Futurebuild 2024: the future is water smart communities
Enabling Water Smart Communities’ (EWSC) discovery phase recently broke cover with new web content, enabling principles and academic insights. George Warren (Anglian Water), Bec Chau (Arup) and Ella Foggitt (University of Manchester) presented a summary to the Futurebuild expo in March.
George Warren, Ella Foggitt and Rebecca Chau discussing the Enabling Water Smart Communities project at the Futurebuild Conference, March 2024
Common, shared risks are bringing housing and water closer together. Both the water sector and housing increasingly need to consider climate change impacts. Population growth, demographic change and nature decline add to this picture. Flood, drought and water scarcity, and issues like nutrient neutrality present challenges for both sectors.
There are many definitions of a water smart community, but essentially it’s delivering new development that harnesses and uses water in the most sustainable manner for the communities who live there.
There is no reason why we should be looking at SuDS or biodiversity net gain and not also thinking about drought or flood resilience too. This needs to engage a lot of stakeholders but few of them have a major enabling role in unlocking the kind of solutions we need to see more of.
And there are no one-size-fits-all answers. So EWSC is looking at different development contents: public sector housing, private sector, community-led and even water sector-led developments which face different nuanced challenges and opportunities. As a water industry-led project, a fundamental question is how can water companies act as anchor institutions to unlock the benefits in their regions?
How might we enable water smart communities?
Like all wicked problems we can’t just use technology to achieve integrated water management. We need regulation, incentives, institutional and social practices to imagine society now and in the future, whilst looking for examples of good practice from around the world.
The project has developed a model which harnesses three enabling principles: the criticality of value, assets and stewardship. The approach recognises the diversity of contexts in which these three factors arise.
Assets can be physical and non-physical, and those which are owned and which are not. Too often there is an over-emphasis on physical, owned assets as opposed to knowledge, skills, jobs, digital services and other non-physical assets.
It’s not possible to think about assets without also thinking about the values they deliver and the necessary stewardship to ensure these values endure.
Values are critical to unlocking EWSC. They are driven by must-do, should-do and could-do actions. These apply differently to different stakeholders and it is important to understand what individuals value, how multiple partners can align around shared values and how these shared values can deliver enhanced resilience.
Stewardship is essential to looking after water as a common good. It underpins the enabling of water smart communities by ensuring the components of values and assets endure and are sustainable.
In an age of systems-awareness there is an important spatial component to the EWSC approach. An EWSC framework sets out a territory for action: there are pathways (e.g. knowledge), linked actions (e.g. consequences) and ripple effects (e.g. policies) that work through the water-housing system, having a bearing on the ability to deliver effective water smart communities.
Community engagement
Shifting social norms and how people interact with their homes, the natural environment and water can have major benefits for water management. Water-intensive activities such as jet washing and practices that reduce rainfall infiltration such as paved gardens go against the ambitions of water smart communities. So EWSC’s research is looking at how it might be possible to unlock more sustainable behaviours, practices and routines.
EWSC is also using a range of techniques to explore visions of water smart communities. There are three components to this: clarifying the challenge, understanding the diversity of how water smart communities could look and be lived in, and finally enabling more sustainable living through design. The latter component seeks to uncover what might be possible to design into new-build homes. Crucially, it also looks to prevent unintended outcomes of unsighted design or development decisions.
A look across masterplans, housing brochures, water and housing strategies in the UK found that existing visions of water smart communities featured communal gardening as a common component, aimed to promote social cohesion and shared values and interests. Upscaling these approaches offers the opportunity to unlock greater water savings from technologies including rainwater harvesting.
However, other apparently sustainable behaviours could have a negative effect on water use. Active travel, for example, is linked to increased showering and laundering. Without accompanying changes to social norms and conventions on hygiene, there could be an associated increase in water demand.
Three areas of experimentation
All this points to there being many layers to successfully achieving water smart communities. So it’s essential to test the theory and bring it to life. To do this the project is exploring the enabling principles in three contexts:
- Partnership delivery for water smart communities (testing community-led stewardship);
- On-site water reuse (creating clear guidance for community-scale water reuse); and
- Water for people and places (how place-based institutions like local authorities and water companies can facilitate shared value models that enable water smart communities).
There are challenges to be unpacked with all of these. Digging into water reuse as an example, currently it’s not possible to provide non-potable water to properties for use. This is due to an interpretation of the Water Industry Act 1991 and the Water Supply (Water Quality) Regulations 2016. Anglian Water are working closely with Defra to understand the risks and mitigation options to overcome this.
But if this blocker was removed, there are further questions: Could the water industry actually respond quickly to deliver water reuse and dual pipe systems? How could water companies adopt these systems? The industry needs to agree what is needed and how it could be developed into a regulated market.
We have a reasonable understanding of the costs of rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse in an individual dwelling. But what are the costs at a community scale? Location, density of the development and more will impact this. There will be considerations of collection, treatment and design of the distribution network, including internal pipework.
All these collection, treatment and distribution considerations mean there is practically no understanding of the costs of delivering at this kind of scale of development. At some point though, community scale reuse will become cheaper than on-plot reuse. This understanding needs to be able to inform local plan development, particularly in water stressed areas where there may be a need to deliver water consumption levels of 80 litres per person per day.
Water smart communities clearly won’t be mainstreamed overnight. But the project has a strong ambition to build the understanding and evidence base that will enable a more sustainable approach for the years to come beyond the end of the project life in 2025.