Frontiers of Land and Water Governance in Urban Regions

A society that intensifies and expands the use of land and water in urban areas needs to search for solutions to manage the frontiers between these two essential elements for urban living. Sustainable governance of land and water is one of the major challenges of our times. Managing retention areas for floods and droughts, designing resilient urban waterfronts, implementing floating homes, or managing wastewater in shrinking cities are just a few examples where spatial planning steps into the governance arena of water management and vice versa. However, water management and spatial planning pursue different modes of governance, and therefore the frontiers between the two disciplines require developing approaches for setting up governance schemes for sustainable cities of the future. What are the particularities of the governance of land and water? What is the role of regional and local spatial planning? What institutional barriers may arise? This book focuses on questions such as these, and covers groundwater governance, water supply and wastewater treatment, urban riverscapes, urban flooding, flood risk management, and concepts of resilience. The project resulted from a Summer School by the German Academy for Spatial Research and Planning (ARL) organized by the editors at Utrecht University in 2013.

This book was published as a special issue of Water International.

Thomas Hartmann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. His research looks at the relationship between land and water, with a focus on river floods and retention. In this research, he combines planning theory, law and property rights, and water governance.

Tejo Spit is Professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He specialises in land policy, planning methodology, infrastructure planning, and administrative aspects of spatial planning. He has worked both in the academic world and the more problem-oriented world of municipalities.