapers, consultants, and architects to turn the city, which
stretches across two main islands in the Baltic Sea, into the world’s first
full-fledged “sponge city.” This state-of-the-art defense system — which
combines nature-based surface features, like wetlands and parks, with large
underground structures, like storage pipes and retention basins — is expected
to fortify the city against cloudbursts and sea level rise for 100 years.
The intricately designed network manages stormwater and rising tides by soaking
them up, storing them, and then slowly returning water to the water cycle. The
sponge city build-out has been so successful that cities as disparate as
Auckland, Nairobi, Singapore, New York, Rotterdam, and Berlin — and many others
in the U.S. and Europe — now consider it an example to emulate.
“Even though the Chinese were first and coined the term sponge city,” explains
Maryam Naghibi, an urban landscape architect at Delft University of Technology,
in the Netherlands, “Copenhagen is a model for cities everywhere with such
dense urban fabric.”"
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-copenhagen-sponge-city/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
