This book is not a reminiscence of the past; it is an outlook into a near future. It ventures there with suggested solutions to avoid the dark consequences of dangerous trends that the Earth is now undergoing and that are expected to increase if nothing is done to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, impacts of excessive plastics use, and waste generation and pollution by chemicals, and to control the devastating effects of these trends.

I was born at the onset of World War II in a small industrialized country in central Europe – Czechoslovakia (today the Czech Republic). I lived through some of the environmental and economic apocalypses of the war, terrible environmental pollution, and economic and political struggles of my native country that for many years, along with the rest of the industrialized world, embarked on unrestricted economic development and disregarded the environment and sound environmentally friendly economics. After the suffering and devastation of World War II, in the second half of the twentieth century many countries experienced terrible pollution catastrophes, which resulted in mercury poisoning in Japan, rivers on fire (the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio), the dying of Lake Erie and some other Great Lakes due to excessive use of industrial fertilizers, unrestricted industrial expansion resulting in contaminated brownfields, and the Silent Spring (as described in Rachel Carson's book on the disappearance of birds due to toxic pollution) caused by contamination of the environment by chemicals.

After that, pushed by the strong environmental movement in the early 1970s, the US Congress passed the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, followed at the end of the century by similar legislative acts in most developed countries. These developments opened the path to the cleanup of the environment. However, despite this progress during the last three decades of the century, it was realized that the fragmented water/stormwater/solid waste management system still threatened the use of resources for future generations. In addition, methane emissions from landfills were still very high, uncontrolled, and now exceed those related to water supply and sewage disposal. Enormous quantities of waste plastics have accumulated in water resources and oceans and the mass of discarded plastics is expected to increase if nothing is done to control it. Furthermore, at the end of the previous century and the beginning of the new millennium, societies realized the danger of global warming that, if not addressed and abated, would by the end of this century change the ecology of the Earth and threaten life as we know it in many parts of the world.

After publishing several books over several decades (the first appeared in 1980), this book is special to the author. Most of the previous books described the state‐of‐the‐art knowledge on water quality, nonpoint (diffuse) pollution, urban drainage, and water conservation. However, in this millennium, scientists, politicians, industrialists, and the informed public have realized that the rise of global warming gas concentrations in the atmosphere must be stopped and eventually reversed. Among other social and economic changes, this will require a change in the paradigm of water, stormwater, solid waste, air pollution control, and energy management. Furthermore, the change will not only have beneficial effects on the environment, but it will also bring tremendous economic benefits. Large‐scale use of renewable energy that ten years ago was expensive and unrealistic is exploding in Europe (Germany, Austria, Poland, France, Sweden, and others) and Asia (Singapore, China, and Republic of Korea), which already have communities that claim to have sustainable net‐zero greenhouse gas (GHG) impact by implementing green (energy from waste, vegetation biomass, and sludge digestion methane) and blue (hydro, solar, wind) energy. Israel, Singapore, and Australia are leaders in water conservation and reuse. However, the efforts are still fragmented, and environmental engineering is still divided between water supply, drainage, and liquid and solid waste resorts and these resorts rarely cooperate. Urban landscape architects and city and industrial planners urgently need guidance of what is wrong with the past and current systems, what to improve, and what is economically possible in the near and more distant future to achieve urban sustainability.

Implementing water and materials reuse, recycling resources, currently considered waste, and deriving a large portion of community energy and some resource needs from local green and blue sources are now becoming near‐future reality. There is a synergy between resources in water and solid waste systems that can be harnessed. The new technologies leading to zero GHG emissions rapidly evolving in the automobile industries are highly applicable and already being applied to other sectors but not yet to urban water/stormwater/solid waste management. These technologies have a potential not only to dramatically reduce urban GHG emissions to net‐zero or better (negative GHG emissions) but they could also make cities self‐reliant on green and blue energy sources that to a large degree can be derived from waste resources.

Switching to hydrogen as an energy source and carrier opens a real possibility of generating electricity by ultra‐clean and very efficient hydrogen fuel cells, which today are opening new possibilities and revolutionizing many segments of the economy. Fuel cells are an energy user's dream: an efficient, combustionless, virtually pollution‐free power source, capable of being sited in downtown urban areas or in remote regions that runs almost silently and has few moving parts (US Department of Energy). The author of this book argues and documents that these new concepts are highly compatible and adaptable to used water and waste solids disposal.

