For years, innovations in alternative mobility—scooters, e-bikes, autonomous vehicles—have focused on how individuals get around. But the pandemic era has put fresh emphasis on a different mobility goal: moving stuff around. 

The demand for rapid delivery has increased sharply in the past two years, and it doesn’t seem to be abating. By some estimates, companies like Door Dash see the quick delivery of groceries alone adding up to a $1 trillion market. With major companies from UPS to Domino’s trying out new ways to deliver their products, the pace and range of vehicle experiments has accelerated—and that is likely to impact the design, planning, and regulation of urban and suburban spaces. 

While it’s unclear which of these experiments will pan out, it’s undeniable that new kinds of delivery vehicles are or soon will be on our streets. With new questions arising, urban design thinkers, retail and technology companies, and municipalities are working to address the convergence of increasing delivery demand and new vehicle forms. Leading the micro-mobility pack is the e-bike, a form that’s been around for decades but has lately become strikingly popular: with sales up 145 percent since the pandemic started, e-bikes now reportedly outsell electric cars. John MacArthur, a program manager at Portland State University’s Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), has been researching their potential—including the “tantalizing hope” that micro-mobility tech gets more people out of cars—for the better part of a decade. Last year, he taught a new class focused on cities dealing with all manner of new micro-mobility experiments, or “technologies being thrust in the public right of way.” 

Students in that class found that the pandemic was inspiring a range of responses from cities. On the one hand, work-from-home trends reduced and reconfigured car-centric commuter patterns. In Portland and elsewhere, MacArthur notes, that led to the creation of more bike and bus lanes. On the other hand, delivery demand spiked, leading to concern about a corresponding spike in single-occupancy delivery vehicles. 

MacArthur’s research connected him to Portland’s B-Line Urban Delivery, a 12-year-old firm that operates a fleet of electric cargo trikes that can handle 500-pound loads. With input from TREC and B-Line, Portland is now considering ways to create “micro-delivery hubs.” In this model, a truck brings a load of deliveries to a strategic location, with e-bikes or other micro-vehicles handling the last mile for each delivery, reducing traffic congestion. Such experiments are already underway in Europe, where delivery giant UPS has been experimenting with e-bikes, delivery hubs, and other “sustainable logistics solutions.” 

MacArthur acknowledges that complicated zoning and other issues are involved. But the bigger point is that Portland is among the cities proactively grappling with the future of mobility and how cities can respond to it and, more important, shape it. Shaping the response to new vehicle forms was a theme of a recent “Rebooting NYC” research project spearheaded by Rohit Aggarwala, a senior fellow at the Urban Tech Hub of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Aggarwala—who previously led mobility work for Sidewalk Labs and recently joined New York City government as commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection and the city’s chief climate officer—sketches the broader context. “If a vehicle is designed to fit well in traditional traffic, then it is almost by definition not designed to be a good urban vehicle,” he says. Cars, pickups, and SUVs are built for highways; their makers put far less emphasis on, say, turning radius or other factors that would make them more suited to the narrower confines of urban streets. 

Thus the rise of new, smaller autonomous vehicles such as the Nuro, shaped like a diminutive van and about half the width of a conventional sedan; with no driver, it’s designed to haul up to 500 pounds of cargo. The startup might be best known for a limited pilot program in Houston with Domino’s, offering “the world’s first fully automated pizza delivery service.” 

While such wee vehicles are pitched as virtuously reducing not just pollution but also traffic congestion, the reality is that they’re often fundamentally unsuited to real-world traffic. So where can they go? 

Another recent pilot program involving startup Refraction AI’s REV-1 had the three-wheeled, washing machine–sized autonomous vehicle hauling pizzas via bike lanes in Austin, Texas—a development that some cyclists were not pleased about. “What if in two years we have several hundred of these on the road?” one bike advocate asked a local journalist. Yet another startup, Starship, has been testing its small mobile robot—a 55-pound object with the footprint of a wagon—in several cities, using sidewalks. This, too, has met with a mixed response. Such responses signal a major potential flashpoint, but also, perhaps, an opportunity. Aggarwala points out that in New York and other cities, bicyclists and e-bike users (who are often delivery workers) have long battled over bike lane use. In many cases, bike advocates have fought for years or decades to establish dedicated lanes, and have little interest in seeing them clogged with newfangled motorized vehicles of any kind.  

