"Cities are not just brick and mortar; they represent the dreams, aspirations, and hopes of societies."
UN Habitat (2008)
Urban lakes are part of many of the cities we live in. They are often intricately bound with the city's social fabric, valued for direct utility purposes such as drinking water provision, or for their aesthetic, historical, cultural, and religious significance. However, oftentimes in spite of their unique spatial, socio-cultural, and economic value and 'relationship' with the city, urban lakes end up as receptacles for waste, or are infilled for development.
This book traces the socio-cultural and technological dimensions at play for the protection and remediation of a tropical urban lake, and how these dimensions guide the design of need-based solutions. It explores design requirements based on the need for sensitivity to religious and cultural norms, social values and aesthetic requirements. First-hand experiences of the writers in planning and executing an urban lake remediation project in a fast-growing city and a UNESCO heritage site, are drawn as practical examples. The lessons learnt can find application in other lakes of cultural significance in tropical regions.
Sample Chapter(s)
Chapter 1: Introduction
Contents:
- Introduction:
- Urban Lakes as a Socio-Cultural Complex
- Challenges for Urban Lakes in Tropical Settings
- Overview of the Book
- Lake and the City: Inter-Relationships:
- Influence of Physical Characteristics
- History Matters
- Valuing the Kandy Lake
- Who 'Owns' an Urban Lake?:
- Management of an Urban Lake
- Institutional Synergies and Conflicts for Lake Pollution Management
- Urban Lakes in Changing Socio-Economic and Environmental Contexts:
- The Ever-Changing Kandy City
- Kandy Lake Pollution: A Multi-Faceted Problem
- Design and Implementation of Solution for Kandy Lake Pollution Management:
- Challenges for Lake Pollution Management
- Overall Approach
- Conclusion and Reflections:
- Post-Project Observations
- Reflections on the Lessons Learned and Path Ahead
Readership: Governments, local authorities, policy-makers or trade professionals dealing or working with the development and/or preservation of urban waterbodies; Activists or members of the general public concerned about the restoration or preservation of urban water supplies.
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Ng Wun Jern was Director of NEWRI till July 2017, is Director of NEWRI Community Development at the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute (NEWRI), and lead Professor of the Environmental Bio-innovations Group (EBiG) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
Prof Ng interacts with the industry as an advisor in water and effluent treatment, and waterbody and soil remediation — and has brought numerous IPs to full-scale applications. Commercialised IPs include biosystems [e.g. aerobic aeSBR, anaerobic anSBR, anaerobic filter Anfil and pulsed bed APBF, and hybrid anaerobic reactor Hybridan], materials, and equipment . His designs have been applied to some 140 full-scale installations in ASEAN, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. He has also founded spin-off companies, and was chairman of a major consulting company, senior advisor to listed companies, and had served on the Singapore national water reclamation expert panel. He was a founding member of the Singapore Engineering Accreditation Board and was Vice-Dean at the Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore, and then Dean until 2003. F In 2005 he was Singapore director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance serving the alliance universities — National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology till 2006. Thereafter he was Director of Capability Development in the Environment & Water Industry Development Council at the Ministry of the Environment & Water Resources, working on national funding for R&D and manpower development. In 2007 he joined NTU and became founding Executive Director at the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute (NEWRI).
His research output may be found in some 600 publications which include journal papers, conference presentations, book chapters and monographs, reports, trade secrets, and patents.
Prof Ng's contributions to industry, research, and education have been recognized with the ASEAN Engineering Award, Outstanding University Researcher Award, the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques and the Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professorship. In July 2017, a project he led was recognized with the IES Prestigious Project Award and thereafter the ASEAN outstanding engineering award. He was also awarded the 2017 Singapore Energy Award, and the President's Technology Award for his work in the field of environmental engineering and wastewater management. In 2018 he was recognized as among the leading 100 scientists in Asia in the Asia Scientist 100 (2018 edition).
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Sreeja Nair is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. She holds a PhD in Public Policy (Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore), and two Masters degrees: one in Climate and Society (Columbia University, USA) and the second in Environmental Studies (TERI University, India). Her research interests include environmental policy design under uncertainty and impacts of environmental change on communities, focusing on water and agriculture, particularly in South Asia. Her doctoral dissertation focused on cases from Indian agriculture to study the design and process of policy experimentation and piloting. She is currently associated with Nanyang Environment and Water Research Institute, Nanyang Technological University where she focuses on the socio-political dimensions of water sustainability projects and policy innovations in Asia. She is also an Instructor at the Public Policy and Global Affairs programme, NTU where she teaches Environmental Change and Policy Design.
Prior to joining her PhD, Dr Nair worked with The Energy and Resources Institute in India for seven years and contributed to diverse policy projects including the National Action Plan on Climate Change, state level Action Plans on Climate Change and scientific assessments of climate change impacts on local communities. She was also a Contributing Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report.
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Shameen Jinadasa is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Dr Shameen has more than 20 years of water and wastewater related design experience, of which the last 10 years were in academia, research and consultancy. He has been part of several research and development programmes both regionally and globally, applying his knowledge of Environmental Engineering designs and consultancy. He earned his BSc Eng in Civil Engineering from the University of Peradeniya, and MEng degree Singapore in Civil Engineering from the National University of. Subsequently he obtained his PhD from Saitama University, Japan in 2006. Dr Shameen's area of expertise is environmental engineering with a special focus on developing sustainable water and wastewater management technologies for tropical developing countries. Dr Shameen has extensive experience coordinating international research projects on tropical constructed wetlands and coastal vegetation for tsunami protection in collaboration with researchers from Singapore, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka.
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Evelyn Valencia is Assistant Manager for NEWRI Community Development, at the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute (NEWRI), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Ms Evelyn works with NEWRI Comm's project coordinators in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Myanmar to plan, develop, and manage their projects. Before joining the Lien Environmental Fellowship team full-time, in her final undergraduate years, she helped to conceptualize the environmental education programme piloted at the Mahamaya Girls' College for the LEF project "Mitigation of Pollution in Kandy Lake and Mid-Canal, Sri Lanka". She has a BEng in Environmental Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, with exposure to humanities and arts subjects, including business law, communication studies, linguistics, and literature.