The blue city: Urban metabolism and the energy-water nexus
type: CreativeWork
description: Urban environments sit at an intersection of technology, resource consumption, population, culture, and economics. With an increasingly urbanized population across the globe comes an increased demand for resources including water, food, and energy. The study of resource consumption in cities and urban environments, therefore, offers potential for conservation and efficiency increases. Water resources are integral to the necessary functioning of the city and its future sustainability. Not only are water resources directly procured and utilized within the city, water is also consumed in the production of other resources, including food and energy. However, these direct and indirect water resources of cities are understudied, with data that are scattered and inaccessible, if they exist at all. This dissertation utilized the principles of the food-energy-water nexus, urban water, material flow analysis/urban metabolism, and urban water governance to discuss the magnitude and importance of water resources in the urban environment. Open data and data availability played an integral role throughout the analysis. First, the availability of direct water volume (drinking water and wastewater) and its embedded energy data were discussed. The lack of existing data prompted the use of open records requests to build a database of urban water and energy data for cities across the United States. The collected data were then evaluated to quantify the state of the urban energy-water nexus. Additionally, the information from this database was compared to other material flows and their water footprints to characterize the extent of direct and indirect water resources in cities. Following the quantification of water resources and their impact in cities from a civil engineering framework, statistical modeling was completed to identify indicators of urban water use considering socioeconomic and environmental factors. Finally, through these studies, the underlying theme of open data in wat…
abstract: Urban environments sit at an intersection of technology, resource consumption, population, culture, and economics. With an increasingly urbanized population across the globe comes an increased demand for resources including water, food, and energy. The study of resource consumption in cities and urban environments, therefore, offers potential for conservation and efficiency increases. Water resources are integral to the necessary functioning of the city and its future sustainability. Not only are water resources directly procured and utilized within the city, water is also consumed in the production of other resources, including food and energy. However, these direct and indirect water resources of cities are understudied, with data that are scattered and inaccessible, if they exist at all. This dissertation utilized the principles of the food-energy-water nexus, urban water, material flow analysis/urban metabolism, and urban water governance to discuss the magnitude and importance of water resources in the urban environment. Open data and data availability played an integral role throughout the analysis. First, the availability of direct water volume (drinking water and wastewater) and its embedded energy data were discussed. The lack of existing data prompted the use of open records requests to build a database of urban water and energy data for cities across the United States. The collected data were then evaluated to quantify the state of the urban energy-water nexus. Additionally, the information from this database was compared to other material flows and their water footprints to characterize the extent of direct and indirect water resources in cities. Following the quantification of water resources and their impact in cities from a civil engineering framework, statistical modeling was completed to identify indicators of urban water use considering socioeconomic and environmental factors. Finally, through these studies, the underlying theme of open data in wat…
author: Chini, Christopher
language: en
keywords: Energy-water Nexus, Urban Water Governance, Water Footprints, Urban Metabolism
date published: 2019-02-08T18:39:42Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:42Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/102900