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Stormwater systems can improve public health and environmental and social conditions in cities, but their effectiveness may be blocked by fragmented project plans and lack of stakeholder support. Systems thinking and institutional analysis were used to assess how these barriers can be addressed and how stormwater systems can become agents of change to support livable and healthy cities. Projects and professional activities were studied to assess stakeholder involvement from low-to-high levels of power and interest in projects. Community stakeholders were developers and social entrepreneurs, government stakeholders included elected officials and staff, and support groups represented engineers, public agency facilitators, and urban planners. Stormwater projects and systems are a focus for engineers, but they often lose their stormwater identify when they are combined with other development projects. The workplace for such projects is the public arena, where cities seek aspirational goals by applying integration through comprehensive planning. However, development projects sometimes fail to comply with the plans. Stormwater may provide the spark for multi-purpose projects as cities must sustain conveyance corridors for connectivity of major flows. However, fragmented project development spurred by rigid capital improvement programs and lack of a path to develop stormwater system connectivity through comprehensive planning and development present barriers. Effective governance is the core issue, and most power is with elected officials, who require public support. The analysis shows need for a road map to utilize stakeholder power to promote stormwater advances by raising awareness and developing practical approaches that work in the spheres of comprehensive planning and capital improvement programming. The road map could be supported by an integrated body of knowledge to frame stormwater management as a combination of urban planning, engineering, and public administration and to encourage these communities to develop a cooperative road map through work among their professional associations.
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1. Introduction
Stormwater systems have the potential to improve cities in the broad areas of public health, environmental management, and social transformation [1,2]. Imaginative frameworks like Sponge Cities [3] and water sensitive urban design (WSUD) [4] show how stormwater projects can make such improvements as development tools [5] that add nature-based solutions to legacy gray infrastructure-based systems. Through their attribute of connecting land and water, they can also promote the One Water approach to water resources management [6,7]. Despite these advantages, the application of stormwater management tools seems fragmented, and its potential may not be realized in many situations. The major issue is connectivity between projects that may improve local drainage and add environmental elements, but which do not connect to other stormwater projects to create citywide systems. Such citywide systems are needed as major flood conveyances and to add to recreation, open space, transportation, and other urban necessities and amenities.
With these emerging possibilities and apparent handicaps, the broad questions addressed here are, “how can stormwater systems be used as development tools to help transform cities by making them healthier and more livable,” “what barriers should be addressed to improve them,” and “what should be the roles of key stakeholders?” The inquiry aims to examine these questions from a systemic perspective as a socio-technical problem. The questions involve multiple areas of inquiry including urban policy, management of cities, professional disciplines, fields of practice, and research and education. Specific questions derived from these include: How do stormwater systems fit in the broad context of urban development? How do multipurpose stormwater projects fit into urban systems? Is “stormwater management” a unified field of practice? How can stormwater systems improve livability in cities? What levers are needed for stormwater systems to drive urban improvement? Who should pull these levers and how can they be incentivized? What would a road map to the future look like?
2. Methodology
The core methodology for the study is the “soft systems” approach to systems thinking [8], which will be used to frame the problem and show the subsystems and interrelationships. Concepts of the “systems approach” are quite variable, and the soft systems approach can be explained as using conceptual and reasoning tools, as opposed to quantitative computations. This has the advantage that the analysis can retain complexity and not simplify to fit available data. As data analytics and machine learning methods advance, quantitative approaches should become more effective. As the soft systems method is applied to the questions cited, emergent findings [9] are expected to add value to the conclusions. The concept of emergence as applied here means that unexpected results will emerge from consideration of the holistic picture.
Within this broad framework, the study of stakeholders and roles will be based on the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) method [10]. Also, the IAD method can be applied in different ways and systems thinking involves diverse toolsets, so their combination offers a rich menu of ways to approach the analysis. The writer’s archives about stormwater management dating back to the 1970s were used to locate unique references and to add perspective to how the stormwater field has changed during the past half-century. Another source of data was provided by experience of the City of Fort Collins, where the author has been involved extensively in several roles related to urban planning, management of the stormwater program, and public administration.
Stormwater systems are defined with conceptual diagrams to identify their functions and interconnections. How they fit the emerging frameworks of WSUD, Sponge Cities, and One Water is explained by comparing their functionality to the main elements of those frameworks. How stormwater projects are structured and become part of systems is analyzed by project evaluation methods and case examples. The concept of stormwater management as a field of practice is assessed by comparing it with established professional fields. How stormwater systems may help transform cities is addressed by examining the economic and social forces that comprise agents of change in cities and aligning the purpose of stormwater projects and systems with them. The levers available to key stakeholders are examined by use of the IAD concept of “action arenas,” which are the planning and decision phases where projects are implemented. The actors and disciplines who may use these levers are probed by stakeholder analysis and assessment of power relationships. The road map offers a way forward and a way to identify roadblocks.
The next section outlines how individual stormwater projects fit within larger stormwater systems and eventually into the holistic set of full urban systems, comprising different sectors and processes.
3. Stormwater Projects and Urban Systems
Stormwater projects may be assembled piecemeal and not fit coherently into an overall vision for urban development. As they are assembled into broader development projects, they become elements of overall systems, but they may not be identified primarily with stormwater, which becomes subsidiary to broader development goals. Gray or nature-based infrastructure will be classified in the stormwater category because of their drainage objectives, but there is no standard category for stormwater projects, and they are not recognized by statistical compilations, such as construction spending. In US construction data [11], spending is categorized as residential and non-residential and project types that might involve stormwater are highway and street, public safety, and conservation and development. These do not focus on stormwater, and they do not capture other types of common mixed-use projects in urban areas. Definitions of project categories are evolving, and different names are used among interest groups. To understand this, a search of projects and professional activities related to stormwater was conducted, with emphasis on civil engineering, public works management, urban planning, and landscape architecture.
Within civil engineering, activity is focused in the Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI) of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which comprises a conglomerate of technical interest groups. This combination of interest groups is evident in the stovepipes of the society’s committee structure, which show overlap and duplication of interests in stormwater topics like watershed approaches, modeling, low impact development, green infrastructure, sedimentation, and rainwater harvesting. One long-standing group, the Urban Water Resources Research Council, manages the International Best Management Practices (BMP) Database that focuses on stormwater management [12]. The focus in ASCE is on technical methods, as illustrated by publications about topics like stream networks, managing runoff using stormwater controls, and simulation models [13,14].
At the local level, stormwater is often included in “mixed use” projects in capital improvement programs, which are packages of projects that local governments assemble to meet community needs and preferences [15]. As an example, citizens in Bend, Oregon [16] approved stormwater related projects that include community gardens, parks and playgrounds, allocating tennis courts to stormwater storage, and utility work. Public works perspectives focus on practical issues like operations and maintenance, as shown by a stormwater benchmarks study that measured employee counts, budget, miles of closed system, open system, and BMPs [17]. With new uses of stormwater like harvesting it for reuse, additional benchmarks can be introduced [18].
The broad field of urban planning views water as an overall instrument of planning and development, including stormwater [19,20,21] as an element in land use policy and mixed-use development. Stormwater projects are evident in sustainability studies, which form a key area for urban planners [22] and planners focus on green infrastructure, like in Philadelphia [23], which focuses on stormwater to comply with a regulatory consent decree. Planners see barriers to implementing a systems approach because green infrastructure lacks regulatory pathways to implement holistic solutions. They also see the need for new regulatory models for urban centers, suburbs, and undeveloped lands to establish an interconnected web of green infrastructure in communities.
The focus on site planning is evident among landscape architects. The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) [24] collected information on 462 case studies in 43 states. The projects were mostly small and at the site level, beginning with individual buildings. They demonstrate technologies like rain gardens, bioswales, porous pavements, filter strips, and wetlands. ASLA has selected stormwater projects for awards, including a system in Los Angeles, a Sponge City, a project with social issues, and a project focused on education and heritage [25].
How projects link to urban systems is a question of systems science, where terminology is important and leads to identification of systems and subsystems [26]. Standardization of definitions is important to exchange information among stakeholders. The term “defining” the system is used here instead of “identifying” it because in systems science, identification means use of a model to analyze input and output data to define the system [27].
