Assessing the Inclusion of Water Circularity Principles in Environment-Related City Concepts Using a Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Cities face increasing water pressure and supply issues, jeopardizing the balance between growth and sustainable water resource use. Green, resilient, smart, circular, blue, water sensitive, or water-wise city concepts are increasingly part of the design of strategies to rethink cities. These concepts have motivated many studies, but little is known about their relative relevance among the scientific community and how they consider water circularity. The objective of this study is to assess how these city concepts incorporate water circularity principles. The assessment is based on a bibliometric analysis of scientific articles recently published. The findings show that despite the wide number of articles dedicated to the various city concepts, water circularity-related challenges are still a small niche of concern, strongly driven by European authors. Moreover, our study showed that water circularity principles are not equally considered among the different city concepts. This uneven assimilation of principles in influential city concepts unveiled gaps regarding water circularity. This brings a new perspective to the use of more integrated definitions, highlighting the importance of such principles in the future use of these concepts when envisioning roadmaps toward sustainable water use in cities.