Comparing City Blueprints of megacities

Recently the results of the City Blueprint analysis of Seoul were presented to colleagues in both the Seoul City government and the Seoul Water Institute. The experts involved were Dr. Jeryang Park, Assistant Professor at the School of Urban & Civil Engineering of Hongik University, Dr.  Seockheon Lee of KIST (for the City Blueprint and Trends and Pressures analyses of Seoul) and Prof. Dr. C.J. van Leeuwen of KWR (for the review of the results).

Seoul achieved a very good performance, with a Blue City Index of 7.3 (on a scale of 0 – 10), placing it in the top 10% of cities assessed. The experts are currently finalizing a manuscript to publish the results in a scientific journal. Seockheon Lee: ‘It is very interesting to do a comparison with other cities with comparable sizes to Seoul to learn from their experiences and plans to cope with water-related challenges in large cities. In the draft manuscript we have provided a comparison with other megacities such as New York City, London and Istanbul.’

Together with KWR, Seoul is also exploring options to collaborate on water governance. Stef Koop of KWR has recently developed the Governance Capacity Analysis. It has also been operationalized with clear questionnaires and a PC tool added to the Watershare Tool Suite. Many urban water management challenges are in fact water governance challenges. Seockheon Lee: ‘We need to assess the capacities, i.e., find the gaps and close them. This is much in the interest of the people of Seoul.’

Comparison of 25 indicator scores between Seoul, New York City, London and Istanbul.