The City Blueprint Approach: Urban Water Management and Governance in Cities in the U.S

Abstract

In this paper, we assess the challenges of water, waste and climate change in six cities across the U.S.: New York City, Boston, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Portland and Los Angeles. We apply the City Blueprint^® Approach which consists of three indicator assessments: (1) the Trends and Pressures Framework (TPF), (2) the City Blueprint Framework (CBF) and (3) the water Governance Capacity Framework (GCF). The TPF summarizes the main social, environmental and financial pressures that may impede water management. The CBF provides an integrated overview of the management performances within the urban watercycle. Finally, the GCF provides a framework to identify key barriers and opportunities to develop governance capacity. The GCF has only been applied in NYC. Results show that all cities face pressures from heat risk. The management performances regarding resource efficiency and resource recovery from wastewater and solid waste show considerable room for improvement. Moreover, stormwater separation, infrastructure maintenance and green space require improvement in order to achieve a resilient urban watercycle. Finally, in New York City, the GCF results show that learning through smart monitoring, evaluation and cross-stakeholder learning is a limiting condition that needs to be addressed. We conclude that the City Blueprint Approach has large potential to assist cities in their strategic planning and exchange of knowledge, experiences and lessons. Because the methodology is well-structured, easy to understand, and concise, it may bridge the gap between science, policy and practice. It could therefore enable other cities to address their challenges of water, waste and climate change.

Keywords: Adaptive governance; Capacity building; City Blueprint; Infrastructure deficit; Water management; Water scarcity.

Fig. 1

Overview of the City Blueprint Approach with three complementary assessment frameworks. The TPF and CBF are based on questionnaires, whereas the GCF is based on interviews

Fig. 2

City Blueprints of Phoenix (top), New York City (center) and Boston (bottom), based on 25 performance indicators. The geometric mean of the indicators, i.e., the BCI scores, are 3.9, 4.8, and 5.4, respectively

Fig. 3

The Blue City Index of 60 municipalities and regions in more than 30 different countries. BCI values of cities in the U.S. are highlighted in black

Fig. 4

A comparison of average scores for eight City Blueprint indicators for six U.S. cities (left; blue bars) and six cities with the highest BCI scores (right; red bars) as shown in Fig. 3

Fig. 5

Results of the GCF analysis. Limiting GCF indicators, with scores below zero, are 3.2 evaluation, 3.3 cross-stakeholder learning, 4.2 protection of core values, 6.2 collaborative agents, and 7.1 room to maneuver