The starting point is to explain the legacy stormwater system. Figure 1 illustrates a comprehensive approach to urban drainage and flood control, as it was conceptualized during the 1970s by innovative stormwater planners in the Denver Metropolitan area [28,29,30].
This legacy diagram is still relevant to show how stormwater systems function for urban drainage and flood control, but it does not illustrate its broader functions, including water quality [31], floodplain management [32], environmental enhancement [33], and stormwater harvesting for water supply [34,35]. These multiple purposes are illustrated in Figure 2 with management of excess water, capturing water as a resource, cleaning cities, and enhancing urban environments.
The literature of stormwater as a subsystem within the urban system of systems (SoS) is expanding [36] to show a view of cities with interacting physical, socio-economic, and environmental groups, each with multiple subsystems. These systems are complex, and analysis must be at a conceptual level to show general groups of variables and linkages. A more detailed view may involve dynamic simulation by distinguishing between types of variables [37], but such simulations can only be realistic at small scales. Urban systems involve state variables such as physical situations like infrastructure conditions, economic variables like job numbers, or social variables like crime statistics.
Figure 3 shows how stormwater, as an urban water service, fits into urban systems [38]. It was skeletonized to show only essential features, and how stormwater systems link to transportation, utility services, and the social and natural environments of the city.
As cities address these many systemic elements, they use the tools of urban planning and development rather than simulation or even conceptual models to indicate needed actions [39]. As an example, the City of Fort Collins has a comprehensive plan with seven broad goal categories [40]. Figure 4 shows how stormwater fits into the goal areas. The outer ring shows the seven goal areas and the stormwater program elements and goals are shown on the points of the star. The affordability issue relates to housing because the city operates a stormwater utility with monthly charges to houses. In this comprehensive view, the technical part of stormwater systems is represented in the engineering and management of the drainage system, but there is cooperation with planning. From a research standpoint, this cooperation is being expressed in a joint committee of engineers and landscape architects within ASCE [12].
The previous section outlined the concept of stormwater systems within the larger framework of urban systems. How these stormwater systems affect the larger urban systems is addressed next by identifying their roles in urban transformation.
4. Role of Stormwater Systems in Urban Transformation
The major transformational forces in cities are the economic, technological, and demographic mechanisms such as trade and investment as cities plan their strategies in these arenas [41]. Such larger forces can create major shifts in demographics and urban form, and stormwater systems will trail but not lead in these processes [42,43,44]. They can make cities more attractive and foster development [45] by facilitating desirable urban conditions through multiple functional areas of drainage, flood plain management, water quality control, and social benefits. Nature-based solutions like low-impact development and Sponge City methods change flood risk and add esthetic benefits, while drainage can reduce traffic delays and property damage due to storms. The neighborhood focus of stormwater management also strengthens social capital. Stormwater capture and rainfall harvesting can also augment scarce water supplies, as shown in Singapore [34]. Benefits like these can be measured in accounts like quality of life, wellbeing, and biodiversity [22].
While these possibilities for stormwater are intriguing, their importance varies with context. Regardless of the context, cities have aspirational adjectives like becoming more livable and healthier [46,47]. The livable cities term has been used for decades by urban planners, although it lacks a consensus definition because it depends on availability of attributes like effective transportation, housing, and urban services that vary in contextual situations [48]. Healthy cities focus on absence of disease, like provision of safe water and sanitation, protection against spread of infectious diseases, and low rates of violence and mental illness [49]
The concept of WSUD aims to integrate urban water management by imitating natural water cycles, also focusing on stormwater reuse, pollution reduction and sustainable urban development [4]. The One Water concept brings these issues together in the context of water management, where runoff, drinking water, wastewater, and recycled water services are managed jointly, often with stormwater playing an integrated role. Definitions are inconsistent, but the idea is to coordinate and manage the water cycle and related infrastructure and to use good practices to connect them [7,50]. A similar concept named “Water-Wise Cities” was developed by the International Water Association [51], and it has a conceptual framework similar to One Water. A Standards Committee of the American Water Works Association has also been studying One Water as part of a stormwater management standard [52]. Sponge City is different in that it links water management, land use, and stormwater with focus on green areas to replace concrete and absorb water, like LID [53]. Ultimately, the related frameworks are heading in the same direction, but with differing areas of emphasis that depend on the perspectives of the separate professional communities.
