Water Sensitive Design as an Ecologically Based Urban Design Approach to Facilitate Stormwater Resilience for Industrial Areas in Auckland

Rapid urban sprawl has led to tremendous changes in land surface characteristics and urban stormwater problems have become serious, including urban flooding, catchment pollution, and receiving waterbody damage. Compared to residential areas, industrial areas have more stormwater problems due to higher proportions of impervious area and industrial pollution. This paper draws on a catchment in Auckland, New Zealand, which contains a developing industrial area. This is a case study example to demonstrate the development of a water sensitive design (WSD) approach that provides a stormwater resilient environment for industrial areas. To identify WSD’s physical characteristics, possibilities and constraints, document, and digital data from publicly available government databases, were obtained and analysed. The assessment of environmental and social elements helped identify the benefits of industrial water sensitive development (IWSD) in the case study area. Green and blue space and the natural water cycle are key for IWSD and the assessment identified the multi-benefits of water and non-water aspects that WSD could bring to industrial areas. This could help to encourage various industrial stakeholders to identify objectives and prioritise the features that they would like a WSD project to deliver. A comparison of two types of industrial development in the study proves that the reasonable synergy of urban green and blue space and the natural water cycle in initial planning and design stages is important for WSD implementation. This approach offers industrial development a new concept for achieving a stormwater resilient industrial catchment and finally leads to a sustainable water environment.