But the problem isn’t the e-bikes or AVs or robots, each of which offers positive alternatives to traditional cars, Aggarwala says: “The problem is all these alternative vehicles being shoehorned into an incomplete network of generally unprotected lanes that are way too narrow.” Thus the “Rebooting NYC” proposals include creating New Mobility Lanes. This would involve widening and expanding the city’s existing bike lanes into a “network that can accommodate both bicycles and these new vehicles.” 

Other researchers have made similar proposals for “light individual transport lanes,” with varying specifics but a common goal. “You’re basically providing more space for different kinds of vehicles,” says MacArthur of PSU. “That’s the big question that planners will have to face in the next five years.” It’s a knotty challenge for municipalities caught between the ambitions of tech companies, the limits on local regulation resulting from superseding state or federal rules, and the reality that even designating bike lanes in the first place depends more on mustering political will and popular support than it does on the planning that underpins it. 

On that last point, Aggarwala suggests a potential opportunity. As a political matter, bike lanes are often seen as benefiting just a portion of the population at the expense of everyone else. But pretty much everyone has been stuck behind a delivery vehicle. And, maybe more to the point, more of us than ever have come to depend on those delivery vehicles. So rejiggering the way road space is divided doesn’t just benefit the few—it’s for nearly everyone. In other words, Aggarwala asks: “What if you broaden the relevance of a bike lane by expanding its use?” 

Clearly a wave of new-vehicle experimentation is poised to disrupt the delivery business, in a time of unprecedented demand. It’s worth thinking about how planners and policy makers can not just respond to that wave, but harness it to help make city streets more functional and accessible for all. 

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of The Art of Noticing. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com. 

Image: Nuro, an autonomous vehicle company founded by two former Google engineers, has partnered with companies including Domino’s, CVS, Walmart, and FedEx on delivery pilot projects in several U.S. states. Credit: Domino’s.

Citing the increasing demand for water even as drought is shrinking supplies, several national organizations representing planners, water utilities, and other key stakeholders have issued a call to action urging more comprehensive integration of land and water planning and management.  

The statement emerged in the wake of Connecting Land and Water for Healthy Communities, a virtual conference held in July 2021 that was cosponsored by the American Water Resources Association (AWRA) and the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. After the conference, which was attended by more than 200 water and planning professionals from around the country, organizers released the findings to address why fragmentation of land and water management occurs and how to repair and prevent it. They also released a set of guiding principles to help land and water managers better recognize and build upon the connections between their work. In addition to AWRA and the Babbitt Center, the American Planning Association’s Water and Planning Network and the American Water Works Association (AWWA) signed on to the statement. 

“The fact that multiple organizations signed off on this statement is a really good outcome of the conference, and we hope to build upon that,” said Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona, who cochaired the 2021 conference with Jim Holway of the Babbitt Center. “Places all over the world are feeling pressure to their water supplies due to water quality concerns and the changing climate,” said Megdal, who is also a board member for AWRA. “Taking available water resources into account is critically important when planning for land uses, [but] there is a lack of connection between water planners and land planners.”  

There are many reasons for that disconnect, including the fact that decisions related to land and water have historically been made by different departments or agencies. “Siloing didn’t start as a bad thing,” notes Bill Cesanek of APA’s Water and Planning Network, which provides a platform for interdisciplinary exchange about water-related issues and boasts approximately 500 members. “Different agencies focused on different problems and created different solution sets.” Too often, though, those solutions didn’t take into account the complicated relationship between land and water, leading to issues ranging from supply shortages for new developments to contamination in water sources.  

“We need to make sure we don’t stay in these siloes,” said Chi Ho Sham, president of AWWA, a nonprofit scientific and educational association dedicated to managing and treating water. AWWA’s membership includes 4,300 utilities that supply about 80 percent of the country’s drinking water and treat almost half of its wastewater. “We need to reach across to other disciplines to take a holistic view on the availability and quality of water—the world’s most vital resource.”  

