The Hamilton City Stormwater Master Plan, Big Data for Smart City Planning

Stormwater Conference

In 2015 Morphum was commissioned to prepare a Stormwater Master Plan (SMP) for the City of Hamilton, in the North Island of New Zealand. The SMP project vision was “To provide a dynamic, well documented and geospatial platform to support the analysis, planning and management of stormwater for Hamilton City”.

The SMP provides both a framework and a set of functional tools and processes to prioritise, plan and deliver on stormwater and environmental management objectives and help meet the conditions of Hamilton City Councils discharge consent. It also serves as an overarching document informing individual Integrated Catchment Management Plans (IMCPs) which are underway in the City. Through using GIS in every facet of the technical planning process the aim is to support Hamilton City Councils service delivery business processes and the 10 Year indicative stormwater funding programme through what is often referred to as ‘SMART City Planning’.

Therefore the SMP is intended to be much more than simply a plan; it represents the new way Hamilton City intend to manage stormwater and its associated information sets. The SMP is not just a static print out or set of reports, but rather a complex set of GIS overlays, integrated information sets and “big data”. The SMP enables analysis and interrogation of information about stormwater in a way that was previously unavailable to HCC and other stakeholders. Consequently numerous workshops were held with other stormwater, infrastructure, and planning teams and managers at Hamilton City Council to ensure that the objectives and outcomes of the SMP were fit for purpose.

One of the main deliverables and tools of the SMP is a Projects Database which represents how (and where) Hamilton City can better manage the stormwater network and its associated impacts. The Projects Database informs the 10 Year indicative stormwater funding programme. The projects identified include growth requirements, stream enhancement works (to improve ecological function), treatment improvements and investigations into flooding. The projects database has a spatial reference, to an associated polygon, indicating the site or area related to the project record.

As many of the tools and processes are new to Hamilton City Council, a comprehensive methodology development process was undertaken to ensure transparency and clarity around the technical tools such overland flow paths and geometric networks. This paper will aim to describe these methodologies and how they have been used to develop the SMP for Hamilton 2016.

Conference Papers Stormwater

5.00 The Hamilton City Stormwater Master Plan, Big Data for Smart City Young.pdf

pdf
1 MB
29 Sep 2017