Application of sustainability criteria to the Reggio Emilia water network to support long-term strategic decisions

Population habits and growth are two main factors that lead the urban water system (UWS) to be inadequate in terms of water resources and water infrastructure. Moreover, land use, city expansion, and infrastructure aging add difficulties to deliver safe and reliable drinking water. In order to counteract these detrimental effects, and considering a framework characterized by limited resources availability, metabolism model represents a flexible methodology able to provide support to decision making process. This approach considers UWS as an amount of fluxes, e.g. resources, chemical compounds, energy, costs, emissions, etc., that interact and influence each other. Through the identification of these fluxes, several performance indicators are evaluated, considering different dimensions of sustainability. The governance and rationalization of these fluxes allow to identify the more sustainable strategies of intervention. Urban Metabolism (UM) concept have been developed and applied in many urban fields (Kennedy et al., 2007) (Kennedy et al., 2010) (Liserra et al., 2016). In this thesis, the Reggio Emilia Urban Water System (UWS) and its interconnections are analysed, with the related water infrastructures. The aim of this work is to adopt sustainability criteria in order to provide support for long-term strategic decisions, considering the presence of internal drivers (i.e. population growth) and external drivers (i.e. population migration to the municipal boundary). In this work, an analysis of the UWS of the city of Reggio Emilia is presented, and two different scenarios are performed. In the first case (Business As Usual), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) describe the “every day” dimensions involved in the systems and its components. In the second case (Scenario condition), stress criteria are applied to the water network to know the physical limit associated to its actual topology. In both cases is considered the population growth, in the second migration.