City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

City-Level Decoupling: Urban resource flows and the governance of infrastructure transitions

Table 2.1 The set of socio-technical systems and associated socio-metabolic flow

SYSTEMS

FLOWS

Water from catchment areas/aquifers/seas (via desalination processes) and re-used water (including reclaimed water from sewage plants). Sewage flows into large treatment works (noting that sewage includes useful ingredients such as nutrients, methane and water). Outflows into natural systems.

Technologies, regulatory frameworks and financial processes for supplying water (including dams, pipes, water treatment works, desalination plants, pump stations) and sanitation (in particular sewage treatment works). Technologies, regulatory frameworks and financial processes for supplying energy (from various sources), including generators and grids, passive systems such as solar PV, liquid fuel infrastructures, natural gas infrastructures, bio operations and maintenance. Technologies, regulatory frameworks and financial processes for supplying mobility, such as railways, air- and sea-ports, roads, and pipelines. Technologies, regulatory frameworks and financial processes for supplying solid waste, including the landfills, transfer stations, incinerators, etc.

Energy generated usually from fossil fuels, hydro, nuclear, biomass, solar and other forms of energy.

Bodies and goods in automobiles, motorcycles, trains, buses, airplanes, ships, plus flows through pipelines such as oil, natural gas, etc.

All kinds of solid waste, including nutrients, recyclables, and biogas.

Data, voices, images, etc.

Technologies, regulatory framework and financial processes for supplying

communications infrastructure, including the full range from traditional land-lines, to fibre optic cables and satellite systems.

proportion of the quantity of the flow, can be used to depict the way urban infrastructures direct resource flows through cities. Drawing on the World Bank’s Eco 2 Cities Report which provides the most advanced practitioner guidelines for assessing urban materials, Sankey diagrams can distinguish between five stages in the flow of resources through

that solutions lie only in replicating the technologies that form the centre of conventional networked infrastructures; the informal sector may also be an important source of innovation.

Sankey diagrams, a type of flow diagram in which the width of the arrows indicates the

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