Adapting Cities to Pluvial Flooding: The Case of Izmir (Türkiye)

first_pagesettingsOrder Article Reprints Open AccessArticle Adapting Cities to Pluvial Flooding: The Case of Izmir (Türkiye) by Stefano Salata 1,*ORCID,Koray Velibeyoğlu 2,Alper Baba 3ORCID,Nicel Saygın 2,Virginia Thompson Couch 4 andTaygun Uzelli 5ORCID 1 Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Lab PPTE, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milano, Italy 2 Department of City and Regional Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Izmir Institute of Technology, Gülbahçe Campus Urla, Izmir 35430, Türkiye 3 Department of International Water Resources, Civil Engineering Faculty, Izmir Institute of Technology, Gülbahçe Campus Urla, Izmir 35430, Türkiye 4 Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Izmir Institute of Technology, Gülbahçe Campus Urla, Izmir 35430, Türkiye 5 Geothermal Energy Research and Application Center, Izmir Institute of Technology, Urla, Izmir 35430, Türkiye * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Sustainability 2022, 14(24), 16418; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416418 Received: 20 November 2022 / Revised: 28 November 2022 / Accepted: 6 December 2022 / Published: 8 December 2022 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Designing Resilient Cities by Ecosystem Service Mapping) Download Browse Figures Review Reports Versions Notes Abstract In the coming decades, climate change will be one of the most significant challenges for urban areas. The quantity, duration and intensity of events, such as flash rains and heat waves, will increase the vulnerability of urban regions while exposing citizens to potentially dangerous conditions. According to the current literature, mainstreaming resilience in urban planning means designing rules that strengthen urban systems’ adaptive and self-regulating functions by reducing their vulnerability. In this work, we aimed to build knowledge for the application of the sponge district concept to Izmir (Türkiye), one of Europe’s most vulnerable areas to pluvial flooding. To do this, we first analyzed the runoff in each urban sub-watershed, then employed a composite index to determine potential areas of intervention for nature-based solutions. Results show that 10% of Izmir’s urban areas are extremely vulnerable to cloudbursts, which means that 40% of the urban population is exposed to this phenomenon. Moreover, the runoff calculation in the sub-watershed demonstrated that the potential flood volume is underestimated, especially in the upslope areas. The results can be used as a template to suggest a stepwise approach to mainstream the resilience of densely-inhabited coastal urban catchments.