As stormwater systems have definite roles in urban transformation, the next question is how stakeholders affect these roles through their agency and power in stormwater projects.
5. Stakeholders as Actors in Stormwater Projects
In stormwater projects, the actors are stakeholders with roles and power levels who participate at different stages of development. A stakeholder map can illustrate their roles in decisions across various fields of business and public management [54]. Stakeholders can be classified in terms of their power and interest [55], and variables for agency and influence can also be mapped, but their differences with power are not great enough to warrant the extra detail. Generally, power means the capacity to change something, agency means the capacity to act, and influence means the capacity to help [56].
Individual stakeholders fall into four categories according to their power and interest: High power and high interest (requiring close attention and management) High power but low interest (requiring attention but less frequent interaction) Low power but high interest (requiring information flow) Low power and low interest (not requiring much attention) [57]
For this analysis, interest means the degree to which a stakeholder has a stake in the success of the project. Low interest does not signify that the stakeholder is not interested in the project, only that the stakes involved are not very high. The most visible stakeholders for this analysis are those who are primarily responsible for initiating action. Two categories are evident, one comprising developers with monetary incentives and the other comprising social entrepreneurs, who may work in stormwater organizations, other local government departments, and in interest groups in other ways [58].
A related group of actors has influence to stimulate and lead the work of developers and social entrepreneurs to use stormwater projects as tools to make cities better [59,60]. The primary group here comprises local elected officials, with a focus on the mayors. Regulators are primarily local government staff with responsibility to check plans and assure quality control.
The support group comprises actors in fields of practice in disciplines, with stormwater having active groups among engineers, urban planners, public works officials, and landscape architects. Their primary roles are to ensure good engineering work, to enhance economic, social, and environmental aspects of cities, and to align stormwater projects with relevant city goals. They will be involved in responsibilities over the stages of projects and in development of collaboration mechanisms.
The stakeholders can be classified in three broad groups, community, government, and support from technical groups. Community groups include developers and social entrepreneurs. Government stakeholders include mayor, staff, and public agency facilitators. The support groups focus on urban planners, landscape architects and civil engineers. The groups are shown in Table 1 to indicate their levels of power and interest and their roles in stormwater projects.
With stakeholder categories and their roles and power levels identified, the IAD concept of action arenas can be used to facilitate an institutional analysis of how stormwater systems should be developed to aid in transforming cities.
6. Institutional Analysis of Stormwater System Improvement
How stormwater projects and systems can transform cities and how stakeholders use their power can be analyzed using the IAD process [10]. This complex process is a tool to analyze how institutions like rules and norms determine actions among stakeholders in different situations. Detailed explanation is beyond the scope here, where the main use of IAD is the conceptual identification of the “action arena” concept and its application in development of urban projects. Figure 5 shows the common configuration used in a descriptive way to focus on the action arena. Community attributes and rules of the game provide the background, and the biophysical/material conditions form the context for the analysis and the physical environment of an action situation. The participants are the stakeholders described earlier, and the interactions occur in the development process comprising the action arena of getting stormwater projects implemented at larger than site scales.
The action situations are broad master and comprehensive planning, new development projects, and redevelopment projects. In these, stormwater systems are assembled through projects with hard and soft aspects [61,62] and serve as coordination mechanisms for mixed-use public works projects. The power levers and action arenas for these projects depend on the different settings, whether urban development or urban redevelopment, as well as the socio-economic situations in the community, whether housing, income levels, or antecedent conditions. Regardless of the setting, the drivers will be land development or renewal. Some initiators will be private sector actors, and some will be government entrepreneurs who work in response to city plans and/or regulatory requirements [63]. Community organizers [64] can spark innovation. Examples of the initiation of action include a private developer proposing a new subdivision on the urban edge, redevelopment in older parts of town, interest groups influencing the comprehensive urban plan and pushing for specific projects, and creative local government planners and entrepreneurs working to coordinate cooperative ventures.