That’s true whether you’re in the drought-stricken West, the flood-prone East, or somewhere in between, says Joanna Endter-Wada, professor of natural resource and environmental policy at Utah State University: “Growth-related plans have to take water into account.” Endter-Wada, who coauthored the findings statement and cochairs AWRA’s Policy Committee, noted that she knows of at least one state-level water official who has already brought the statement into policy conversations. In April, the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute will use it as a backdrop to a seminar series on opportunities and challenges facing communities due to the Colorado River Basin shortage declaration.  

“This is not just a one-off statement,” Endter-Wada says. “Given the challenges the world is confronting, we will keep sharing the science and making the argument. The power of words and the power of action go together.” 

That steady drip of communication is key, agree Cesanek and his Water and Planning Network cochair Mary Ann Dickinson, who send a regular newsletter to their members and maintain a collection of reports, toolkits, and other resources on the APA website. Cesanek thinks the message about the importance of integrating land and water seems to be getting out; he pointed to a new book about comprehensive planning written by David Rouse, a Water and Planning Network steering committee member and former APA director of research. The book touches on both green infrastructure, a nature-based urban stormwater management approach, and One Water, an integrated approach to water management that prioritizes sustainability and community vitality. This type of integrated approach “needs to be applied universally, and climate change has made that all the more apparent by exacerbating not only a lack of water but excess water,” Cesanek says. 

Promoting conceptual, scientific, and management frameworks and techniques like One Water is one of six guiding principles laid out in the joint statement. The others include balancing the health of human and ecological communities; incorporating diverse perspectives; honoring and learning from traditional and tribal knowledge; protecting land critical to drinking water source protection; and utilizing collaboration, engagement, and boundary-spanning tools.  

The call to action, which marks the first such collaboration between the four organizations, “was just one example of the partnerships that emerged from the AWRA conference,” said Faith Sternlieb, senior program manager at the Babbitt Center and coauthor of the findings statement. Sternlieb noted that plans are in the works for a follow-up conference in 2023, and said organizers hope to focus on the “action” part of the recent call to action.  

Sham said he is optimistic about the collaborations underway and looking forward to the 2023 conference, as well as other opportunities to keep this conversation going: “We need time for folks to meet up, think about the big issues, and come up with solutions.” 

It’s a conversation that is increasingly urgent in an era marked by history-making drought, floods, and extreme weather. “We face a lot of challenges due to climate change,” said Megdal of the University of Arizona, who published a reflection inspired by the findings statement. “We can only do a better job if we put our heads together.” 

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines.

Image: A national call to action recommends embracing frameworks like One Water, an integrated approach to water management that prioritizes sustainability and community vitality. Credit: Courtesy of Brown and Caldwell.

Stretching from Portland, Maine, to Norfolk, Virginia, the Northeast megaregion is a powerhouse of the knowledge economy. Yet it struggles with grinding congestion, escalating climate change risks, and skyrocketing housing costs—problems that too often fall to the region’s more than 1,500 individual cities, towns, villages, and boroughs to solve. 

The Northeast and a dozen other U.S. megaregions will shape the country’s future over the next century. Each one is a network of metropolitan areas united by history, culture, economics, and shared infrastructure and natural resource systems. They contain only 30 percent of the nation’s land, but most of its people. As a new book makes clear, they face complex challenges that require planning, policy, and governance that cross traditional political boundaries. 

Written by planning scholars Robert D. Yaro, Ming Zhang, and Frederick R. Steiner, Megaregions and America’s Future explains the concept of megaregions, provides updated economic, demographic, and environmental data, draws lessons from Europe and Asia, and shows how megaregions are an essential framework for governing the world’s largest economy. 

Far from being a substitute for a strong national government, megaregions are, in the authors’ view, the perfect geographic unit for channeling federal investment and managing large systems such as interstate rail, multistate natural resource systems, climate mitigation or adaptation, and major economic development initiatives. 

