Problems in River Use and Management during the Rapid Urbanization Process and the Strategies

The acceleration of urbanization process poses greater challenge for storage capacity, resource development and utilization, pollutants self-purification, landscape and other service functions of urban rivers. Severe threats and challenges faced by urban river channels under the background of urbanization were summarized in this paper, including the increase of occupied land area, disorderly exploitation of water resources, water quality deterioration, river channel sedimentation and excessive mining, the destroy of river configuration and structure and so on. The negative effects of the above problems on the sustainable utilization and management of urban river channel and the healthy development of urban economy were also analyzed. Besides, in this paper, the function evolution trend of river channel from natural service to social service as well as the relationship between social service function and the urbanization process were discussed and explored. At the same time, the paper has deeply discussed the restriction of urbanization to the social service function based on the analysis of the functional requirements and the existing problems, Reasons for those problems include insufficient regulatory ability, incomplete river management and planning, the low and lagging capital investment, the absence of the matching project facilities and so on. At last, solutions and countermeasures for sustainable protection and management of river channel were proposed in the paper: firstly, urban river channels should be protected and restored from the aspects such as engineering building, technology and management; secondly, we should establish a protection system in which restoration project, financial support, government management and daily regulation are strengthened to promote the coordination of sustainable utilization of river basin with the development of the city, thus providing meaningful references for the management and protection of urban river channels.