Urban development and water infrustucture: Towards innovative decentralized urban water management

Hydropolis will:

• Review the state-of-art of decentralized water management technologies through data collection, data analysis and pilot scale investigations.
• Develop a new framework and modeling tools to simulate and analyse urban development scenarios that will take into account urban water management at the earliest design stage.
• Explore alternative strategies for urban development that will be conscious of the opportunities and constraints imposed by the physical system (in view of water management) and make the best use of state-of-art decentralized water management technologies.
• Examine issues of impact of these alternative strategies and associated technologies on social, economic and environmental criteria and indicators, including water demand and energy.
• Provide real time operation and management of pilot  decentralized technologies, coupled with remote monitoring via a system of distributed sensors and actuators that will continually check the performance of these systems thus providing remote supervision, remote control and rapid intervention for their maintenance and problem-solving.

To allow for the assessment of potential impact of decentralized technologies, there is a requirement for the development of tools that can model the complete urban water cycle, at various scales (household, neighborhood, municipality etc) and then use these tools in conjunction with urban growth models to assess the applicability and impact of alternative technologies, for different development scenarios. Within this context, urban water infrastructure and its association with urban growth will be considered as part of the novel concept of “urban metabolism”  thus creating an interdisciplinary interface between the engineering, social and economic aspects of the project.