Asset management of urban drainage systems is the subject of a new Open Access book released by IWA Publishing. Its editors explain why they feel it is an important contribution on this topic area.
It was three years ago that Frédéric Cherqui, Bert van Duin, Francois Clemens-Meyer and Franz Tscheikner-Gratl, all members of the UDAM (Urban Drainage Asset Management) joint working group (IWA/IAHR) committee on urban drainage, decided there was a need for a book on urban drainage asset management that would be valuable to both academics and practitioners.
“We felt that something was missing,” says Frédéric Cherqui. “It is a large topic and to our knowledge there is no comprehensive book on urban drainage asset management currently available.”
So, this team of editors – with exceptional knowledge in a breadth of subjects across urban drainage – decided to draw together experts from a range of countries working in this area to form the basis of this new book published by IWA Publishing. Its title, Asset Management of Urban Drainage Systems: if anything exciting happens, we’ve done it wrong!, has a touch of humour. But in addition to grabbing the attention of potential readers, it alludes to the critical nature of these often hidden and sometimes forgotten assets that communities across the world rely on for their safety, health and wellbeing. The resulting book is truly a ‘labour of love’ of passionate professionals around the world who volunteered many evenings and weekends to its creation.
Building resilience
As urban drainage asset management has evolved, climate change has become an increasingly significant factor, testing the integrity of systems and requiring innovative solutions. Climate change is definitively addressed from the very first chapter of the book, Cherqui explains. “When we think about urban drainage systems, we are considering pipes, nature-based solutions, and other solutions to manage water at source,” he says. “When it comes to climate resilience, pipes have often been in place for more than a century and are not very agile by their nature. Nature-based solutions, however, are more adaptive.”
Continuing: “As well as tackling ageing pipes, there are also lots of unknowns when it comes to the resilience of vegetation used in nature-based solutions, and how vegetation might respond to periods of drought or more persistent heavy rain.”
“Climate change has become an increasingly significant factor”
Acknowledging the importance of sharing knowledge and experience of nature-based solutions to improve asset management, decision-making, prioritisation, adaptation and mitigation, the growing subject of nature-based solutions is a thread that runs throughout a range of chapters in this publication.
A dual approach
Bert van Duin says: “When you are dealing with urban drainage and you want to build in a degree of resilience to climate change, the experience has been that where urban drainage systems are implemented based on a dual drainage system approach – one that considers both the pipes and the overland drainage system – you build in greater resiliency. Pipes can only take so much water given size limitations, but in extreme events the overland drainage system comes into play. That acknowledgement has made a huge difference in those jurisdictions where it has been applied. It is important to understand that urban drainage is not just about what happens underground, but also what happens above ground, and how we can bring together different kinds of infrastructure to manage water.”
Emerging opportunities
AI and digitalisation have enormous potential to transform the way we work and urban drainage asset management is no exception. The big question right now is how professionals manage and develop it. Francois Clemens-Meyer says high quality data will be critical. “We are in a kind of loop at the moment,” he explains. “AI can make a guess about your assets, but this is from fragmented observations due to poor data. However, AI has been found to be very good at interpreting images from CCTV to find vulnerable assets. Here, humans have been replaced by AI to good effect.”
He continues: “One of the great, so far not really materialised promises, is real-time control. Here AI could potentially turn out to be a game changer. If you know in a timely way – and in some detail – the characteristics of a storm that’s coming, you can prepare your system. Unfortunately, predictions of weather currently have too short a window. AI may eventually be able to significantly extend these prediction horizons to a level where they become meaningful for applications in controlling urban drainage systems. But for now, I guess we need to concentrate on data quality.”
The availability of quality data is particularly poor when it comes to nature-based solutions. “Data management for a sewer, although of varying quality still, is more straightforward,” says Franz Tscheikner-Gratl. “In the case of nature-based solutions, data quality and availability are even worse than that of piped solutions. We need to change that, so we don’t repeat the mistakes we made with sewers, where we started late in thinking about the need for data.”
Facilitating collaboration
Unlike piped solutions, nature-based solutions require extensive collaboration across multiple sectors, each approaching a project with different objectives and priorities. While this new thinking offers a wealth of opportunity for our urban environments, it is not without its challenges.
“We do need to be aware that nature-based solutions are fundamentally different from the historical realm of urban drainage. They offer many co-benefits such as addressing urban heat island effects, walkability, public health, biodiversity and habitat, for example,” says van Duin. This provides real opportunities to redefine urban drainage and its contribution to our cities, but it also requires an evolution in the sector’s skills set to incorporate disciplines beyond traditional engineering.
“By definition asset management of urban drainage has (or should have) always been multi-stakeholder, because the assets are sharing a common urban space,” says van Duin. “But nature-based solutions draw in many different participants from a broad range of backgrounds and experience – social scientists, NGOs, policymakers, and planners. They all have different objectives, and these will be different from location to location, reflecting where society is at and its values and priorities.
“The difference with nature-based solutions is that, in reality, the field is still immature. Although there has a been a lot of interest as to their installation and construction, understanding of the feedback loops we are seeing is still evolving to a large extent. Our book points readers to the different elements that they need to think about to deliver successful solutions.”
‘Living’ book
Conscious of the evolving nature of urban drainage asset management and eager to engage with the wider community of academics and practitioners working in this field, in the concluding chapter the editors have provided an interactive, online space – a ‘living’ book – which they ‘envisioned to provide a comprehensive, though digestible overview of “things to be done” when starting from scratch in, say, a small municipality or by a private asset owner who wants to create a professional system without relying on commercial products or proprietary software.’
“Urban drainage is not just about what happens underground”
“Chapter 10 is an exciting and also a bit of a scary challenge that we have created for ourselves,” says Tscheikner-Gratl. “We want to reach out to a broad audience, and we would like people to contribute to the ‘living’ book to continue the discussion. This is a field that is evolving, so it is natural that there will be gaps – gaps that we would like to fill with the help of the asset management community. The ‘living’ document will enable people to share cases and experiences from different fields. It will provide an opportunity for on-going improvement and engagement, and hopefully help to push the field forward, keeping the information available as fresh as possible.
“We want this space to help to weaken the boundaries between academia and practitioners. Sharing is key and we want to share our information as much as possible. Hopefully this ‘living’ chapter will provide a space for learning and sharing across the whole field.”
Supporting this drive for inclusivity, Asset Management of Urban Drainage Systems: if anything exciting happens, we’ve done it wrong! – due for launch this summer – has been published as an Open-Access ebook.
“We were very deliberate that we wanted the book to be Open-Access,” says van Duin. “We wanted to remove all barriers to access. The reality is that cost is a barrier for many practitioners. But this is a joint journey that we are on, and we want to improve our community in the most practical and efficient way as possible.” •
More information
- Asset Management of Urban Drainage Systems: if anything exciting happens, we’ve done it wrong! is available as an Open-Access ebook: https://iwaponline.com/ebooks/book/920/Asset-Management-of-Urban-Drainage-SystemsIf
eISBN: 9781789063059
ISBN13: 9781789063042
- See: www.iwaponline.com
- The ‘living’ book can be found at: https://udam.home.blog/udam-book-chapter-10/
The book editors: Frédéric Cherqui is associate professor at the University Lyon 1 and INSA Lyon, France, and honorary senior fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia; Bert van Duin is drainage technical lead at the City of Calgary Water Utility, Canada, and adjunct professor at the Universities of Calgary and Alberta, Canada; Francois Clemens-Meyer is a professor-emeritus at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, and professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology; and Franz Tscheikner-Gratl is associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
