Sustainable In-Situ Water Resource Management Strategies in Water Scarce Urban Environment: A Case Study of Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco City

The key of sustainable development of newly urbanized areas often lies in tackling with issues, such as population growth, growing resources constraints, coordination between regional and urban needs, etc. Water, as one of the shared and liquid resources, has been playing a more and more important role in sustainable urban planning nowadays. Conventional water resource planning concept alone, i.e. planning for adequate and reliable water supply, could no long address the growing urbanization needs. Especially in China, water resource management practices are still under the guidance following conventional mindset and compliances. It was yet brought up to people´s attention that water resource planning is a crucial element of urban planning, not to mention the effort that should be spent in localized investigating and exploring the potential value of water to economy, esthetics and social development. This paper takes Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city as a case to study its future-ready approach in managing its local water resources under water scarce urban settings, i.e. recovery of the polluted water environments, integrated planning of catchment and reservoirs for stormwater storage, acquiring new resource to supplement and replacing conventional water resource, adopting water sensitive urban design to rediscover the added value of water resource to urban development, establishing PPP network for water demand management and water resource protection, etc. By reviewing Eco-city´s strategies on sustainable in-situ water resources planning, the existing urban water resources shortage situation in some of China´s coastal water scarce cities would be addressed and suggestion for urban water resource sustainable planning and use would also be given.