Abstract
Centralized urban water management currently faces multiple challenges, both at the supply side and the demand side. These challenges underpin the need to progress to the decentralization of urban water, where multiple distributed technologies (water-aware appliances, rainwater harvesting, greywater recycling, sustainable urban drainage) are applied in an integrated fashion and as a supplement to centralized systems to design more resilient neighborhoods. However, the methods and tools to assess the performance of these distributed solutions and provide management support for integrated projects are still few and mostly untested in real, combined cases. This study presents a simulation-based framework for the quantitative performance assessment of decentralized systems at a neighborhood scale, where different technologies can be linked together to provide beneficial effects across multiple urban water cycle domains. This framework links an urban water cycle model, which provides a scenario-based simulation testbed for the response of the whole system, with key performance indicators that evaluate the performance of integrated decentralized solutions at a neighborhood scale. The demonstrated framework is applied to provide an ex ante evaluation of SUPERLOCAL, a newly developed area in Limburg, the Netherlands, designed as a circular, water-wise neighborhood where multiple decentralized technologies are combined.
Highlights
The conventional, centralized model of urban water management that delivers ‘big pipes in’ from multiple water sources to urban areas and drives ‘big pipes out’ to dispose urban wastewater has generated significant benefits to cities
A framework for the ex ante evaluation of integrated decentralized systems at a neighborhood scale, based on the simulation testbed of an urban water cycle model, has been demonstrated in this study
The framework is applicable to integrated neighborhood projects that include an array of distributed options, including water-saving appliances, household or neighborhood-scale rainwater harvesting (RWH)
Summary
The conventional, centralized model of urban water management that delivers ‘big pipes in’ from multiple water sources to urban areas and drives ‘big pipes out’ to dispose urban wastewater has generated (and will likely continue to deliver) significant benefits to cities Through this ‘hard path’ of water, cities worldwide enjoy reliable, constant clean water supply, improved health services, efficient disposal of their wastewater and simple operational and management structures. Water-aware appliances are envisioned to be used at a household level, in order to lessen demands at a household level, paired with neighborhood-scale decentralized measures, that aim to add local sources such as rainwater or groundwater to the distribution network, as well as recycle wastewater to cover part of the urban demands This decentralized paradigm in water management aims at creating smart, water-aware units within the city, where multiple distributed technology options are integrated to provide a circular urban water management model that reduces-reuses-recycles, instead of the one that merely extracts, transports and disposes. The paradigm shift that is envisioned bears a close resemblance to broader socio-economic transitions that aim at reaching sustainability, such as the progression towards a model of circular economy [12,13]
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