City planners need to design for flooding

Professor Elizabeth Mossop, Dean of the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building

As the current New South Wales flooding highlights, it’s not enough to continue to build cities and towns based on business-as-usual planning principles — especially as these disasters tend to disproportionately affect disadvantaged populations, increasing inequality in Australia.

We need to design our urban spaces around the idea that flooding is inevitable. That means not building on flood plains, and thinking creatively about what can be done to create urban “sinks” to hold water when floods strike.

Examples from overseas show what’s possible when the political will is there.

• Read the full story in The Conversation:  Not ‘if’, but ‘when’: city planners need to design for flooding. These examples show the way.