“Creating national, megaregional, and metropolitan governance systems will require a reinvention of the federal system and a nationwide program of innovation and experimentation unlike any that the country has undertaken since the New Deal almost a century ago,” the authors write. 

The book pays particular attention to defenses against sea-level rise and storm surges, calling for regional alternatives to the “go-it-alone approach” of cities like Boston and New York, and to high-speed rail, which could open access to opportunity as it has in other highly industrialized countries. Building better rail networks within cities and regions is critical to the success of high-speed rail, the authors write. 

Geared to urban and regional planners and policy analysts, staff and decision makers in transportation, environmental protection, and development agencies, faculty and students in related fields, as well as business leaders, Megaregions and America’s Future includes a case study of the Northeast—the nation’s oldest megaregion and the source of the concept—but delves deeply into every megaregion, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast to Southern California. 

The book builds on two decades of Lincoln Institute scholarship on megaregions, including several books on the European model and Regional Planning in America: Practice and Prospect, a foundational text in the field of regional planning.

“This ambitious book makes the case for recognizing American megaregions as a driver of policy, planning, and investment,” said Sara C. Bronin, a planning professor at Cornell University. “It provides a road map for breaking down jurisdictional boundaries to address urgent needs in affordable housing, ecosystem vulnerability, and transportation-system connectedness—and it is essential reading for anyone hoping to broaden their thinking about our national trajectory.” 

Will Jason is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Image: DKosig/iStock.

Randall Woodfin, Birmingham’s “millennial mayor” and rising star in Alabama politics, has launched an urban mechanic’s agenda for revitalizing that post-industrial city: restoring basic infrastructure on a block-by-block basis, setting up a command center so federal funds are spent wisely, and providing guaranteed income for single mothers. 

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to really supercharge infrastructure upgrades and investments we need to make in our city,” Woodfin said, referring to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act, which are bringing unparalleled amounts of funding to state and local governments. “This type of money probably hasn’t been on the ground since the New Deal.” 
 
Woodfin talked about neighborhood revitalization, housing, climate change and other topics in an interview for the Land Matters podcast. An edited version of the Q&A will appear in print and online as the Mayor’s Desk feature in the next issue of Land Lines magazine. 
 
When he was elected in 2017, Woodfin was the youngest mayor of Birmingham in over a century. Now 40 and nearly a year into his second term, he’s made revitalization of the city’s 99 neighborhoods a top priority, along with enhancing education, fostering a climate of economic opportunity, and leveraging public-private partnerships. 
 
In a city battered by population and manufacturing loss — including iron and steel industries that once thrived there — Woodfin looked to education and youth as keys to a better future. He set up Birmingham Promise, which provides apprenticeships and college tuition assistance to local high school graduates. He also established Pardons for Progress, a mayoral pardon of 15,000 misdemeanor marijuana possession charges dating back to 1990, that had been a barrier to employment. 

Woodfin is a graduate of Morehouse College and Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law. He was an assistant city attorney for eight years before running for mayor, and served as president of the Birmingham Board of Education as well. 
 
Too many Birmingham residents have been living in areas where they are constantly reminded of decline, Woodfin said — stepping out of their house and seeing a dilapidated house next door and a broken streetlight out front. Playground and park equipment is out of order, and many live in food deserts. The answer, he said, is to “triple down” on efforts to create new housing and other infrastructure and eradicate blight, to address “snaggletooth” blocks where “you have a house, empty lot, house, empty lot, empty lot.” 

Chipping away at concentrated poverty through physical improvements improves quality of life for thousands, and will help the entire city rebound, Woodfin says.  

More near-term, Woodfin said he embraced the concept of guaranteed income because as a practical matter, a few hundred dollars a month could help single mothers fend off “the monotony of concentrated poverty.” 
 
“I think we all would agree, no one can live off $375 a month,” he said. But if households had that additional money, “does that help keep food on the table? Does it help keep your utilities paid? Does it help keep clothing on your children’s back and shoes on their feet? Does it help you get from point A to B to keep your job to provide for your child? 

