A Sustainable Water Design Strategy for Semarang
Speakers
Event Details
In 2018-2019, The Netherlands Enterprise Agency (Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland/RVO) initiated a project called, “Water as Leverage for Resilient Cities Asia”. This project aimed to help Asian Cities to develop its resiliency towards hydro-metrological disasters as the impacts of climate change. In the implementation, there are three selected pilot cities: Chennai (India), Khulna (Bangladesh), and Semarang (Indonesia).
IDN Liveable Cities, as a platform for Dutch and Indonesian professionals in the field of architecture, urban planning, design and cultural heritage preservation, participated in the project altogether with other Dutch and Indonesian multidisciplinary experts and formed a consortium called, “Cascading Semarang”. For almost a year, the team worked hard in collaboration with Semarang City Government. As the result of this project, an integrated and sustainable water and land use management strategy is established. This strategy also contained of six (6) realistic project proposals that are ready to be offered to the financial institutions for funding – as a funding alternative to the limited budget of the local government.
The process of this project has given numerous lessons in achieving and integrating water and land use management towards more sustainable urban development – especially SDG Goal 11 and Goal 13, not just to the entire team and initiator (RVO), but also to the local government. IDN Liveable Cities thinks that what the team has learned is worth to be shared. In regard to this, this session would like to share our team’s journey in assisting Semarang City Government in developing the integrated and sustainable water and land use management strategy through “Water as Leverage” project.
The session will be conducted online for approximately 2 hours (120 minutes) which comprised of a presentation from four representatives of “Cascading Semarang” consortium, followed with group discussion sessions that will be done in parallel and will be ended with a reflection session from each group, question and answer sessions and closing. The presentation itself will consists of four clusters of lessons learned in achieving sustainable water and land use management: (1) Spatial development; (2) Finance & economic aspects; (3) Social and community participation; and (4) Governance aspect. The four keynote speakers are the experts of each of these clusters and are the combination of Dutch and Indonesian multidisciplinary experts. The group discussions will also be moderated by four young urban professionals from both countries.
The discussion result of this seminar will be well documented as the recommendation for the team who is currently assisting the Semarang City Government in adapting and adopting the strategy to the planning document. The assistance also includes further research of the coastal area of Semarang City, which becomes the prioritized area by the Government due to its severe hydro-metrological impacts of climate change.
Source:
Cascading Semarang Final Report, published in 2019, retrieved from: https://idn-lc.nl/reports.html
Yulia, Arlianda, R. 2020. Transferring Climate Resilience to Semarang. E-Tropic Journal, Singapore (draft will be published by the end of 2020).