General Information

Publication year: 2019

Publication place: Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Language: English

Publishers:

• Ministry of the Entrepreneurships Kingdom of the Netherlands (RVO)

• MLA+

​

Summary

This publication is a technical report that was written under the involvement of myself in a project called, Water as Leverage for Resilient Cities Asia, which was initiated by Ministry of the Entrepreneurships Kingdom of the Netherlands (Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend/RVO). The project started in 2018 and was implemented in three selected cities in Asia: Semarang (Indonesia), Chennai (India) and Khulna (Bangladesh).   Furthermore, this publication is more than just a technical report, but also offers an integrated water management plan for the city that can be adopted for further strategic city planning documents.

​

As one of the famous delta cities in Indonesia, Semarang is facing multiple interconnected water-related challenges, such as floods and droughts. In addition, long-term excessive groundwater extraction causes land subsidence and exhausts the available freshwater resources. Currently, a wide array of measures has been employed to respond to the direct dangers at hand: polders, sea dykes, and canals normalizations. Although these actions are being successful, they apparently do not address the issue of integrated water management. If this remains similar from time to time, the challenges are not overcoming.

​

In order to address the challenges properly, an integrated water management shall be in place. It means managing the upstream and downstream properly. The name, “Cascading Semarang”, represents a series of strategies consisted of storage and utilization that are created through complimentary and synergetic approaches.  In this publication, it is also presented three main strategies for Semarang. First strategy, namely, “Spongy Mountain Terrace”, is a strategy focused on how to transform land at the upstream areas to store water as much as possible. Second strategy namely, “Rechanneling the City”, focuses on giving the water priority way to flow without any disruptions, so that when the amount of water increased due to heavy rainfall, they will not be flooding the city. Last strategy, namely, “Feeding the Industry”, is a strategy to reduce the excessive ground water extraction and recycle the water for industrial purpose that is located at the downstream areas.

​

​