The Water Sensitive City

This book advocates a more thoughtful approach to urban water management. The approach involves reducing water consumption, harvesting rainwater, recycling rainwater and adopting Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) where surface water is not sent straight to drains but is intercepted by features like green roofs, rain gardens, swales and ponds.Cities in particular need to change the existing linear model of water consumption and use to a more circular one in order to survive. The Water Sensitive City brings together the various specialised technical discussions that have been continuing for some time into a volume that is more accessible to designers (engineers and architects), urban planners and managers, and policymakers.

Gary Grant is a Chartered Environmentalist, Member of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, an Academician at the Academy of Urbanism, Member of the All Party Parliamentary Committee on Biodiversity, thesis supervisor at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London, Chair of the Judges of the Integrated Habitats Design Competition and Director of the Green Roof Consultancy Ltd. After graduating from Nottingham University in 1980 with a degree in Biology, he worked for the London Wildlife Trust (LWT), campaigning for and managing urban wildspace. He conceived the London Wildlife Garden Centre which won a RIBA/Times Award. Later he led the Wildlife in Docklands Project, a joint venture between the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust and LWT, which promoted nature as part of the redevelopment of London's Docklands. In the early 1990s he participated in the Royal Fine Art Commission's River Thames Study and worked on the Natural History Museum's Wildlife Garden. From the early 1990s he has designed green roofs, including the CUE Building at the Horniman Museum. Based in Hong Kong during the much of the 1990s, he worked on housing, tourism and infrastructure projects. In 2003, Gary wrote English Nature's Research Report on green roofs and followed that in 2006 with Green Roofs and Facades published by BRE Press. From 2006 to 2009 he was a Director of EDAW and then AECOM Design + Planning, where he worked on large scale planning projects including the London 2012 Olympic Park, the Bedford Valley River Park, the Whitehill-Bordon Eco Town, Education City, Qatar and Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi.