An Adaptive Stormwater Culture? Historical Perspectives on the Status of Stormwater within the Swedish Urban Water System

The purpose of the article is to analyze a number of historical explanations behind the slow process of change in stormwater management in Swedish urban planning and practice. We achieve this by studying three different periods of the long-term establishment of the Swedish urban water system over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, developments which were strongly linked to stormwater. The article recognizes the social construction of the system, i.e., how it grew out of human desires and how it grew extensively during the twentieth century due to an expansive growth of system-supporting public initiatives. These included funding opportunities as well as the establishment of different institutions and organizations. The analysis indicates that in their current efforts to transform urban stormwater management in a more sustainable direction, policymakers and implementers ought to be encouraged by an increased awareness of this social construction; what humans by their desires once built up, they should also be able to transform. Still, an important implication is also the need for such transforming efforts to determinately break away, both physically and mentally, from the traditional pipe-bound system and system culture.