Stormwater Adaptive Resilience and the Assessment of Rotterdam’s Urban Water System

Abstract: As the global climate gets warmer, local extreme weather becomes more frequent, and it becomes more and more difficult to accurately predict the occurrence of extreme rainfall. At the same time, the threat and destructiveness of stormwater weather to urban water systems and cities are also increasing due to the continuous advancement of urbanization, the continuous gathering of urban population and the increasingly obvious urban heat island effect.Since it was first proposed, resilience thinking has become a very important idea in urban planning and research. With the continuous development of resilience thinking, its concept and connotation are also constantly improved and developed. It has developed from a single state of resilience at the beginning to cover all aspects of social, economic and ecological issues.This research aims to find the resilience level of the urban water system of Rotterdam, and find some typical cases of Rotterdam’s experience for other cities to learn. Based on the resilience thinking, this study takes Rotterdam as an example to comprehensively evaluate the resilience of the urban water system under stormwater disaster and urban flood and waterlogging. The first part of this thesis first introduces the urban water system, resilience thinking and other concept which this thesis use. In the second part, this thesis mainly introduced the specific analytical method and analytical framework, namely ASPIRE model. The third part will combine the analysis model with the example of Rotterdam, and comprehensively analyze the stormwater adaptive resilience of the urban water system. In the fourth part of this thesis, three engineering examples of Rotterdam which worthy of promotion and learning are introduced and summarized in detail. The last part of this thesis is the discussion and conclusion. Through this study, it is found that the urban water system of Rotterdam has high stormwater adaptive resilience and Rotterdam has many successful experiences which can be learned by other cities.