Water Centric Cities of the Future - Towards Macroscale Assessment of Sustainability

The developments of several current and future ecocities have been comparatively assessed as to their environmental benefits of preservation or restoration of the ecological and hydrological (water reuse) functionality of their surface water bodies and social benefits such as carbon emissions reduction, recreation, and resource recovery. These evaluation categories are the key components of the Triple Bottom Line assessment of sustainability. The assessed urban water developments include downtown San Antonio (TX, USA), ecocity portion of San Francisco and Sonoma Mountain Village (CA, USA), Hammarby Sjöstad (Sweden), Tianjin, Qingdao and Dongtan (China), and Masdar (UAE). The analysis revealed some problems with the lack of macroscale measures, models, and indices for some key components of the triple bottom assessment. Several research hypotheses and ecocity concepts were suggested for further research and studying.