Linee guida per il Drenaggio Urbano Sostenibile : tecniche e principi per la pianificazione urbanistica

In the frame of risk-based planning, there is a need to address climate change impacts in a systemic way that goes beyond sectoral logic. The management of heavy rainfall in urban areas requires exploiting every planning opportunity to compensate for vulnerabilities caused by intervention practices linked to previous planning seasons. In this context, and in line with the broader process of adaptation to climate change that led the Municipality of Padua to elaborate a European award-winning SECAP, a guiding document has been elaborated to promote and give a local operational dimension - both technical and policy - to sustainable urban drainage techniques (SUDS). This document provides indications and principles of intervention to include these approaches in the planning and design system, targeting those policymakers, technicians and practitioners that can steer the physical modification of urban space and soil. The contextualisation of the SUDS approaches in the particular local dimension is ensured by the definition of regulatory frameworks, identification of recurrent climate events, and characterisation of typologies of local urban spaces. The research methods used include analysis of the local planning corpus, survey and evaluation of available techniques, and the definition of a hierarchy of principles for intervention. Overall, the document provides all the tools to operationalise SUDS approaches in land policies, practices and projects, giving water management a systemic dimension. Combining these approaches with existing management – based on sewerage systems, conveyance and the principle of hydraulic invariance – also allows pursuing hydrogeological invariance, mitigation of other climate change impacts, and maximising co-benefits for urban space.