Urban drainage has been a major part of urban development for the last 150 years. Then and now, the main goals have been an hygienic and efficient system to drain the wastewater from the cities as much as protecting them from urban flooding and to improve surrounding surface water bodies.
This infrastructure, created by multiple generations, is worth to be kept functioning and sustainable as well as intelligently prepared for future challenges. Further, the increasing amount of impervious surfaces in cities, climate change and demographic changes as well as the pollution of the aquatic environment with micropollutants and cost efficiency of the various treatment methods has to be considered. A special focus lies on the treatment of runoff from urbanized areas. These topics are discussed on international conferences all over the world. In the German speaking part of this world however, there is no platform for these topics so far.
From a scientific as well as from a hands-on side of these topics the five urban water management institutions of Eawag-ETH Zurich, Graz University of Technology, TU Kaiserslautern, University of Innsbruck and University of Stuttgart have teamed up with the national organizations DWA, ÖWAV and VSA to organize a new conference. This new, German speaking D-A-CH-Conference with the name
"Aqua Urbanica" focuses on the runoff and combined sewage management in urbanized areas. It is organized yearly by one of the universities together with their corresponding national organization rotating through the consortium.
Under the headline "Runoff and Combined Sewage Management" the Aqua Urbanica includes the following topics:
- Transport processes of surface runoff
- Runoff pollution and its treatment
- Transport and decay processes in sewers
- Modeling of drainage systems
- Management of drainage systems
- Flood protection
- Meeting new challenges (demographic change, climate change, resource preservation, ...)
- Efficiency of runoff and combined sewage facilities
- Effects on surface water bodies
- Measurement, controlling and software based tools
- Guidelines, rules and planing tools
- Case studies
We aim to draw in presentations from the scientific and the business sector as well as from the government authorities and equipment producers. The goal is to create a platform with a wide span of opinions.
In 2011 the cooperation partners created the foundation for a sustainable use of surface runoff in urbanized areas. The yearly exchange of information, knowledge and experiences between science and application at the Aqua Urbanica should be a major part of that.
Link to the Aqua Urbanica homepage