Comprehensive planning is a critical ingredient in identifying stormwater systems for assembly of projects [65], and capital improvement projects are the way to build portfolios one project at a time [66]. The development review process can facilitate and/or improve proposals for development or redevelopment projects. The stages of these projects and roles of actors in them are shown in Figure 6. The map shown in the figure identifies action arenas for institutional analysis using the IAD method [10]. The conceptual development stage involves entrepreneurs and urban planners, whose involvement depends on the situation. Technical support is required to advance to the initial plan stage where projects begin to be formal. Engineers are normally involved here, and their findings may require revision of conceptual plans. In the public and agency review stage, additional actors learn of the project and can exercise some agency prior to the implementation stage, where financing and approvals must occur. These require leadership from elected and appointed officials.
Stormwater projects were shown as fitting within the broad field of community development projects, but the important question here is whether there is continuity in their use to form stormwater systems and to gain the influence they can have in urban transformation.
7. Is Stormwater Management a “Field of Practice?”
Returning to the question of whether stormwater management is a useful way to frame a field of practice, we begin by explaining the concept. A field of practice is a way to organize the tools, methods, and norms of an arena of work, and its community of practice comprises the actors involved. Familiar examples include medicine, accounting, and law. General management can also be considered a field of practice [67], although it is broad and more difficult to classify into sub-fields than a more focused field like medicine. A principal difference between management and focused fields like engineering is the acceptance of a codified body of knowledge [68].
One test of whether stormwater management qualifies as a field of practice is whether it has its own body of knowledge. The splintering of it into fields addressed by engineers, public administrators and planners shows the inherent divisions. Dominant fields of practice such as medicine or law show a coherent organization of their labor markets, procedures for licensing, and higher education programs [69]. Stormwater managers are not organized into a labor market and, while there is some credentialling, it is established in separate activities. For example, the American Public Works Association offers a Certified Stormwater Manager credential, which is for “individuals responsible for administering drainage, flood control, and/or water quality programs” [6]. That verbiage suggests that it does not address areas of land use, such as environmental enhancement of flood plains or recreation that is facilitated by stormwater management. As it pushes into new areas like green solutions that depend on academic knowledge and expertise, stormwater management draws from distinct fields like engineering and landscape architecture, but cooperation seems weak.
From these comparisons, it is apparent that stormwater management is not a recognized field of practice, at least in its broad form, although it may be such within the field of engineering. Its fragmentation indicates that it can benefit from more emphasis on an integrated approach [70,71]. A possible way to pursue integration and develop an integrated body of knowledge is to frame stormwater management as a combination of engineering, urban planning, and program administration. Each of these draws in multiple disciplines, such as engineering for infrastructure and water management, urban planning for landscape and esthetic designs, and stormwater administration as one of the many subfields of public administration [72].
Figure 7 shows the concept with program areas and interrelationships. This shared activity can create an action arena to make stormwater systems work well and enhance economic, social, and environmental aspects of cities. How this should work in practice is shown by the strategic plan of Fort Collins, which was explained earlier as having seven areas. To pursue these, the city shows multiple entries for performance measurement on its website [73], with stormwater under utilities, while its impacts are felt across all seven goal areas.
8. Discussion
Stormwater management may be a defined field of practice for engineers, but when the concept is broadened to include multipurpose projects, it risks the loss of its focus. A field of practice is a workspace where specialized knowledge, skills, and ethical standards are applied in a domain to address real-world situations [74]. If it involves “professional practice,” it will involve workers who claim and are accepted by the public to have knowledge and skills in a specialized body of knowledge and who apply these to help others [75]. Norms of professions are expressed by professional societies [76,77], certifying bodies, and regulatory agencies. The National Society of Professional Engineers and ASCE provide norms for engineers.
