Synopsis

As cities scale up Nature-based Solutions as a climate adaptation pathway, water sensitive urban design has emerged as an integrated planning and design approach for managing the urban water cycle. Yet the long-term performance of these systems depends not only on governance and financing, but on communities actively recognising, valuing, and co-stewarding them. Unlike conventional grey infrastructure, blue-green infrastructure is a living system requiring continuous quality maintenance to deliver its expected co-benefits, making community participation central to whether these systems work in practice. Drawing on experience including Singapore’s first WSUD masterplan at Kallang Riverside Development, this talk presents a cross-city empirical study examining residents’ willingness to co-steward water sensitive urban infrastructure across Singapore, Seoul, and Zurich, and what enables water sensitive communities to emerge.

Speaker

Ms Jihye Lee is a Researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory Global, Singapore-ETH Centre. Her research focuses on what drives urban communities to recognise, value, and co-steward Nature-based Solutions, and what this means for achieving urban water circularity at scale. She is also a registered urban designer and planner in the Netherlands, with over 15 years of professional experience across Asia and Europe, including Singapore’s first WSUD masterplan at Kallang Riverside Development. She is an invited speaker at the World Cities Summit 2026, contributing to the UNDP session on circular pathways for cities.