Ideas and examples of the sustainable and resilient urban landscape providing water storage wherein storm and combined sewers become obsolete and sanitary sewers much smaller, are also presented. Stormwater is not waste; it is the third best source of water for communities, and reusing it locally also saves energy. The “triple net‐zero” goal (no waste of water, net‐zero GHG emissions, and no waste to landfills) featured in this book is a challenge leading to integration of water, used (waste) water, solids waste, and energy management that is a foundation of the future sustainable urban and suburban areas. This conceptual idea was also a challenge to the author, who attempted to use his 50 years of experience to prove or disprove whether these goals are realistic.

In the late 1980s, the author led a small international team of experts to prepare an English‐language adaptation of Karl Imhoff's Taschenbuch der Stadtentwässerung (Pocketbook of Urban Sewage). Founder of European sewage management, Karl Imhoff wrote the first edition of this book in 1906 for a growing audience of planners, students, and engineers embarking on implementing an emerging and challenging paradigm of sewage of cities plagued at that time by extreme pollution of urban waters and polluting industrial activities (mining and steel mills in Germany's Ruhr industrial area). Even city streets were severely impacted by pollution from solid wastes and horse manure. The original Taschenbuch has been translated and used by engineers of urban water/wastewater management of many countries for decades as a tried and tested work aid. In the US it was first introduced by the pioneer of US environmental engineering (at that time known as sanitary engineering), Gordon M. Fair (K. Imhoff and G.M Fair, Sewage Treatment, John Wiley & Sons, 1956) and revised and adapted again in 1989 (V. Novotny, K.R. Imhoff et al., Handbook of Urban Drainage and Wastewater Disposal, Wiley). This compact but comprehensive guide has been continuously updated and republished, most recently the 32nd German edition in 2007 (prepared by Klaus Imhoff with coauthors). It has provided fundamental engineering/planning guidance in Europe and in many translations elsewhere to generations of students and professionals.

This book attempts a similar mission: to provide fundamental information and guidelines to students, planners, politicians, and other stakeholders to implement the new paradigm of sustainable integrated water/stormwater/solid waste and energy infrastructures concepts. This shift is as much or more revolutionary as the shift from the uncontrolled waste disposal at the beginning of the twentieth century to the wastewater “fast conveyance – end of pipe treatment paradigm” and engineered solid waste landfilling that dominated the end of the last century. The revolution toward the new paradigm of how cities and homes are built is already in progress. In the next 20–30 years, most homes and commercial houses in countries adhering to the Paris 21 Agreement will have photovoltaic solar panels. Very soon France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Singapore, Austria, Israel, Iceland, Germany, and possibly other countries will soon be net‐zero GHG‐impact countries. Large wind energy farms and solar energy power plants are already ubiquitous in some EU countries, China, India, Israel, Australia, the US, and other countries.

Since 2005 I have been a member of the international team and a founding member of the International Water Association (IWA) committee of scientists, which under the auspices of the IWA organized and promoted the “Cities of the Future” program. Consequently, this book provides information in the international context. The uniqueness of this book is in integration of used (waste) water treatment, municipal solid waste, and suburban agriculture organic waste collection, and disposal into one system of water, solid waste, energy, and resources management and recuperation. In this system, gasification of a wide range of waste organic solids, including plastics, producing syngas, replaces landfilling and environmentally damaging and inefficient incineration. Reforming syngas and methane to hydrogen and subsequent power production by hydrogen fuel cell power plants (2030–2050 horizon) produces with high efficiency blue electricity, heat, resources from waste, and even some ultraclean water.

