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Urban metabolism and Water Sensitive Cities governance
Published in Thomas Bolognesi, Francisco Silva Pinto, Megan Farrelly, Routledge Handbook of Urban Water Governance, 2023
Steven J. Kenway, Marguerite Renouf, J. Allan, KMN Islam, N. Tarakemehzadeh, M. Moravej, B. Sochacka, M. Surendran
As an evaluation approach, an urban metabolism approach quantifies resource flows through urban entities, which could be water, energy, materials, or nutrients. Here, we are principally interested in water (Figure 20.1). When we refer to the water metabolism of the city, we mean the process of water flowing through and being transformed and consumed by the urban entity to sustain all the technical and socio-economic processes that occur within it.
Spatial-temporal views on urban construction material flow and stock towards sustainability
Published in Natalia Yakovleva, Edmund Nickless, Routledge Handbook of the Extractive Industries and Sustainable Development, 2022
Hiroki Tanikawa, Jing Guo, Tomer Fishman
In addition to the buildings, material stock and flows of other infrastructure, like roads, railways and sewer networks also contribute to urban metabolism. Demolished materials, such as crushed concrete, sand and gravel, are mainly downcycled into the layers of roadway construction, and for land developed for housing lots. To consider demolition waste, recycling measures with regard to the metabolism of building and infrastructure on a city scale, it is necessary to understand the change in its material accumulation both spatially and temporally. The research on Salford Quays in Manchester (8.0 km2) over time from 1849 to 2004 (9 snapshots) and Wakayama City centre, Japan (11.3 km2) during 1855–2004 (8 snapshots) revealed the evolution of material stocked in buildings and infrastructure, which provided key guidance for urban planning and waste management in the future.
Introduction
Published in Anne Schiffer, Reframing Energy Access, 2020
The urban metabolism can be understood as a “collection of complex sociotechnical and socioecological processes by which flows of materials, energy, people, and information shape the city, service the needs of its populace, and impact the surrounding hinterland” (Currie and Musango, 2017). While Kartong is strictly speaking not yet urban,2 the transition to modern energy services such as electricity is also marked by increasingly urban characteristics at the local level. The adaptation of the urban or more specifically the ‘energy metabolism,’ however, also recognises that regional and global ‘hinterlands’ do not just feed the city (Kennedy et al., 2007), but that the city itself also impacts on or is seen as responsible for providing rural communities with services, goods and infrastructure such as electricity grids and roads.
Integrative technology hubs for urban food-energy-water nexuses and cost-benefit-risk tradeoffs (II): Design strategies for urban sustainability
Published in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, 2021
Ni-Bin Chang, Uzzal Hossain, Andrea Valencia, Jiangxiao Qiu, Qipeng P. Zheng, Lixing Gu, Mengnan Chen, Jia-Wei Lu, Ana Pires, Chelsea Kaandorp, Edo Abraham, Marie-Claire ten Veldhuis, Nick van de Giesen, Bruno Molle, Severine Tomas, Nassim Ait-Mouheb, Deborah Dotta, Rémi Declercq, Martin Perrin, Léon Conradi, Geoffrey Molle
It is not easy to delineate the boundary of sustainability assessment to enhance sustainable development (Das & Cabezas, 2018). Case studies containing all relevant factors in FEW systems are very limited. Scenario analysis with future prediction (long-term) is still lacking in the integrated modeling analysis (Dai et al., 2018). With the exception of carbon and water footprint, no sustainability indicators, such as ecosystem footprint, were fully developed for different FEW nexus analyses. Water and energy sectors are still the priority areas in the current literature, with less focus on the food sector. Incorporating policy and governance paradigms into these FEW systems is still uncommon (Artioli et al., 2017). However, energy generation and consumption are directly related to resource depletion and other environmental impacts (Ng et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2017), and these upstream impact categories should be incorporated into sustainability indicators of the FEW nexus through a holistic risk assessment. Thus, interdisciplinary research coupling these three sectors should be conducted cohesively with case studies of regional significance with respect to different policies and governance structure. Developing multiscale, multiuncertainty, multisector, and multiagent models that incorporate multiple impacts is essential for addressing multiple externalities and exploring recognized challenges. Multi-sectoral systems analysis, a research tool for decision-making, supporting policy and investment could be effective in urban FEW nexuses, as this systematically analyzes the magnitude of material and energy flows and transformation from an urban metabolism perspective (Walker et al., 2014). Based on the applied systems analysis, this paper finally proposes a closing remark via an integrated evaluation framework for an urban FEW nexus to achieve Green, Resilient, Empowering, Adaptable, Transformative, and Sustainable (GREATS) urban development (Figure 13). In this framework, flows of the three most valuable resources can be quantified within a designated physical boundary of varying scales in the first layer of assessment, located at the multilayer building block at the upper right corner of Figure 13. Selected sustainability criteria and indicators are highlighted, along with multilayer evaluation methods for each indicator of different aspects (e.g., environmental, social, economic, and technological aspects) of the proposed FEW systems. Although it requires plenty of data collection, LCSA can be used for the aspects of each of the three FEW nexus pillars to assess the sustainability performance with the aid of spatial analysis techniques. These spatial analysis techniques (i.e., Geographical Information System) can be linked with system dynamics models from which the urban growth models at large can be applied for intertwined material and energy flow analyses via urban growth visualization. These interlinkages for formalizing the multiscale, multiuncertainty, multisector, and multiagent models can serve as a neural system in the applied systems analysis.