Urban Developers & Planners
Every urban water decision touches stormwater, sanitary, combined sewers, water distribution, harvesting, channels and rivers — and the budget, the community, the regulators, all simultaneously. The old workflow uses separate tools for each stream; the design conversation breaks between them. MAGNET4WATER's StormNET is built around five urban water streams in one model, with FEMA-approved engines and live cost feedback as you design.
What used to be 100-year storms now arrive every 10–20 years in many basins. FEMA flood maps are still based on historical records that no longer reflect current risk. Insurance carriers and lenders are already pricing forward-looking flood risk — municipal planning has to catch up.
More municipalities falling under Phase II and III NPDES MS4 stormwater permits, with quantitative compliance targets — no-net-increase, runoff volume reduction, TSS removal. Generic narrative compliance is no longer sufficient.
Utility-style stormwater fees based on impervious cover are now common. Developers must demonstrate runoff reduction quantitatively to qualify for fee credits — an architectural-design decision with direct cash-flow implications.
IIJA, BRIC, HMGP, FEMA flood-resilience grants, state climate funds. Award decisions require quantitative flood and runoff modeling justification. The application defense rests on the model behind it.
LEED v5 (2024) increased water-stewardship weighting. Many jurisdictions are codifying voluntary standards into mandatory ordinances. Documentation rigor is rising; checklist compliance is being replaced by performance-based requirements.
City councils, planning commissions, and public hearings now expect interactive, current visualizations — not slide decks of static maps. The visualizations that land in the council vote are the ones the design actually runs on.
These pressures arrive at the same time across every project — from a single subdivision to a citywide master plan. The design infrastructure has to keep up.
What Sets MAGNET Apart
Four architectural decisions specific to how urban water actually gets designed.
Five urban water streams — one model.
Stormwater. Sanitary sewers. Combined sewers. Drinking-water distribution. Stormwater harvesting and reuse. Open channels and rivers. One StormNET model handles all of them as one infrastructure, with full 1D unsteady Saint-Venant hydraulics — pressurized, free-surface, partly-full, and transitional regimes. Most platforms model one stream; the planner ends up reconciling between separate tools. MAGNET handles them together because urban water actually IS one design problem.
EPA SWMM. FEMA-approved. LEED v5 documented.
EPA SWMM is the canonical engine for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) — FEMA-approved for flood-inundation mapping submissions. Eight Low Impact Development types with multi-layer physics: bioretention, permeable pavement, rain gardens, green roofs, infiltration trenches, rain barrels, vegetative swales, rooftop disconnect. LEED credit documentation is built into the workflow — designers see the credit qualification as the design evolves, not after it's submitted.
Live cost feedback — 258 regional presets.
Every component placed on the design generates live CAPEX, OPEX, and lifecycle-cost feedback drawn from 258 regional cost presets. Resize a culvert, add a detention pond, swap LID types — the cost responds as the geometry changes. For urban planning, cost is the binding constraint at the design stage; building it into the design loop is the difference between a buildable plan and an aspirational one.
3D digital twin — for the council meeting.
Streaming 3D visualization of flooding, drainage, LID performance, and infrastructure response — produced as the simulation runs. Publish the design to a secure observatory page; stakeholders see the same evidence the design team sees. The visualization that defends the plan to the planning commission is the same one the engineering team uses to refine it. No translation layer; no PowerPoint dilution.
Urban water decisions span physically distinct domains. StormNET handles most of urban planning's day-to-day work; the other platforms join in for specific dimensions where they fit better.
MAGNET4WATER is the water-cycle modeling layer underneath urban planning, on federal-standard engines. It is not a GIS platform (Esri ArcGIS, QGIS), an urban-planning land-use system (CommunityViz, CitySim), a traffic or transportation model (TransCAD, VISUM), a building information modeling tool (Revit, ArchiCAD), or a construction project management platform (Autodesk Construction Cloud, Procore). Those remain the planning, design, transportation, and construction-management tools cities and developers run their projects on. What MAGNET adds is the stormwater, drainage, source-water, distribution, and flood analytical layer: StormNET on EPA SWMM for stormwater design and MS4 documentation; ConduitNET on EPA EPANET for distribution; SwaNET and IGW-NET for source-water sustainability under climate; and the 5-platform integration that ties urban water-cycle questions together in one defensible analytical environment.
