FEW Nexus Tool Survey

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The Moveable Nexus (M-NEX): Design-led urban food, water, and energy management innovation in new boundary conditions of change, is a design research-based effort delivering FEW system assessment tools and pragmatic design solutions through stakeholder engaged living labs in six bioregions across the world. This co-design research initiative is based on three interdisciplinary knowledge platforms of design, evaluation, and participation. Each platform assembles, structures, and synthesizes existing knowledge, tools, data, methods, models and case studies for FEW nexus applications. The following tool compilation is part of the evaluation platform and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF): Award 1832214 and Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this compilation are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organization.

International consortium

• Prof. Wanglin Yan, Keio University (Japan, Lead PI)
• Dr. Bijon Kumar Mitra, Institute of Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) (Japan)
• Prof. Greg Keeffe, Queens University Belfast (UK, PI)
• Mr. Kevin Logan, Maccreanor Lavington (UK)
• Prof. Sami Sayadi, Qatar University (Qatar, PI)
• Asso. Prof. Geoffrey Thün, University of Michigan (USA, PI)
• Prof. Andy van den Dobbelstee, Delft University of Technology (NL, PI)

Duration

• April 2018.4 ~ March 2021.3

Total Budget

• 1,670,883€

Facets of study sites

Partner City	Belfast (BEL)	Doha (DOH)	Detroit (DET)	Sydney (SYD)	Tokyo (TOK)	Amsterdam (AMS)
Main thematic	Divided city	Food security	Vacancy and Capacity building	Urban Development process	Ageing and disaster risk	Co-creation of spatial
Climate	Maritime	Desert	Continental	Subtropical	Subtropical	Maritime
Bioregion	Northern Ireland	Arabian Desert	Great Lakes Basin	Sydney Basin	Kanto Plain & Tama Hills	Atlantic Mixed Forest
Scale	Neighborhood	Precinct: Uni-campus	Metropolitan region	Large Greenfield: 3rd City	Neighborhood	Neighborhood
FEW-focus	F: Diet, E: Algae, W: Flood	F: Local plantation, lowering UHI, E: Solar, W: Drought, reuse,	F: Urban production, E: Waste to energy, W: Great Lakes Basin,	F: Regional food-bowl, E: Large and small hydro, W: Heat	F: Food in urban rooftop/rural, E: Solar, W: Water-river basin	F: High tech, vertical, E: Wind & integrated renewables, W: flood, controlled
Motto	‘The Aquaponic city’	‘The urban water machine’	‘The post-industrial city’	‘The fridge city’	‘WISE city’*1	‘The circular city’
Take away	Technologies	People Engagement	Regional synergies Scalar Cascades	Far future design	Community Engagement	Design with flows for far future
Goal	Existing technologies in the city	Expanding the effectiveness of food production in the city with minimal water availability	How to overcome jurisdictional barriers	Using landscape as cooling machine through plantation, crops and water	Multi-layer FEW cycles	Close FEW cycles at city level
Data	Baseline data	Place based data (QU campus)	Regional jurisdictional data	Regional landscape data	Building and land use data	Flows of FEW data
Method for workshop	Roadshow	Design workshop	Large scale spatial drawing	Creative COCD	Design Workshop & GIS analysis	Stakeholder co-design
Paradigm shifts	2050-2080	2050-2100	2035-2070	2030-2060	2040-2080	2040-2070
Outputs	Part I of few-print: Advanced FEW Technologies in the city into the future	Part II of few-print: Community gardens and permaculture, for higher scales	Part III of few-print: Jurisdictional system, Visualizing Cascading systems and scales	Part IV of few-print: FEW-urban landscapes	Part V of few-print: FEW-integration in local community	Part VI of few-print: Energy cascading / REAP for Food and Water

Note: *1 WISE=Wellness, Intelligent and ICT, S: Sustainable and Smart, E: Ecology, energy, economy. This is the catchphrase of the project in Yokohama City for next Generation of suburban town.

Design-led Nexus Approach

Design is by its nature a trans-disciplinary approach to problem solving, which draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning in order to explore potential innovative solutions to problems [Kimbell, 2011]. Designers explore concrete integrations of knowledge that will combine theory with practice for new productive purposes [Buchanan, 2010], integrating the opinions and needs of multiple stakeholders. In spite of the romantic image that design is a highly personal process, in most cases design proposals are in fact the culmination of shared knowledge and consensus on a specific issue [Kimbell, 2012]. These advantages make a design-led approach particularly appropriate to addressing wicked problems. The integration of food, energy and water is not yet mainstream. and there is no established design methodology in practice. The nexus approach with regards to FEW in particular was not common in urban planning and design because of the complexity of the problem per se, the uncertainty of outcomes, and the difficulty of communication between scientific research and design as it is practiced. This article proposes a design-led approach through the concept of the moveable nexus. The goal is to mobilize natural and social resources in urban spaces with integrated technology and knowledge in order to uncover and carry out FEW management innovations. It is also a response to the call of Sustainable Urban Global Initiative: Food-Water-Energy Nexus (SUGI-nexus)[SUGI, 2016] by Belmont Forum and the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe. In their words they ask us “to move stakeholders to action through dialogue from a sector oriented technocratic approach to one that recognizes more diverse viewpoints and rationalities”.

