Centralized versus Decentralized Urban Water Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Planning for future urban water services is challenged by uncertainties in the supply side (e.g. climate change), the demand side (driven by socio-economic as well as geopolitical changes) as well as the infrastructure itself that links the two. Aging urban water infrastructure and the obvious investment gap that hinders complete replacement is both a problem but also a potential opportunity to change the very face of what urban water infrastructure looks like. Urban water management itself is continuously evolving, moving onto resource efficiency, urban ecosystem services, circular economy and urban resilience. This progressive move to more distributed, interconnected and multipurpose infrastructure brings us now to the edge of new paradigms, in which the city’s infrastructures are more interconnected to each other (e.g. water-energy systems), are re-purposed to support a new understanding of what is ‘waste’ and what is a ‘resource’ (e.g. circular economy) and are more tightly coupled to the digital world. And yet, as more distributed solutions are becoming cost-effective and arguably fit better in the circular world, the question of the appropriate balance and trade-off between centralized and decentralized urban water systems becomes an urgent one. To answer it and understand how these new infrastructures will perform and how their deployment will impact legacy centralized infrastructure, we need new types of models that can link centralized and decentralized systems and assess their combined performance, as well as new metrics of performance per se, suitable for these hybrid (central-decentral) infrastructures under uncertainty, also building on the idea of resilience. In this Special Issue, we investigate technologies, models, tools and methods able to capture, visualize and quantify the pros and cons of a new generation of infrastructure and help us balance novel decentralized systems with centralized legacy infrastructure, leveraging the strong points of both for a more circular, resilient future.

Prof. Christos Makropoulos
Prof. David Butler
Guest Editors

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