FAPESP-ESRC-NWO Joint Call Sustainable Urban Development Resilience and vulnerability at the urban Nexus of food, water, energy and the environment

Cities are complex networked spaces. Due to rural-urban migration and climate change, augmented by other pressures (e.g. from 'global' markets), provisioning of many basic services and commodities such as food, water and energy requires constant adaptation and reform. With increased demand on these services, there are urgent needs to improve access in an equitable way, increase efficiency of use, and to preserve the ecosystems that support the natural resources upon which these services depend. However, mainstream interventions aimed at creating 'resilient' urban food, water and energy systems' are associated with a number of critical challenges. These are the focus of our research.
First, access to key services is unevenly distributed among city dwellers. With vulnerability (understood as 'the inability of an individual or group to cope with adversities), being experienced by the urban poor more acutely than other social classes Both poverty and vulnerability may be exacerbated by the unequal provisioning of key services.
Second, the material flows and infrastructures involved in provisioning basic services are deeply interdependent. This interdependence has recently gained considerable international policy attention under the rubric of the 'Nexus' of food, water, energy and the environment/climate. Associated with the Nexus are, a) trade-offs such as those encountered in water use for provisioning bio-energy instead of food; b) aggravations when one sector's problems (such as water pollution) impair others (e.g. food provision); and c) synergies that arise, for example, when removing a barrier to energy access streamlines flows of food and/or water. Our research examines how these three sets of challenges interact. For example how vulnerability to water contamination may be exacerbated by vulnerability to hunger and lack of access to energy. We will explore how any new vulnerabilities engendered by a social, technological or ecological 'events' interact with existing forms of insecurity and injustice. For instance, squatters cultivating a peri-urban riverbed for their own food provision may be most directly affected by cyclical flooding. Specifically the project aims to:
1.Examine how vulnerabilities within urban communities are co-constituted with the trade-offs (the use of a resource for one service reducing availability for another e.g water use for bioenergy affecting food production) and aggravations (the problems in one sector affecting another - e.g water pollution affecting food) at the food, water and environment nexus, in three highly-dynamic cities in East Africa, Brazil and Europe.
2. Utilise dynamic maps of vulnerabilities amongst urban populations to inform resilience-building efforts led by public policy and other practitioners. In particular to examine opportunities for urban governance to exploit the synergies (e.g when removing barriers to energy access improves flows of food and water) of the urban Nexus, and reconfigure the trade-offs towards both resilience and equity.
Focussing on access to infrastructures and resource flows by the urban poor in three mid-sized cities in East Africa, Brazil and Eastern Europe, the project engages with the two policy areas of 'poverty, inequality and vulnerability' and 'infrastructure and the built environment'. Through participatory vision-building workshops and inter-city exchanges of policymakers and NGO representatives, the project attempts to involve these expected beneficiaries directly in the research process. Placing central importance on users' practices and their (re)connection with policy-led interventions. Our 'ecology of practice' approach will ultimately contribute new insights into the deepening of democracy in urban governance. To facilitate broad-based communication, the project's key research outputs (frames, methodologies, findings) will be converted into policy briefs, blog posts, anonymized digital archives and teaching materials for schools.

The project is designed with societal, policy and research impact in mind. The target audiences of the project include local authorities, the urban poor and other practitioners (such as engineers and NGOs) and researchers. Societally, the primary beneficiaries of the project are expected to be urban practitioners (policy-makers/planners, engineers/designers, service providers, NGOs, and poor end-users). By placing central importance on users' practices in governance of the urban Nexus, the project will provide new insights on how to deepen the democratisation of urban governance in practice. Through that and other core project activities, we aim to meaningfully engage with policymakers and help design governance strategies that better reflect the complexity of the urban Nexus and are better connected with practices of end-users. In this way, we aim to contribute to the reduction of urban vulnerabilities and related poverty issues in the three cities studied, while consolidating insights to improve pro-poor urban governance in other cities worldwide. We will also work with NGOs and academic bodies in the three cities to identify ways to sustain the dialogue and collaboration (in the long-run) between policy practitioners and (poorer) end-users, stimulated through the participatory vision-building workshops.

The vision-building workshops we aim to organise in each city for relevant practitioners (e.g., planners, engineers, implementers, NGOs, end users) will enable co-production of knowledge through the a) exchange of knowledge and experience about the urban nexuses of basic services and the implications for vulnerability, and b) identifying new pathways of (re)connecting their strategies with practices of end-users of basic services. In addition, we will organise a workshop with ICLEI in Brazil, during which we will provide guidance for stakeholders on how to fully exploit the outputs of the project and test our impact strategy.

To reach daily users, we will collaborate with local journalists to publish articles in local-language newspapers and maintain a webpage which will host blogs, interview responses, videos, photographs and alternative practices in chosen geographic sites. This material will be clearly organised by location, as well as by topic and date, and readers' comments on the blogs encouraged (and monitored). Creating such interactive data platforms responds to a new phase of media literacy for stakeholders and provides innovative ways of communicating research methods and results to stakeholder communities. The integrated use of document study, shadowing and participatory vision-building will permit an innovative collation and presentation of layers of research output, made freely available to stakeholder communities (for example public schools) on the project's webpage. This dissemination strategy provides tools for more inclusive and collaborative governance, with the aim of enhancing social justice and building resilience for sustainable urban development.

To engage with the academic community (especially in the areas of urban governance, development studies, science and technology studies and human geography, we will organise a final conference on 'Nexuses of Sustainable Urban Development' at WU for about 80 researchers; we will present our findings at, at least, 3 international conferences; and publish 2 articles in open access journals. In addition, all resources will be made openly available after the due process of ethical review.