Pain Points & MAGNET Solutions
The design-cycle iteration cost
MAGNET: Hydraulics, flood inundation, and lifecycle cost respond live as components are placed. Resize the detention pond; the flood map redraws and the cost updates. Swap a culvert; the hydraulic profile re-routes immediately. The design loop stays continuous — iterations happen at the speed of decision-making, not the speed of file exports.
MS4 NPDES quantitative compliance
MAGNET: EPA SWMM with full 1D unsteady Saint-Venant hydraulics; 8 LID types with multi-layer soil physics; land-use-based pollutant buildup-and-washoff. Quantitative compliance outputs from the same model that runs the design, on the engine the regulator already accepts.
Climate-resilient planning under outdated flood maps
MAGNET: CMIP6 downscaled climate scenarios force the storm hydrology directly into SWMM. Project flood-extent maps under specific climate pathways, not just the 1990s climate. The same FEMA-approved engine, with forward-looking forcing — supporting climate-resilience planning the carrier already expects.
Stormwater fee credit defense
MAGNET: LID controls with full multi-layer surface / engineered-soil / storage / underdrain physics. Place the LIDs on the site; SWMM models the actual runoff reduction. The fee credit defense is built into the same model that delivered the design — not a separate spreadsheet calculation submitted alongside it.
Brownfield & contaminated site redevelopment
MAGNET: IGW-NET (MODFLOW 6 + MT3DMS + MODPATH) for contamination assessment, plume backtracking, and capture-zone analysis — the same architecture that secured BP Superfund remediation infrastructure and the Mika Meyers courtroom outcome. StormNET handles the redevelopment drainage; IGW-NET handles the contamination analysis — one platform, both questions.
Public hearings & council votes
MAGNET: 3D digital twin with streaming visualization; publish to a community-facing observatory page with an AI-generated explanatory report grounded in the model. Council members and the public see the design respond to rainfall, flooding, and LID interventions in real time. The visualization that defends the plan is the same one the design actually runs on.
Strategic Value
For urban developers and planners, the architectural commitments translate into three dimensions: design-cycle compression — hydraulics, flood inundation, LID performance, and cost responding live as the design changes, so iterations happen in the conversation rather than between meetings; regulatory first-pass approval — submissions on FEMA-approved engines with LEED v5 documentation, NPDES MS4 quantitative compliance, and audit trails that survive review; and community trust through transparency — the same model that supports operations and engineering also supports the public hearing.
Projects move from feasibility to entitlement to permitting on shorter cycles, with fewer review iterations, with documentation already prepared for grant applications — and with visualizations the planning commission can actually interpret.
Proven in Urban Design
Three deployments demonstrating MAGNET's architecture across regulatory approval, urban design, and contaminated-site redevelopment.
EGLE-Reviewed
Coastal Marina Development
Luxury marina in a politically sensitive coastal-dune aquifer ecosystem — state regulatory approval under contested conditions
Spartan Gateway
MSU Urban Design
Half a dozen real Michigan sites — stormwater design with live hydraulics, 3D twin, cost feedback, and green infrastructure
Brownfield
BP Superfund
Complex contamination remediation — concept to commissioned infrastructure, analog for any contaminated-site redevelopment
Managing urban water across portfolios of projects, neighborhoods, and adaptation initiatives — where regulatory deadlines, climate projections, and community engagement converge on the same set of decisions? Read the strategic argument for why the water-resources digital transformation moment is now — and why the multi-tier, multi-scale framework is a viable response at the scale of urban water portfolios.
Read: The Inflection Point →