This book presents the concepts and designs of the integrated sustainable water, energy, solids management, and resource recovery in the “Cities of the Future.” Beginning with defining urban sustainability, the text presents historic scientific geological and ecological reasons why humans must reduce the present levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to avoid catastrophic consequences of global warming. The book introduces the concepts of sustainable triple net‐zero adverse impact communities and describes methodologies toward meeting sustainability goals. It guides users through the latest emerging technologies of urban water, energy, and solid waste management disposal to the realization that water must be conserved, and that stormwater and solid waste are resources. This book does not directly cover the water/energy nexus of the industrial, agricultural, or even transportation sectors. However, the circular economy of cities is expected to have significant direct and indirect effects on the production sector and switching to hydrogen energy will affect transportation and other sectors, as is already happening in Iceland, Germany, and elsewhere.

The 2018 reports of the International Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC, 2018) and the 13 US government scientific agencies (US Global Change Research Program, 2018a, b) confirmed what scientists and scientific research have been finding and warning about for decades: that if water, solids, and energy management and other economic practices continue practicing business as usual, atmospheric temperature will continue to rise and the damages to the planet's ecology – the frequency of catastrophic storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires, and the melting of artic ice and glaciers – will continue to magnify and within a generation will reach a point of no return. The innocent people greatly impacted by these adverse changes and catastrophes includes the author's children, grandchildren, and future generations. To avoid the serious and catastrophic consequence of global climate change in the near future (from now to 2040), societies must implement radical, fast, yet very logical changes of the urban paradigm from fragmented waste and excessive water and energy use and solid waste disposal to integrated systems that save water, produce excess green and blue electricity, and recover resources from used water and solid waste without landfilling. Recovered water, energy, and resources, including hydrogen and high concentration of CO₂ gas, will have a commercial value, and income and savings achieved with the new paradigm may pay for a great part of the cost of implementation.

The main technical objective of the book is to systematically prove that, within a generation, the move to the urban sustainability paradigm with triple net‐zero adverse impacts is feasible both in new and historic communities and to prove that this new paradigm is not a utopia, but it is a realistic goal and even a necessity because of global warming, population increases, and other stresses. The book does not claim that the paths toward these sustainability goals outlined in it are the only way. New technologies unknown in the last century are rapidly emerging. The author trusts that this book will help in the movement toward the sustainable Cities of the Future.

This book is in no way a product of only one person. It contains the knowledge and ideas of many experts and visionaries, personally starting with the late professor Peter Krenkel, a renowned expert on water quality management, who invited me – at that time a young scientist just starting out – to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, during the time of crisis in the author's native country 50 years ago. Also significant is the late Professor W. Wes Eckenfelder, Jr., who taught me the craft of wastewater treatment and disposal design as a teacher and first US employer. Work on adaptation of the Taschenbuch with Ing‐Dr Klaus R. Imhoff, Director of Ruhrverband Water and Sewage Management Agency in Germany, introduced me to regional urban integrated water and sewage management. Past presidents of the International Water Association, Professors Petr Grau, László Somlyody, and Glen Daigger, and IWA past Executive Directors Anthony Milburn, Paul Reiter, and current Executive Director Professor Kala Vairavamoorthy, with whom I collaborated, created the IWA “Cities of the Future” program and should also be acknowledged, along with many international scientists now participating in the Cities of the Future movement. These scientific leaders are a part of many thousands of scientists of all ages who discovered the danger of overuse of fossil fuels, the ensuing global warming, and the unsustainability of the way cities and industries use energy and resources. Thousands of visionaries of all ages and professional organizations are committed to the goals of achieving the triple net‐zero adverse‐impact communities, transportation, and industrial production and are working on solutions. And finally, I must mention my former graduate students, who are now university professors and department leaders, presidents, vice presidents, and leaders in large engineering and research companies and city governments.

However, this book is mainly dedicated to the current and next generation of scientists, engineers, political leaders, and all those who will be saving the Earth from the damages of global warming and environmental degradation caused by their ancestors. Thanks and appreciation go also to my wife and life-long partner for her support and collaboration.

Working under a different paradigm of economic development, these ancestors eliminated famine and poverty in most countries, have flown to the Moon, cleaned up the water and air in some cities, and kept the world mostly at peace now for more than 75 years. The realization that unlimited development and urbanization are not sustainable and may severely damage the Earth's ecosystems and humanity occurred later. Now is the time to make the world sustainable and liveable for this and future generations. The goals of sustainable Cities of the Future are realistic and achievable in a generation.

Vladimir Novotny