“This is why I believe this guaranteed income pilot program will be helpful. We only have 120 slots, so it’s not necessarily the largest amount of people, but I can tell you over 7,000 households applied for this,” he said. “The need is there.” 

The Lincoln Institute’s Legacy Cities Initiative is developing a community of practice for the equitable regeneration of post-industrial cities, like Birmingham, that have been hit hard by manufacturing and population loss. Strategies to maintain good municipal fiscal health for these and all cities include one that Woodfin is making a priority: keeping better track of intergovernmental transfers, such as the billions in federal funding that is currently on the way. 

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Photograph courtesy of Anthony Flint. 

Further reading: 

Everything you need to know about Birmingham’s millennial mayor 

Seven Strategies for Equitable Development in Smaller Legacy Cities 

How Smarter State Policy Can Revitalize America’s Cities 

The Empty House Next Door: Understanding and Reducing Vacancy and Hypervacancy in the United States 

From the suburban boomtowns of the Colorado River Basin to the postindustrial cities of the Northeast, communities across the United States can benefit from integrating land and water planning in the face of increasing water demands, climate change, and other risks, according to a new Policy Focus Report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

In Integrating Land Use and Water Management: Planning and Practice, author Erin Rugland of the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy explains how integrating land and water can help communities deal with increased drought or flooding as they navigate the uncertainty of a warming planet and changes in their communities. She outlines best practices in land use planning and water management, provides a detailed menu of policy tools, and shares four success stories from vastly different places: Evans, Colorado; Hillsborough County, Florida; Philadelphia; and Golden Valley, Minnesota. 

“Water is not only essential to life and to thriving communities, but it brings value to land,” Rugland writes in the report. “Land use determines the character of communities and in turn greatly impacts water demand, water quality, and flooding risks. Connecting land with water and understanding these resources in the context of issues like equity, resiliency, and climate change is critical for building and sustaining healthy communities for the future.” 

Although land and water are inextricably linked, land use planning and water management have historically occurred in silos. Rugland clearly explains each discipline, focusing on a key policy framework for each—the comprehensive plan and the water management plan. Comprehensive plans lay out a community’s long-term vision, with an emphasis on themes like economic development, transportation, and housing. Water management plans vary more widely from place to place; some focus narrowly on drinking water supply, while others incorporate wastewater and stormwater. 

As the report describes, state policy can play a significant role in promoting the integration of land and water planning, whether through mandates or resources. Colorado, for instance, requires utilities to consider how land use efforts can reduce water use. The state also supports the Colorado Water and Land Use Planning Alliance, a peer learning group for local practitioners. Pennsylvania is one of five states to require a water element in local comprehensive plans. And Minnesota’s state legislature established the Metropolitan Council, one of the strongest regional planning agencies in the country, which helps communities in the Twin Cities area coordinate development plans with water supplies and requirements. 

The report shows how four communities, driven by state policy and their own initiative, have integrated land and water planning in different ways: 

• Evans, Colorado, used a new water efficiency plan to secure buy-in and resources to implement a fixture replacement program, landscape design regulations, and other measures.  
• Hillsborough County, Florida, which includes the Tampa metropolitan area, added a new One Water chapter to its comprehensive plan, leading to policies to encourage development near existing water supplies, deal with environmental damage, and invest in stormwater infrastructure.  
• Philadelphia enacted a plan to use green infrastructure to filter stormwater, reduce pollution, and improve quality of life.  
• Golden Valley, Minnesota, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis, is working with neighboring communities to protect water quality, mitigate stormwater runoff and flooding, promote conservation of drinking water, and renovate aging infrastructure. 

The report offers four key recommendations for policy makers based on the experiences of these communities and others: collaborate locally, coordinate regional expertise and oversight, build capacity through funding and technical assistance, and use state mandates. 

“Integrating Land Use and Water Management is relevant, informative, and necessary at this moment in time,” said Chi Ho Sham, president of the American Water Works Association and vice president and chief scientist of Eastern Research Group. “In the age of specialization, we have created many silos. As problems with the urban water cycle become more complex and multidimensional, collaboration with other disciplinary experts is needed. This report provides a practical bridge to facilitate collaboration between land use planners and water management.” 

