Strategic Approaches to Urban Wetlands: Reconciling Nature Conservation, Engineering and Landscape Architecture

Abstract

Wetlands are at the same time among the most productive and the most threatened ecosystems of the world. One of the major threats for wetlands is urbanization. In the urban context there is a long history of associating wetlands with a number of water-related diseases, floods, pollution and poor living conditions.

Since the end of the 20th century, there has been a paradigm shift in the attitude towards wetlands: the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands has promoted the importance of new concepts of wetland management in order to reduce health hazards by highlighting the many positive wetland values from the perspective of nature conservation. At the same time, engineering has broadly introduced the concept of constructed wetlands and biofilters as a way of effectively trapping and removing the pollution from stormwater runoff, wastewater and polluted river water. Linking the ecological and technical dimensions and integrating them with the high aesthetic and recreational value of urban wetland parks, landscape architecture has developed fascinating concepts demonstrating the high potential of an integrated strategic approach to the recovery and creation of wetlands in the urban context. This paper brings together these different perspectives on urban wetlands and argues by discussing different case-studies how wetlands can take a prominent role in urban ecosystems.

Keywords

Integrated Design / Landscape Infrastructure / Ecosystem Performance / Ecological Engineering / Constructed Wetland / Integrated Water Management

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2014 Higher Education Press