Urban environments sustainable development through low impact approaches

The rapid rate of urbanisation is putting pressure on ecological condition of cities and caused to producing changes on hydrological processes and specially increasing of storm-generated flows and water pollutants. Traditional urban catchment management methods have overlooked many opportunities to perform water-sensitive urban development and public space design strategies, to decrease impacts on the natural water cycle. During recent years, the low impact approaches in urban development have been recommended as an alternative to these traditional stormwater management. The main objective of this paper is to define what low impact approaches are and what they are not, by defining principles and practices and to show the relationship between the principles and implementation actions. This paper reviews the literature on low impact approaches like low-impact development (LID) and low-impact urban design and development (LIUDD) and presents some relevant designing tools and processes that can be used by urban planners and designers in the urban development.