WP 4 - Urban water metabolism and the interconnected nature of water
Research Description
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Work Package 4 explores the changing Urban Water Metabolism of Accra against the background of accelerating urbanization and environmental change processes, and seeks to map the concrete impacts of these processes on urban water security.
The concept of the Urban Water Metabolism emphasizes the interconnected and political nature of water. It also serves as an integrative analytical framework to study dynamic human-environment relations in the urban water sphere from an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, the framework focuses on the interactions between the biophysical, economic, technological, and sociopolitical dimensions of urban water flows. The overarching research question that drives the inquiry under Work Package 4 is: "How can urban metabolic processes be conceptually understood and practically analyzed, with a specific focus on the politicized socio-material flows of urban water under accelerating urbanization?" In order to answer this question, the Work Package develops and tests a novel, integrated approach to urban metabolic analysis that aims to combine classical industrial ecology with insights from socio-hydrology and political ecology to shed light on the nested nature of multiple social and material metabolic processes that shape, and are in turn shaped by, the urban environment. |
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