Chapter 8

Consequences & Management Of Urbanization Impacts

Outline:

• Flood damage risks
• Degraded water quality issues
• Socio-economic "externalities"
• Social costs
• Land use planning methodologies
  • extrapolation
  • crisis management
  • systems analysis
  • Landscape-based planning

Course Reader reading:

• Christopher J. Walsh, Allison H. Roy, Jack W. Feminella, Peter D. Cottingham, Peter M. Groffman, and Raymond P. Morgan, "The urban stream syndrome: current knowledge and the search for a cure," Journal of the North American Benthological Society 24, no. 3 (September 2005): 706-723. https://doi.org/10.1899/04-028.1.

Related web links:

• UN rapid urbanization concerns
• Floods and land use planning in the Central Valley, CA
• Anatomy of a levee failure in the Central Valley, CA, part 1
• Anatomy of a levee failure in the Central Valley, CA, part 2

Video Podcast: Socioeconomic Consequences Of Urbanization Impacts on Hydrology

This 41-minute presentation explains that "natural disasters" are hardly natural at all, but often the direct result of human intervention in to the landscape. For example, under natural conditions a particular rainstorm might only yield an in-channel flow, but after 50% urbanization of the watershed the runoff peak magnitude could be 10-20 times larger, causing water to spill out of the channel and damage property.

• 640 x 480 (480p) format that balances speed and quality. (610 MB file)
• 1920 x 1280 (HD) format that provides larges size and best quality. (3.6 GB file)

YouTube Video: A Guide for Field Identification of Bankfull Stage in the Western United States

This 30-minute presentation introduces the basic concept of "bankfull discharge" and explains how you can identify it on-site at a river. Although this is not explicitly "urban", it relates to the concept of a flood, because one has to know when water has spilled out of a channel before one can say there is a flood.  That means one has to know the dimensions of a channel and this video explains how you figure that out.

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