Challenges in urban flood management: travelling across spatial and temporal scales

Urban floods cannot be managed in isolation at the city scale and responses to potential flood impacts are complicated by interlinked political, socio-economic and environmental changes. To understand the unique features of urban flood management, a framework should be developed in which spatio-temporal relations are further defined and investigated. This should provide clarity regarding both the feedback loops that cause vulnerability as well as those that build resilience, and how they interact across differing spatial scales. Various insights and methods from system and complexity theory could provide hands-on methods to create such a framework. Yet the transition towards system-based approaches is still surrounded by many unknown factors; more effort should be put into developing a roadmap towards this transition. It is argued that local-scale pioneering and experimentation are essential in this process to encourage the cultivation of resilience through bottom-up initiatives that can shape strategy and policy development.