The Nexus City: Researching connectivity between networks and flows of urban food, energy, and water

Summary:

Sustainable use and supply of natural resources dedicated to feeding urban life are becoming increasingly complex in a time of rapid urbanization and climate change. Cities require large amounts of resources, such as Water, Energy, and Food (WEF), as inputs to feed in processes of provisioning in order to provide with services to their inhabitants. The provisioning of these resources has been characteristic for not consciously reflecting on their possible synergies and trade-offs. Practitioners, and policy and decision-makers have often treated WEF as separate domains, while ignoring their interconnectedness. Sustainable governance of (WEF) requires, then, innovative and cross-sectorial systems of provisioning and ways of thinking. This is crucial for identifying and understanding the governance steering points to provide sustainable urban WEF.  In this regard, this Ph.D. research contributes to an ‘Urban Nexus’ perspective which assumes that WEF resource networks interact and relate to one another in achieving urban sustainable development.