Role of Resilience in Sustainable Urban Stormwater Management

Typically, best management practices (BMPs) are implemented to help sustainable stormwater management in urban areas. Over recent decades the selection of urban stormwater management measures for a site has been a challenge among urban planners where thecriterion based on flood volume no longer suffices for selecting urban drainage solutions. Therefore there is a need to consider a set of holistic criteria beyond runoff and inundation objectives by which it would be possible to evaluate sustainability of urban drainage projects. Frequent urban flooding events have justified the use of ‘resilience’ concept and pertaining criteria.  This paper proposes a methodology to verify the sustainability of BMPs projects alongside their resilience. The multi criteria decision making (MCDM) technique has been applied for BMPs ranking based on proposed criteria. The methodology has been applied to urban drainage system of a municipal district of Tehran (Iran). Results indicate the effects of manager’s preferences on selecting BMPs. The proposed methodology provides an effective tool for urban managers to adopt more resilient-sustainable decisions in urban areas.