ABSTRACT
A society that intensifies and expands the use of land and water in urban areas needs to rethink the relation between spatial planning and water management. The traditional strategy to manage land and water under different governance regimes no longer suits the rapidly changing environmental constraints and social construction of the two key elements in urban development. The dynamics of urban development and changing environmental constraints cause an urgent need for innovative concepts in the overlapping field of land and water governance.1 The claim for more space for rivers for flood retention (Hartmann, 2011) and environmental protection (Moss & Monstadt, 2008), the fragmentation of the drinking water sector (Moss, 2009), or unsolved upstreamdownstream relations (Scherer, 1990) are illustrative of these dynamics. Therewith, increasingly, water management steps into the governance arena of spatial planning, and spatial planning needs to reconsider its notions of water issues.
