Water-sen­si­tive design (WSD) is cre­at­ed to man­age water sen­si­tiv­i­ty, such as rain­wa­ter man­age­ment and water sup­ply. Man­a­do City is strate­gi­cal­ly locat­ed in North Sulawe­si Province, Indone­sia, which is grow­ing rapid­ly but has slum areas and is prone to flood­ing. Slums do not meet stan­dards, includ­ing water man­age­ment.

The appli­ca­tion of WSD to res­i­den­tial areas in urban areas affects the uti­liza­tion of rain­wa­ter flows and the avail­abil­i­ty of alter­na­tive water sources. Pre­vi­ous stud­ies did not look at the poten­tial for imple­ment­ing WSD to increase the set­tle­ment qual­i­ty in slum areas.

This study aims to iden­ti­fy the poten­tial for imple­ment­ing WSD in the urban slum area of Man­a­do city by con­sid­er­ing the exist­ing sit­u­a­tion and con­di­tions. Fur­ther­more, this study reviews the phys­i­cal, non-phys­i­cal, and sup­port­ing aspects for the poten­tial imple­men­ta­tion. Three loca­tions of Man­a­do city slums were reviewed as case stud­ies.

For data col­lec­tion, this study uses the inter­view method through struc­tured ques­tion­naires, area obser­va­tions, and sec­ondary data. The phys­i­cal aspect reviews the rain­wa­ter drainage sys­tem fed by grey­wa­ter and the water sup­ply includ­ing ground­wa­ter and refilled water. The non-phys­i­cal aspect reviews incomes, own­er­ship of hous­es, and lim­it­ed land.

The study results show that the appli­ca­tion of WSD is very poten­tial giv­en the loca­tion con­di­tions, but some chal­lenges need to be con­sid­ered accord­ing to the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the loca­tion.