Urban Flood Risk Assessment and Development of Urban Flood Resilient Spatial Plan for Bhubaneswar

Urban flooding is growing as a serious development challenge for cities. Urbanization demands the conversion of pervious land to impervious land by pushing the transformation of water bodies, flood plains, wetlands and green spaces into built-up spaces. This affects the hydrological setting of the city’s geographic area. Bhubaneswar, one of the first planned cities of independent India, has expanded rapidly with an increase in the settlement land use cover from 41 km2 to 81 km2 in the last two decades. Non-consideration of disaster risk assessment in the land use plan has placed the city at high disaster risk. Hence, this article explores various avenues for making a flood resilient city through spatial planning. To understand the flood and its consequences, a flood hazard and vulnerability map was prepared by overlaying the existing social and infrastructure networks, and flood risk zones were generated through analytical spatial modelling in GIS. This accounts for the areas in which flood hazards are expected to occur, as well as the area whose socio-economic and infrastructure susceptibility to the disaster is more. The key outcome is to ensure urban development that can work concurrently with nature by integrating disaster risk reduction strategies into land use planning.