Ablutionary Urbanisms: Water Infrastructures, Cultural Production and Charitable Dispensation

With interest in advancing inclusive urban landscapes and guided by principles of social and cultural sustainability, this essay speculates as to localized water infrastructures as “ablutionary urbanisms,” important forms of contemporary design expression in a context of rapid growth, widening inequalities, climate change and lack of resilience. It derives inspiration from vernacular precedents in advocating for an integrated, decentralized approach to addressing current urban water challenges. It explores the contemporary relevance of the sabil, a prominent civic feature of Islamic cities intended for the charitable dispensation of water. More specifically, this essay considers the contemporary relevance and potency of the sabil-kuttab, a hybrid building type unique to the city of Cairo in which a school (kuttab) sits atop a sabil. Such a type offers helpful guidance in devising principles and precepts relevant to contemporary infrastructural design in that: (1) it offers encouragement to advocate for distributed urban water systems as civically prominent elements of cities, particularly as these systems combine with other important community-focused programmatic features; and (2) given a reimagining of urban water systems as critical forms of cultural production, it offers encouragement for interdisciplinary teams to commit to the task of infrastructure planning as a promising locus of integrative design.

Shaping More Sustainable Communities: a Case Study in Urban Water Management

<p>The motivation for this study was to consider how communities might take a more integrated and systematic approach to meeting the challenges of water management in New Zealand, and achieve more sustainable systems. The specific challenges facing a community pursuing sustainable urban water management objectives were examined and solutions sought and tested. Urban water systems, in particular, are under increasing pressure to meet the expectations of communities, with water managers required to articulate sensible management initiatives that secure water supplies and protect water for its intended use, now and in the future. Despite policy and regulation intended to advance outcomes and integrate efforts within the complex area of urban water management, fragmented approaches persist, while a pattern of decline in the quality of New Zealand's water resources remains a cause for concern. Nearly half of urban rates collected in New Zealand apply to water and wastewater management. Thus, this study is concerned with understanding the critical constraints to achieving healthier, more sustainable urban water systems that are affordable for New Zealand communities. The thesis demonstrates the methodology by focusing on Kapiti, a settlement north of Wellington, which has been debating and responding to water quality and security issues for more than a decade. Subsequent to a piloted investigation, a methodological framework was proposed, based on integrating three near complementary perspectives. The Theory of Constraints (TOC) was used with a Stakeholder Typology to identify system stakeholders, capturing and representing their perspectives with Intermediate Objective (IO), Current Reality Tree (CRT) and Prerequisite Trees (PRT), while Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs) from Systems Dynamics were constructed with some participants to explore and circumvent potential negative outcomes. The combined framework provided a source of deep insights into the challenges, dilemmas, potential solutions and side effects facing resource managers and other stakeholders in an urban water system under pressure from population growth and climatic/topographical conditions. It is possible that the combined theoretical framework can be applied to other resource management cases. The use of the Stakeholder Typology to complement TOC provided a tactical element not routinely evident in systems studies, valuing the experiential and historical perspectives of those who might otherwise be treated as being outside the system, their perspectives marginalised or ignored. The TOC framework offered a logic-based means to identify and invalidate a critical assumption that peak demand would reduce to a level predicted by system managers. Further, the TOC tools were used to focus on and agree the set of conditions necessary to deal with the demand constraint and meet the system goal agreed by the stakeholder participants.</p>

Shaping More Sustainable Communities: a Case Study in Urban Water Management

<p>The motivation for this study was to consider how communities might take a more integrated and systematic approach to meeting the challenges of water management in New Zealand, and achieve more sustainable systems. The specific challenges facing a community pursuing sustainable urban water management objectives were examined and solutions sought and tested. Urban water systems, in particular, are under increasing pressure to meet the expectations of communities, with water managers required to articulate sensible management initiatives that secure water supplies and protect water for its intended use, now and in the future. Despite policy and regulation intended to advance outcomes and integrate efforts within the complex area of urban water management, fragmented approaches persist, while a pattern of decline in the quality of New Zealand's water resources remains a cause for concern. Nearly half of urban rates collected in New Zealand apply to water and wastewater management. Thus, this study is concerned with understanding the critical constraints to achieving healthier, more sustainable urban water systems that are affordable for New Zealand communities. The thesis demonstrates the methodology by focusing on Kapiti, a settlement north of Wellington, which has been debating and responding to water quality and security issues for more than a decade. Subsequent to a piloted investigation, a methodological framework was proposed, based on integrating three near complementary perspectives. The Theory of Constraints (TOC) was used with a Stakeholder Typology to identify system stakeholders, capturing and representing their perspectives with Intermediate Objective (IO), Current Reality Tree (CRT) and Prerequisite Trees (PRT), while Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs) from Systems Dynamics were constructed with some participants to explore and circumvent potential negative outcomes. The combined framework provided a source of deep insights into the challenges, dilemmas, potential solutions and side effects facing resource managers and other stakeholders in an urban water system under pressure from population growth and climatic/topographical conditions. It is possible that the combined theoretical framework can be applied to other resource management cases. The use of the Stakeholder Typology to complement TOC provided a tactical element not routinely evident in systems studies, valuing the experiential and historical perspectives of those who might otherwise be treated as being outside the system, their perspectives marginalised or ignored. The TOC framework offered a logic-based means to identify and invalidate a critical assumption that peak demand would reduce to a level predicted by system managers. Further, the TOC tools were used to focus on and agree the set of conditions necessary to deal with the demand constraint and meet the system goal agreed by the stakeholder participants.</p>

