"Water vs. Urban Scape" by Marco Ranzato (ed.)

Urban river floods, inundations, water shortage, dirty water, water pollution, or drowning are nothing new for our urban environments. But is there any other paradigm to follow but going along with the assumption water vs. urban? How can the challenge be met to give more room for water while enhancing the spatial quality of our urban landscapes?

An interesting book that proposes alternatives to harmonize the urban built environment and the urban water cycle, combining the functionality of water management with principles of urban design. The approach embraces an interdisciplinary cooperation of water management, urban design, architecture and landscape planning in order to reach the integration of water management concerns into overall concepts and development plans.

As early as the nineties, the concept of Integrated Water Management has gained momentum in urban design research and practice. Water vs. Urban Scape, edited by Marco Ranzato and publiseh by Jovis, presents promising new approaches to integrate water in the urban landscape through design-based experiences drawn up for a range of specific socio-spatial urban landscapes across the world such as the diffuse urbanisation in the Northeast of Italy and in Flanders, the booming cities of Shanghai and Istanbul or the expanding Oslo, the informal urbanisation of Kigali and the suburbanisation of Perth.

In a second part, four visual essays display possible scenarios of integrated water-urban arrangement in the Brussels Capital Region. With this, Water vs. Urban Scape provides plenty of inspiration for tackling one of the major issues of Urban Design in the urban age.