Urban flooding poses serious threats to human life. In China, many cities have recently experienced flooding during every rainy season. Several years ago, policies, scientific methods, and engineering measures were applied to address this systematic problem. However, flooding disasters remain frequent in urban areas in China. Therefore, this article discusses the human-earth relationship from a philosophical perspective to analyse the causes of urban water problems. This article mainly illustrates the value of the what-if analysis concept and how to use this concept to address urban flooding issues and improve the management of urban overland flow. However, the existing simulation models and software do not effectively support what-if analyses. In particular, most existing urban hydrological simulation models and software do not sufficiently consider the heterogeneity of geographical objects on urban surfaces and lack interactions to support what-if analyses. These limitations hinder effective implementation of what-if analysis. This article introduces three key technologies that allow an urban overland flow simulation system to effectively support what-if analyses: 1) urban spatial automatic discretization and topo-adjacency, which reflect the heterogeneity of an urban area; 2) hydrological models for the simulation of the hydrologicalprocesses of the main geographical objects in the urban area; and 3) key strategies for a visual analytic platform to support what-if analyses in well-perceived way. The experiment was conducted using a community in Chongqing as a case study. The results demonstrate that the designed key technologies and functions of the proposed system can support what-if analysis and that what-if analysis is an important and useful concept for urban water management.
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