WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT IN URBAN AREAS – An Ecosystems Approach
Especially in developing countries, the rapid growth of densely populated areas makes great demands upon planners and decision-makers. There is, among other things, a strong need of rational management of water resources within the framework of integrated societal planning. The complexity exhibited by large urban areas calls for a new approach in planning and management, an approach which may be capable of overarching the gap that exists between the capabilities of contemporary planning procedures on one hand and the complexities of planning problems on the other. In this paper, the author suggests that one way of approaching this difficulty would be to make use of the urban ecosystems idea in order to identify essential interdependencies in the urban system from a qualitative point of view. The paper concludes with the hope for much better co-operation between hydrologists and ecologists.