Image: Master-planned community in Chandler, Arizona. Credit: Art Wager via Getty Images.

This article is adapted from a report on a project funded by the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy and the Water Research Foundation. Several municipal staff members in Aurora, Colorado, generously provided data and support for the project, including Lyle Whitney, Zach Vernon, and Timothy York at Aurora Water and Karen Hancock, principal planner with the City of Aurora. 

The Front Range of Colorado, an urban corridor east of the Rocky Mountains that includes Denver, Boulder, and other densely populated areas, increasingly faces a perilous combination: rapid population growth and a capricious water supply. With a semi-arid climate and a history of lengthy drought periods, the region is experiencing an increasing imbalance between water supply and demand, a situation aggravated by climate change. Water managers are faced with the challenge of securing an adequate water supply for future growth and new development.  

Our research at the University of Colorado applies an innovative methodology to water demand forecasting that provides key insights into the relationships between development decisions, water needs, and growth. This in-depth analysis of residential outdoor water use in Aurora, Colorado, uses a novel housing typology to inform 50 unique future development scenarios, providing a water blueprint for future projected growth, a methodology that can be applied to other communities. The study forecasts future water demand under various growth, climate change, and design scenarios, and demonstrates the inherent value and necessity of connecting water management and land use planning. 

Projecting Water Demand in Aurora 

The study area is the City of Aurora, Colorado, a growing municipality located in the Denver metro area. Like most communities in the region, Aurora is facing intense population growth and development pressures, with close to 2 percent annual projected growth to 2070, which will almost double the current population (Data & Demographics: Population, 2020).  

While Aurora has prioritized securing water rights to ensure the community has the needed water supply to support that growth, these are predominantly surface water supplies. They are vulnerable to drought and climate change and can be usurped by those with higher-priority rights to Colorado River water. These circumstances leave the community’s water security vulnerable, providing ample incentive for developing a better understanding of a variety of possible trajectories of future water demand, which can also inform and prioritize land use policy changes.  

Based on the best available data for population growth, land use, and water use, this study generated growth scenarios out to the year 2050. The study methodology is based on the creation of a unique housing typology, which reflects the current housing stock in Aurora. The housing types were defined by yard size, home value, and current outdoor water use. This data was then analyzed to determine the key housing characteristics that predicted significantly different water use, based on built environment characteristics. The two most significant variables were house value and pervious lot areas—in other words, larger houses with larger yards predictably used more water. This is consistent with other findings in the literature pointing to income levels and yard size as key drivers for water demand (Arbues and Villanua 2006, Dalhuisen et al. 2003, Locke et al. 2018, Rogers 2002). The analysis allowed for the classification of all residential units in the data set into eight distinct housing types.  

The scenario development was initiated by establishing a baseline growth scenario which projects full build out of Aurora’s approved master planned (MP) developments. The housing typology was matched to the expected future units in the MPs, based on an analysis of their yard sizes and home values. Using the water use data for each house type, the outdoor water demand was calculated for the projected MP developments. This calculation was used as the baseline scenario for comparison with 50 subsequently developed scenarios. 

The subsequent scenarios combine six factors: predicted development extent, pervious area, home values, climate change severity, landscape design, and level of irrigation efficiency. A portion of the scenarios includes projection of growth beyond the extent of MPs, simulating unplanned development of what is currently open space prairie lands. Because the distribution of housing types in these unplanned future development areas is unknown, the researchers used Aurora’s Unified Development Ordinance guidelines to develop scenarios with different combinations of housing types.  

Landscape design, irrigation efficiency, and climate variables were added to the scenario model as multipliers that either increase or decrease overall outdoor water use per unit area. The 50 scenarios were organized into ten groups of five scenarios, which had the same sequence of landscape design, climate change extent, and irrigation efficiency values. This allowed for a clear understanding of the impact of the multipliers and the development extent.  

The resulting scenarios address a wide set of possible future circumstances that were designed to reflect a range of realistic possible outcomes. By providing insight into how impacts may change based on factors like climate and population growth, this methodology can inform management and policy decisions related to lot size and landscaping standards. For example, the results show that having a development ordinance that limits lot sizes for single family residential development and requires at least 50 percent low-water (xeric) landscaping would yield water savings up to 35 percent.

