About Arup

Arup is an independent firm of designers, planners, engineers, architects, consultants and technical specialists, working across every aspect of today’s built environment. Together we help our clients solve their most complex challenges – turning exciting ideas into tangible reality as we strive to find a better way and shape a better world.

Our Solutions

The City Water Resilience Approach (CWRA) responds to a demand for innovative approaches and tools that help cities build water resilience at the urban scale. The CWRA was developed to help cities grow in their capacity to provide high quality water resources for all residents, protect them from water-related hazards, and connect them through water-based transportation networks.

The CWRA is the result of fieldwork and desk research, collaborative partnerships between Arup, The Resilience Shift,  The Stockholm International Water Institute and World Resources Institute, subject matter experts, and direct engagement with city partners.

The CWRA was developed using 8 diverse pilot cities all with differing socio-political contexts, thus creating a model that could be applied anywhere in the world. The CWRA details five steps to guide cities through initial stakeholder engagement and baseline assessment, through action planning, implementation and monitoring of new initiatives that build water resilience. The CWRA also utilizes the OurWater tool as part of the process.

OurWater is a digital tool that allows users to input information about their local infrastructure and governance processes to map the relationships between stakeholders in the water system. It helps build collaborative and cross-sectional understanding of the urban water system by answering three basic questions:

1. What are the natural and man-made elements that make up the urban water system?
   
2. Which actors are involved in designing, maintaining and using the water system?
   
3. How will future shocks and stresses impact the water system?
   

The smart, digital approach means the innovative tool is easily scalable and utilized by any city to identify governance gaps, build resilience, and increase water security.

 The CWRA and the OurWater tool have been used across the globe in a number of cities demonstrating its feasibility and scalability.