When a problem space requires work of multiple professions, it may be said to be “interdisciplinary.” If the work involves a single organization, it may be addressed by theories about organizational management [78], but in the case of multi-purpose stormwater projects, the workplace is in the public arena. Solving problems in this arena requires a systems approach [79] involving different perspectives and a comprehensive approach, which is a principal goal of urban planning [80].
Such problems cross numerous goals for livable and healthy cities. For example, the One Health framework involves aspects of environmental, human, and animal health [81]. Achieving these involves multiple specialties, like nutrition and medicine, among others. The analogy with stormwater is that in One Health the patient must assemble individual portfolios of practices, and in the case of cross-cutting stormwater projects, the patient is the city itself. Attending to the needs of cities involves public administrators with multiple responsibilities as professional local government managers. These include managing financial and human resources, overseeing community services, planning for community development, and preparing the capital improvement program, among others [82].
Public administrators depend on planners to see the potential of using stormwater to achieve broad goals, and the engineering focus is primarily on drainage functions, which are increasingly seen as linked to other goals, like green infrastructure. Landscape architects are part of the family of urban planners, and they focus on sites more than systems.
The important role for engineers is that drainage and control of urban runoff pollution often lead to stormwater projects as the spark to initiate actions. This happens as cities face challenges to sustain conveyance corridors for major flows and to store and treat runoff and combined sewage. As urbanization advances, these needs become more urgent in cities of diverse contextual situations [83]. Technical methods address drainage and pollution control are well advanced, but integrative frameworks to address the joint needs in social, ecological and infrastructure realms are more challenging. These challenges from the scale of sites to the city require leadership from higher governance levels, although many governments face resistance to such initiatives, especially when substantial funding is involved. This challenge is more difficult in settings with poor land use and public works management systems, along with steep affordability hurdles.
Returning to the key questions of how stormwater systems can transform cities into healthier and more livable conditions and the roles of key stakeholders, the answers take on a familiar tone with governance as the core issue. The question of how stormwater systems fit in the broad context of urban development is answered by the dilemma that stormwater projects can lead to systemic change and contribute positively to urban development, but without connectivity, they end up having only local impacts. On the second question, how multipurpose stormwater projects fit into urban systems, the finding was that they become submerged into broader developments, and the stormwater dimension can be lost.
Clearly, effective stormwater systems can improve livability in cities, regardless of their dimensionality across multiple contextual situations. If the setting is high-income, the livability bonus may focus on esthetics, whereas in sprawling lower-income cities, it may focus on more fundamental issues like public health and safety.
On the question whether “stormwater management” is a unified field of practice, it was shown not to be such. It is a recognized field of practice among engineers, but it must be exercised in a shared workspace with planners and public administrators. The power levers for stormwater systems to drive urban improvement begin with civic leadership involving elected officials and community visionaries, and they require support from entrepreneurs and technical support organizations like consulting firms. City staff have key roles in regulating and enabling projects, and community leaders must gain public support if projects and systemic change are to succeed.
The arguments to elevate stormwater management to a higher level among city planners and public administrators, as well as to broaden the application of engineering methods in it, seem compelling within the theories of urban connectivity [84]. The analysis pointed to the fragmentation created by the project basis of capital improvements and the lack of a way to introduce stormwater system connectivity into comprehensive urban planning. Connectivity theories focus on streets, transportation systems, and social networks but the connectivity aspects of stormwater are lost in the disconnects among water services and user communities. Integrative concepts of One Water and IWRM address this connectivity, but it remains to be applied widely in comprehensive urban planning.
The observation of a need to embed stormwater connectivity in urban planning emerged from the application of systems thinking to the problems addressed. There is need for further work, but the connectivity attribute of stormwater management offers substantial benefits to cities as they move ahead.
The levers needed for stormwater systems to drive urban improvement focus on urban planning and capital improvement programming, and the stakeholders who can pull these levers are mostly in the public sector, both elected and appointed. Ways to incentivize them are needed as the tendencies to work in stovepipes and to pursue narrow, short-term interests are powerful.
Development of a road map to exploit these findings and utilize stakeholder power and interest to promote stormwater advances should focus on raising awareness among stakeholders with the most power and developing practical approaches like changes in comprehensive planning and capital improvement programming. Work among the engineering, planning, and public administration communities can begin through programs of professional associations to raise awareness with case studies and peer-to-peer sharing of experiences.
