Water-Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) offers an approach for alternative spatial organisation of cities and infrastructures fit to address urban and climatic challenges. However, its relevance in all contexts is questioned and transferability concerns arise when mainstreamed. Instead of considering water sensitivity as guiding concept for the ultimate state of an urban environment, this article argues that water sensitivity is a context- and culture-specific variable, dictated and confined by other site variables. As such, WSUD implies an interaction between water sensitivity as context and concept, in which context shapes concept and concept provides focus on how to address context. Sensitivity therefore refers to the thoughtfulness of reading a context, highlighting to what extent site-specific urban conditions can be identified to be considered water-sensitive. This understanding enables local urban designers and water managers to appropriate and engage in WSUD fit for the cultural, socio-economic, and physical context.

In rapidly growing urban contexts, water plays a pivotal role in the transitions the urban environment goes through to sustain the quality of life of its population. Spatial planning and design are essential for the facilitation and manifestation of such transitions. Focusing on Bhuj, a rapidly growing Indian city in a hot arid desert climate, its crucial yet changing sensitivity to urban water flows over time is assessed. The concept of water sensitivity is coined as a goal to pursue by the Water-Sensitive Urban Design approach. In India, however, much of the urban design and development processes are of an unplanned and informal nature, seemingly inhibiting the water sensitivity of urban transitions. Reviewing spatial planning paradigms and their manifestation in space in Bhuj over time, however, brings to light a pre-existing water sensitivity. Yet it also shows a shift from the supply security-oriented ingenious watershed expansion to catastrophe-steered and urban expansion-driven water system negligence. Review and discussion of past and present urban water transitions and management points out drivers, barriers, and their interrelationships, to enable and advance water-sensitive urban development tied to local history, traditional knowledge, and context specificities.

Nature-based solutions (NBSs) offer an opportunity to address environmental and societal challenges worldwide while simultaneously providing benefits for human well-being as well as biodiversity. Despite a growing demand and evidence base for NBSs in coastal systems, the scaling of their implementation and mainstreaming of their principles in policy and practice are constrained by multiple barriers, such as misinterpretations of concepts, effectiveness, or locked-in preferences or conventions of traditional solutions. To address these constraints, an international consortium of coastal authorities and experts in the North Sea Region collaborates to validate, document, and share learnings of NBSs to establish a framework for mainstreaming NBSs for flood and coastal erosion risk management around the North Sea. Co-creation processes of workshops, field visits, and expert knowledge sessions contributed to a theoretical framework and baseline assessments of exemplary sandy and muddy case study sites in the region, amongst others, iteratively providing and showcasing building blocks for the mainstreaming framework. This article takes stock halfway of the project’s activities, learnings, and status of the called-for common language.