The Water Environment of Cities evolved from a “Green Cities-Blue Waters” workshop in 2006. Most chapter authors were teaching various courses on water planning, policy, and management and realized that there was no one “go-to” book on urban water management. Hence, our goal was to develop a book that could be used to teach a complete, multidisciplinary course, “The Urban Water Environment”, but could also be used as a supplemental text for courses on urban ecosystems, urban design, landscape architecture, water policy, water quality management and watershed management. The book is also valuable as a reference source for water professionals stepping outside their arena of disciplinary expertise.
The book is available as a e-book, which really helps for teaching. Many universities carry the e-book version, which allows students to download chapters for free. This allows the instructor to utilize particularly useful chapters to fit hir course, without requiring students to purchase the entire book. It also conserves paper. So far more than 17,000 chapters have been downloaded!