Blue4Green - Hydrating the city by combining heritage, natural and high-tech solutions for green-blue challenges
Bruges is a true water city. The historic city centre is criss-crossed with canals, known as ‘reien’. Yet, even here, water is becoming scarce. With the Blue4Green project, the city is calling for an integrated and sustainable approach to water management in order to optimise the green-blue veining of the city. In the future, the Bruges canals will become an essential link in making the city water- and climate-robust, helping the urban environment cope with climate change.
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Bruges is a world heritage city where water has always played an important role. The inner city canals, known as reien, not only shaped the city centre and provided its water supplies in medieval times, but they are also vital to make the inner city climate change resilient today. Bruges needs to adopt a holistic and preventative approach in which a sustainable water management system supports the city’s greening policy.
The goal of Blue4Green is to make the reien sustainable, in terms of water quantity and quality, to provide for the increasing water demands of urban greenery. The reien form a closed system with only one inlet and one outlet.
This project automates the control system and develops a smart water balance model to allow for preventative measures to be taken affecting water supply and buffering. To this end, part of the underground historic water network is to be reconnected to the reien.
The project also involves ensuring high water quality, creating a reliable water supply for the maintenance of existing and new greenery. This also benefits biodiversity and water recreation.
In order to allow for data-driven decisions, all these actions are linked to a new policy dashboard. This Blue4Green digital twin is designed to integrate all existing green-blue data, complemented with new missing data in order to analyse water availability and quality, and green stress at local level. This extensive dashboard will steer policy decisions and help identify solutions through co-creation with stakeholders and citizens.
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The European Urban Initiative is an essential tool of the urban dimension of Cohesion Policy for the 2021-2027 programming period. The initiative established by the European Union supports cities of all sizes, to build their capacity and knowledge, to support innovation and develop transferable and scalable innovative solutions to urban challenges of EU relevance.
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