WP2: Stormwater management

Objective and tasks

The objective of this WP is to assess the stormwater management regime in Dar es Salaam and Addis Ababa, and design and test local options for landscape based stormwater management in two communities in the two case cities.

The tasks are:

  1. To identify existing urban stormwater and flood risk management practices in Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam
  2. To determine present and future urban stormwater management challenges in Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam and their underlying reasons and assess the local coping capacity 
  3. To develop, design and test in more detail the options for landscape based stormwater management in two community sites within the case cities
  4. To compare biophysical, structural and institutional options and limitations for landscape based stormwater management in Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam
  5. To develop strategies for landscape based stormwater management practices in the two cities; city level strategies and strategies and plans for the pilot sites

Methods and scope

The outset will involve a review of existing data on local climate and climate change aspects, combined with a GIS based analysis of present and future flood prone areas in the two cities, as well as aerial photos and field surveys to support arguments for causes and impacts. A participatory inventory will be carried out across stakeholder groups in Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam and in the pilot sites with the aim of indentifying existing and prospective coping strategies for the cities and sites.

The design of landscape based stormwater management solutions will use a research-by-design (i.e. research-through-design) (Backhaus et al., 2011) approach carried out by researchers possibly in collaboration with a team of local students and/or professional designers. In the two case communities, local residents as well as city officials will be invited to take part in a participatory design process in order to develop integrated solutions that meet bottom-up and top-down perspectives and rationales, as previously done in a Danish context by Fryd et al. (2010)