Submitted by Michael Mascarenhas on
Throughout the 20th century, American cities have built centralized drinking and wastewater infrastructure, which can be credited with improving public health and preventing environmental pollution. Centralized infrastructure has generally been effective at providing equitable drinking water and wastewater services in cities where it serves the entire population, but as these systems age disparities are emerging.
Much of the nation’s existing centralized water infrastructure was built more than 50 years ago and is coming to the end of its design life. There is an urgent need to reimagine and revitalize the nation’s urban water infrastructure – and decentralized (on-site or neighborhood-scale) systems for wastewater treatment and reuse may help do so. Decentralized water systems are attracting increasing interest from water engineers and designers because they can foster water system resilience by expanding the portfolio of source waters from which a city depends. They can also provide redundancy and flexibility to a centralized water system in the case of shocks like earthquakes or other water supply disruptions. In addition, onsite water systems can be designed modularly and can efficiently treat and reuse wastewater near the site where it is produced. For these reasons, decentralized urban water systems are likely to increase in prevalence in the future.
However, decentralized water systems are prone to disparities, since they often rely upon smaller communities or organizations for funding, construction, operation, and maintenance. This research seeks to understand if there are ways in which onsite water systems can evolve that decreases disparities over time. Can the regulatory, institutional, social, technical or political frameworks that enable onsite be reuse be set up in such a way that decentralized systems can assist in alleviating historical inequalities in access to water and wastewater services? What forms of governance and institutional structures can lead to most the equitable outcomes for onsite reuse? More broadly, this research seeks to understand how societies can build social protections into engineering models for essential water infrastructure for water supply and wastewater treatment to ensure equity. These issues of equity entail both an equal distribution of benefits and risks within and among varying racial, socio-economic, and other demographic groups, as well as equal participation and representation in decision-making.
To address these questions, we propose to combine innovative technology development and testing for onsite water systems with rigorous social science methods including focus groups and interviews with decision-makers and onsite system users, ethnographic field methods, and historical and policy analysis to understand ways in which decentralized water systems are envisioned by engineers and designers, and to assess the equity implications of these designs. A fundamentally interdisciplinary approach that includes both engineering research into the technologies for onsite reuse with social science to understand the human systems governing their implementation is essential for this project. Grounded in case studies in San Francisco [and any other places], this research will develop a framework for assessing and guiding the implementation of equitable onsite water reuse.
To collect archival and policy data on water infrastructure in the state of California.
To examine the impacts of the impacts of the State's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).
Undergraduate student in S&E with interest in water and sustainability.