The limits to large scale supply augmentation: Exploring the crossroads of conflicting urban water system development pathways

Managers of urban water systems constantly make decisions to guarantee water services by overcoming problems related to supply-demand imbalances. A preferred strategy has been supply augmentation through hydraulic infrastructure development. However, despite considerable investments, many systems seem to be trapped in lackluster development pathways making some problems seem like an enduring, almost stubborn, characteristic of the systems: over-exploitation and pollution of water sources, distribution networks overwhelmed by leakages and non-revenue water, and unequal water insecurity. Because of these strategies and persistent problems, water conflicts have emerged, whereby social actors oppose these strategies and propose alternative technologies and strategies. This can create development pathways crossroads of the urban water system. To study this development pathway crossroads, we selected the Zapotillo conflict in Mexico where a large supply augmentation project for two cities experiencing water shortages is at stake. The paper concludes that urban water systems that are engaged in a trajectory characterized by supply-side strategies may experience a temporal relief but neglect equally pressing issues that stymie the human right to water in the medium and long run. However, there is not a straightforward, self-evident development pathway to choose from, only a range of multiple alternatives with multiple trade-offs that need to be thoroughly discussed and negotiated between the stakeholders. We argue that this development pathway crossroads can cross-fertilize technical disciplines such as socio-hydrology, and social disciplines based on hydrosocial studies, which both ambition to make their knowledge actionable and relevant.

Stochastic stress-testing approach for assessing resilience of urban water systems from source to tap

&lt;p&gt;Urban water systems are designed with the goal of delivering their service for several decades.&amp;#160; The infrastructure will inevitably face long-term uncertainty in a multitude of parameters from the hydroclimatic and socioeconomic realms (e.g., climate change, limited supply of water in terms quantity and acceptable quality, population growth, shifting demand patterns, industrialization), as well as from the conceptual realm of the decision maker (e.g., changes in policy, system maintenance incentives, investment rate, expansion plans). Because urban water systems are overly complex, a holistic analysis involves the use of various models that individually pertain to a smaller sub-system and a variety of metrics to assess performance, whereas the analysis is accomplished at different temporal and spatial scales for each sub-system. In this work, we integrate a water resources management model with a water distribution model and a water demand generation model at smaller (household and district) scale, allowing us to simulate urban water systems &amp;#8220;from source to tap&amp;#8221;, covering the entire water cycle. We also couple a stochastic simulation module that supports the representation of uncertainty throughout the water cycle. The performance of the integrated system under long term uncertainty is assessed with the novel measure of system&amp;#8217;s resilience i.e. the degree to which a water system continues to perform under progressively increasing disturbance. This evaluation is essentially a framework of systematic stress-testing, where the disturbance is described via stochastically changing parameters in an ensemble of scenarios that represent future world views. The framework is showcased through a synthesized case study of a medium-sized urban water system.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Acknowledgement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This research is carried out / funded in the context of the project &amp;#8220;A resilience assessment framework for water supply infrastructure under long-term uncertainty: A Source-to-Tap methodology integrating state of the art computational tools&amp;#8221; (MIS 5049174) under the call for proposals &amp;#8220;Researchers' support with an emphasis on young researchers- 2nd Cycle&amp;#8221;. The project is co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund- ESF) by the Operational Programme Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014-2020.&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt;

Living and Prototyping Digital Twins for Urban Water Systems: Towards Multi-Purpose Value Creation Using Models and Sensors

In this paper, we review the emerging concept of digital twins (DTs) for urban water systems (UWS) based on the literature, stakeholder interviews and analyzing the current DT implementation process in the utility company VCS Denmark (VCS). Here, DTs for UWS are placed in the context of DTs at the component, unit process/operation or hydraulic structure, treatment plant, system, city, and societal levels. A UWS DT is characterized as a systematic virtual representation of the elements and dynamics of the physical system, organized in a star-structure with a set of features connected by data links that are based on standards for open data. This allows the overall functionality to be broken down into smaller, tangible units (features), enabling microservices that communicate via data links to emerge (the most central feature), facilitated by application programing interfaces (APIs). Coupled to the physical system, simulation models and advanced analytics are among the most important features. We propose distinguishing between living and prototyping DTs, where the term “living” refers to coupling observations from an ever-changing physical twin (which may change with, e.g., urban growth) with a simulation model, through a data link connecting the two. A living DT is thus a near real-time representation of an UWS and can be used for operational and control purposes. A prototyping DT represents a scenario for the system without direct coupling to real-time observations, which can be used for design or planning. By acknowledging that different DTs exist, it is possible to identify the value-creation from DTs achieved by different end-users inside and outside a utility organization. Analyzing the DT workflow in VCS shows that a DT must be multifunctional, updateable, and adjustable to support potential value creation across the utility company. This study helps clarify key DT terminology for UWS and identifies steps to create a DT by building upon digital ecosystems (DEs) and open standards for data.