Nexus Principles

The nexus idea can be traced to works by Ignacy Sachs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in particular with reference to the food and energy nexus in UNU(United Nations University) food-energy program [Sachs, 1980, 1988]. The World Bank worked on the food, water and trade nexus [McCalla, 1997] and later replaced the idea with new concepts, including virtual water, at the Kyoto World Water Forum in 2003 [Allan, 2003a; Merrett, 2003]. The importance of the three nexus pillars of water, energy, and food was officially recognized at the first Nexus Conference in Bonn, Germany 2011 [Hoff, 2011], making that year Nexus Year One. Since then, our understanding on the nexus has been seriously improved. The essence of the nexus thinking can be summarized [Martínez-Martínez & Calvo, 2010; Hoff, 2011; Kurian & Ardakanian, 2015]:

• Investing to sustain ecosystems
• Creating more with less
• Accelerating accessibility

Understanding and acting upon this concept is central to diminishing the human footprint on planetary boundaries [Kurian & Ardakanian, 2015]. Implementation of these principles relies on finding solutions to the question: Where, how, and who will produce food for cities [Yan and Roggema, 2019]:

• Where - the relationship of production and consumption
• How - the relationship between costs and benefits
• Who - relationship between working and living

Moveable Nexus

Initiated by the Belmont Forum SUGI/M-NEX project, the moveable nexus is considered as an innovative methodological package for FEW management and utilization that make use of the spatial, temporal, and service linkages of natural and social resources. It helps designers and practitioners to structure the procedures, knowledge and techniques in design practices with regards to FEW. It is also a moveable platform to deliver the accumulated methods and techniques across cities and countries with regards to practice, with the following three principles:

• to mobilize social and natural resources to create more with less for all the needed with design solutions.
• to move stakeholders to action through cross sectoral dialogue with informed platform of M-NEX.
• to move around local and global to the needed with the support of guiding principles and informed platforms.

The package offers an indication as to how to practice nexus thinking in a way that will lead to its integration with urban planning, architectural design, and environmental policy studies. Ultimately it is a communication platform that can be moved to a design site with the support of scientific data and knowledge.

Implementation Methods

• Six research sites

M-NEX research consortium with seven organizations in six countries (Japan, UK, Qatar, United States, the Netherlands, Australia) has been established, with its study areas being Tokyo-Yokohama, Belfast, Doha, Detroit, Amsterdam, and Sydney. The cities differ in terms of geographical features, bioregions and societal conditions, but from the table it is clear all cities are mature and share several common concerns in terms of sustainability in their urban areas. The project will take the complex sustainability challenges of its involved cities, and communicate FEW design solutions in concrete, visual, and physical ways to stakeholders and residents. This will deepen the understanding of FEW and promote consensus-building on actions plans for future cities. Each country team will determine the research contents in consideration of the local needs and proceed collaboratively. For example, the UK team (Belfast) will work on design of food factories, while the Dutch team (TUD) will focus on energy planning in FEW-nexus. All of the teams will learn from each other and study the potential to incorporate FEW-management into their own cities. Ultimately, they will deliver their research findings, policy recommendations and technical innovations, such as implementation of FEW at a University campus (Doha), revitalization of a post-industrial city (Detroit), and future FEW strategies for consumption-oriented cities (Tokyo-Yokohama, Sydney).

• Charrette Design Workshops

The moveable nexus shall be developed incrementally through a series of design workshops at the above six living labs with all of the partners (see Figure 3). The project engagement will consist of six stakeholder workshops, one in each living lab that engage with key aspects of the FEW, in a bioregional context. This international workshop coincides with one of the (six) participatory workshops in each city. The international team will participate in this workshop and bring their particular skills and knowledge to it. Each of these international workshops has their own focus. The first workshop in Belfast focuses on the creating an Initial vision on the technical food systems and the city. In the second workshop in Doha the focus is on the city farm, stakeholder participation and urban agriculture. Workshop three (Detroit) focuses on climate futures, development of regional scenarios and resilience in light of a changing climate. Workshop four (Sydney) focuses on building Integration, integrating FEW-technologies at user scale. Workshop five (Tokyo) focuses on stocks and flows for regional planning and the nested neighborhood. And the final workshop (Amsterdam) focuses on implementation, from strategy to tactics. Each team will bring its own topics to the international design workshop, and the teams together will refine them and build common design methods, evaluation indicators, and co-creation mechanisms. The teams will bring what they have learned back to their countries, put them into practice in their local Living Labs and undertake action toward the next international workshop. Finally, the knowledge obtained at each workshop will be integrated and provided as expertise and solutions from the M-NEX Project at each level, from building to neighborhood, city, and region.

• Urban Living Lab

Each national team builds an urban living lab in the study area, hold stakeholder and community design workshops, consider local FEW-topics, and develop solutions. The urban living lab in each city is featured with the local social and bioregional context. see "Urban Living Labs" below.

• Data Management