9. Conclusions
The potential for stormwater systems to improve public health, environmental management, and social transformation around the world seems high, and there are many impressive case studies from leading cities, as shown by the survey of the American Society of Landscape Architects. However, as explained about the global situation, in some cities disorder and poor governance block their implementation. In many other cities, greater awareness among interest groups and use of integrative methods can accelerate use of innovative stormwater systems. As shown by systems thinking and IAD methodologies that focus on the action arena, change can usually occur through the stages of planning and implementing of individual projects, rather than bold systemic change. However, the elements of stormwater projects can be aggregated to become parts of overall systems by linking mixed-use projects involving drainage, floodplain management, and land use changes.
Urban planners have bold visions for systemic change, but they may not be involved in projects at smaller scales and opportunities may be missed to make on interconnections among green infrastructure in communities. In this case, the focus on projects rather than systemic change leads to fragmented stakeholder involvement, and those with most power and interest may be sidelined by lack of imaginative systemic proposals for continuous systems and improved connectivity among natural, social, and ecological systems. Navigating the action arena will require a systems approach with comprehensive planning and diverse perspectives, which is a recognized goal of both urban planning and public administration. However, the project focus of stormwater shows how, once a comprehensive plan is developed, it may or may not guide development as different actors with diverse power levels become involved. Maintaining a commitment to the stated goals and values of comprehensive plans is difficult in the real world of urban development.
The use of the IAD process provided a platform to view actions among entrepreneurs and urban planners in the conceptual stage with supporting groups of engineers involved later. These actors will view the stormwater focus differently than engineers and they will focus on land development and the broad outlines of urban planning, rather than using stormwater systems to achieve new modes of urban connectivity. A possible way to pursue integration and develop an integrated body of knowledge is to frame stormwater management as a combination of urban planning, engineering, and public administration.
From the analysis, it was apparent that the current version of stormwater management may be a defined field of practice for engineers, but when the concept is broadened to include multipurpose projects, it loses its focus. The important contribution of engineers to implementation of broad stormwater systems is to leverage the effects that drainage and control of urban runoff pollution control offer to create a spark that initiates systemic actions.
Public administrators depend on planners and engineers for stormwater work, and they confront many other issues such that their attention becomes diffused. However, public administration has a large tent and within it, public works administrators are the logical focal point to lead stormwater systems creation.
Development of a road map to exploit these findings and utilize stakeholder power and interest to promote stormwater advances should focus on raising awareness and developing practical approaches. Bringing stormwater engineers to comprehensive planning forums early in the processes will help. Adding comprehensive planning to their training is another potential aid. The focus of urban planners and landscape architects on stormwater as a connector will help in the same way.
The arguments to elevate stormwater management to a higher level to transform cities seem compelling, and the theories of urban connectivity show the possible benefits. As with many issues, governance is the core element in future solutions. The main powers are with elected officials, but they are shared among stakeholders in cities. The identification of the action arenas where governance is applied focuses on projects and capital improvement programming, which are principal activities of public works administrators. This focus inevitably involves policy and politics, which show the need for open, transparent, and effective public involvement and communication. These challenges are, of course, more difficult in settings with poor governance and public works management systems, along with steep affordability hurdles.
No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Footnotes
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Figure 1 Urban stormwater system focused on drainage and flood control.
Figure 2 Four functions of stormwater management.
Figure 3 Stormwater management as an urban water service.
Figure 4 How stormwater management serves seven strategic goals in a city master plan.
Figure 5 IAD process and the action arena.
Figure 6 Sequence of the urban project development process.
Figure 7 Concept for a shared professional field of stormwater management practice.
Roles and power of stakeholder groups in stormwater projects.
| Roles | Stakeholders (Community, Government, Support) | Power and Interest |
|---|---|---|
| Initiate projects | Developers | High power |
| Stimulate and encourage projects | Mayors | High power |
| Regulate | Staff | High power |
| Support | Engineers | Low Power |
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