Urbanisation intensifies stormwater management challenges by expanding impervious surfaces, increasing flood risk and degrading water quality. Vertical greenery systems (VGS) are increasingly promoted as nature-based solutions for space-constrained cities, yet their performance remains highly variable and context-dependent. This systematic review, conducted in accordance with preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses guidelines and synthesising evidence from 34 peer-reviewed studies, demonstrates that VGS hydrological efficacy is not a universal constant but is fundamentally moderated by local climatic conditions. Climate acts as the primary filter, shaping system function across tropical, temperate, Mediterranean, arid, and cold zones, each presenting distinct opportunities and constraints. Beyond climate, performance is refined by system typology (green façades versus living walls), plant functional traits (notably root architecture), and substrate composition, which together determine trade-offs between runoff delay, retention, and water quality improvement. The review further reveals a stark divergence in adoption barriers: in the Global North, high costs, regulatory complexity, and data gaps create institutional inertia, whereas in the Global South, limited awareness, misaligned priorities, and weak policy frameworks relegate stormwater management to a low priority. To address these challenges, we propose a five-pillar implementation framework centred on climate-responsive design protocols, advanced economic valuation of co-benefits, adaptive governance, long-term monitoring, and context-sensitive community engagement. This review provides actionable, evidence-based guidance for integrating VGS as resilient, equitable, and multifunctional components of sustainable urban water management, tailored not to global templates, but to local environmental and socio-institutional realities.

Vertical green infrastructure could help manage roof runoff in dense cities, but reported retention values from individual storms are difficult to transfer because wall architecture, antecedent wetness and measurement methods are rarely considered together. This study combines full-scale green wall experiments with a parsimonious event model and design-scenario analysis for roof-runoff-fed systems. A two-zone bucket model was parameterised and evaluated against observations from the Green Sponge Buildings Laboratory for two contrasting modular wall architectures: a tank-type wall (GW1) and a porous-substrate wall (GW2). The model represents wall-specific retention capacity, drainage onset and detention routing. It reproduced retained volumes with Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency ≈ 0.99, R² ≈ 0.99 and percent bias ≈ -0.9% for GW1, and Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency ≈ 0.97, R² ≈ 0.98 and percent bias ≈ +2.1% for GW2. Using Oslo 60-min intensity–duration–frequency design storms as a demonstration case, dry-start retention was governed mainly by wall storage capacity and wall-to-roof ratio. Latin Hypercube sampling (N = 500) identified the derived pre-storm storage fraction as the dominant explanatory state variable, with single-predictor R² values of 0.967 for GW1 and 0.968 for GW2. For the 10-year design storm at a wall-to-roof ratio of λ = 1.0, dry-start assumptions overstated median retention by 89 percentage points for GW1 and 30 percentage points for GW2. Green walls can therefore contribute to urban stormwater management, but their operational effectiveness depends on wall architecture, wall-to-roof ratio and antecedent wetness. Green wall performance claims and design guidance should therefore explicitly report wall architecture, wall-to-roof ratio and antecedent storage condition.

Post-conflict reconstruction research has examined façade materiality and symbolism, yet the process conditions under which aesthetic specifications are systematically overridden during construction remain neglected. This study investigates why designed architectural aesthetics fail to survive implementation in post-2017 Mosul, Iraq. A mixed-methods design combined formal visual analysis of 12 recently completed residential façades with a structured survey of 45 practicing architects. Survey data reveal that designers are excluded from construction supervision in 76% of projects and that clients intervene in material and color selection in 70% of cases. Visual analysis identifies a sophisticated design language—orthogonal massing articulated through contrasting materials—that is rarely realized in built form. Where designers retain supervisory authority, projects most consistently achieve material–form coherence. The study advances the concept of an aesthetics of interruption (the systematic degradation of designed form–material relationships through the fragmentation of professional authority during construction). Exclusion produces four distinct pathologies: material substitution, execution degradation, language override, and ornamental hollowing. The findings demonstrate that aesthetic degradation in post-conflict reconstruction stems not from design incapacity but from broken process structures. Safeguarding architectural quality requires contractual frameworks mandating designer supervision and material-substitution protocols that protect design intent.