Conclusions and Scalability 

Given the multiple constraints on sustaining future water supply in the Colorado River Basin, creating a portfolio of reasonable outcomes can be critical for managing sustainable growth. The key factors within the bounds of land use planning include growth boundaries, lot sizes and housing types, landscape design regulations (e.g., xeric requirements or turf limits), and irrigation efficiency standards.  

The results from this model show that new development that requires 50 percent xeric landscaping combined with efficient irrigation significantly reduces outdoor water demand, even when using the highest climate change impact multiplier and the greatest extent of development scenarios.  

Notably, this model uses only half-xeric yards, versus modeling the entire outdoor pervious space with xeric design. This is because the current UDO calls for low-water-use front yards, while back yards have no regulatory parameters on landscape design.  This suggests that creating a 100 percent xeric landscape yard would likely prove twice as effective. The half-xeric yard was chosen due to the guidelines of Aurora’s UDO ordinance, which requires small lot homes to have xeric designed front yards. Expanding that ordinance to 100 percent xeric landscaping for future growth would significantly contribute to meeting water supply goals, while still accommodating growth projections.  

The scenario modeling in this study provides a unique look at the coupled effects of multiple factors that influence outdoor water demand. The results show that best practices for low water use landscape design and irrigation efficiency can lower water footprints for high population growth in a warming climate, as predicted for Aurora. These outcomes reinforce the importance of integrating land use planning and water management.  

The conservative projections for climate change used in this study are likely estimates of future realities, and our results reveal that community planning that includes water smart land use zoning, building code improvements, and landscape requirements yields positive effects for future water resilience.  

Beyond the direct usefulness of this study to Aurora, much of its value lies in demonstrating that the methodology is feasible, yields reasonable results, and is scalable to larger regions.  

Many cities in the Colorado River Basin and throughout the West are facing similar growth pressures to those seen along Colorado’s Front Range. Our findings support the recommendation for jurisdictions to carefully consider where and how development occurs, before extending future populations away from the urban core through annexations of undeveloped open spaces, prairies, and greenfields. Moreover, this water demand forecasting model demonstrates the promising opportunities available for the arid West to use water-smart land use planning to create a more resilient future. 

Gretel Follingstad is a PhD candidate in Geography, Planning & Design, with a research and pedological focus on Climate Resilience Planning, in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Colorado, Denver 

Austin Troy is a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Colorado, Denver. 

Lead image: A waterwise yard in Aurora, Colorado. Credit: City of Aurora.

References 

Arbues, Fernando, and Inmaculada Villanua. 2006. “Potential for Pricing Policies in Water Resource Management: Estimation of Urban Residential Water Demand in Zaragoza, Spain.” Urban Studies 43(13): 2421–2442. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980601038255. 

Dalhuisen, Jasper M., Raymond J. G. M. Florax, Henri L. F. DeGroot, and Peter Nijkamp. 2003. “Price and Income Elasticities of Residential Water Demand: A Meta-Analysis.” Land Economics 79: 292–308. http://ron-griffin.tamu.edu/x677/readings/dalhuisen.pdf. 

Data & Demographics: Population. 2020. Aurora Colorado. https://www.auroragov.org/cms/One.aspx?portalId=16242704&pageId=16394086. 

Locke, Dexter H., Rinku Roy Chowdhury, J. Morgan Grove, Deborah G. Martin, Eli Goldman, John Rogan, and Peter Groffman. 2018. “Social Norms, Yard Care, and the Difference between Front and Back Yard Management: Examining the Landscape Mullets Concept on Urban Residential Lands.” Society & Natural Resources 31(10): 1169–1188. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2018.1481549. 

Rogers, Peter, Radhika de Silva, and Ramesh Batia. 2002. “Water Is an Economic Good: How to Use Prices to Promote Equity, Efficiency, and Sustainability.” Water Policy 4(1): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1366-7017(02)00004-1.