Green Workshop – Shifting the flows, pulling the strings: Stocks, flows, and their dynamics

Green mobile workshop – Water challenges

The objective of this workshop was to give an overview of the available water resources in Egypt and the related challenges facing the country. Managing the Nile water, which represents 97% of the Egyptian water resources, were at the core. The day gave the participants information on how the Nile water was managed in ancient times and how it is managed today.

The day started with a presentation at the meeting point, Dusit Thani Hotel. The group then moved to El Qanater El Khayreya – the main destination. El Qanater El Khayreya is one of the major cities of El Qalyubiya governorate towards the north of Cairo, where the Nile splits into the Damietta and Rosetta Branches marking the beginning of the Nile Delta.

It is located about 22km away from Cairo and is admired for the wide range of gardens, parks and the agricultural area surrounding it. The city’s name El Qanater El Khayreya – meaning “The Dams of Welfare” – is driven from the Mohammed Ali Barrage that was built in 1840 with the purpose of storing water and protecting the delta from high floods. From the barrage, various channels were caved to distribute water to the west, center and east of the Delta. The Barrage itself is divided into two sections: one for Damietta Branch and the other for Rosetta Branch.

Excursion leader profile

Hani Sewilam is a professor of water resources management and sustainable development at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and the founding director of the Center for Applied Research on the Environment and Sustainability (CARES). He is also the Managing Director of the UNESCO Chair on Hydrological Changes and Water Resources Management at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. Hani Sewilam also coordinated the capacity development activities of the United Nations Water between 2010 and 2011. He managed international research and capacity building projects in 21 countries.

To harness inherent, yet untapped opportunities of the building stock as a more robust resource, it is essential to have a fundamental understanding of its material vitality. The concept of urban metabolism is crucial to such an understanding with regard to urban systems and the quantification of flows in an out of cities, [3,4,5] yet this conventional focus must be expanded to encompass multiple interdependencies among manifold physical flows and anthropogenic processes across space and time. [6]

Cities manifest complex systems in which natural and human processes interact to fabricate an environment that in turn has its own innate physical dynamics. Understanding the multi-scalar dimensions of these dynamics to identify leverage points toward more sustainable urban systems will be the core focus of the workshop.

During this workshop we will explore four nested, interrelated temporal dynamics. The natural cycles that are daily or seasonal interact with bio-based material production and energy use patterns. The building life cycle, understood in terms of material use in buildings, operations, and demolition/recycling, represents still another cycle that typically spans from several decades to even centuries. Humans too are bound by certain cycles. Changing lifestyle patterns across different stages of individual and collective lifespans has different resource and environmental implications, as does the changing demographic profile. And finally, cities evolve over time, growing rapidly or shrinking due to socioeconomic, resource-related, or environmental factors as well as particular policy and planning decisions.

Can we better integrate these compound dynamics conceptually and analytically, while examining their practical implications for material and energy flows? How do changes in a specific flow influence another? Can multi-scalar understandings of material and energy flows and their roles in the powering the dynamics of cities be used to pull the strings and reorient the course of our socio-technical world? The workshop “Shifting the flows, pulling the strings: Stocks, flows, and their dynamic” will accordingly explore potential paths toward sustainable urbanization and urban regeneration.

References

1. Thomas F. Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” Theory and society 31 (February 2002): 35-74.
2. Bai, X., Dawson, R.J., Ürge-Vorsatz, D., Delgado, G.C., Salisu, A.B., Dhakal, S., Dodman, D., Leonardsen, L., Masson-Delmotte, V., Roberts, D.C. and Schultz, S., 2018. Six research priorities for cities and climate change. Nature, 555(7694), pp.23-25.
3. Wolman, A., 1965. The metabolism of cities. Scientific American, 213(3), pp.178-193.
4. Newcombe, K., Kalma, J.D. and Aston, A.R., 1978. The metabolism of a city: the case of Hong Kong. Ambio, pp.3-15.
5. Pincetl, S., Bunje, P. and Holmes, T., 2012. An expanded urban metabolism method: Toward a systems approach for assessing urban energy processes and causes. Landscape and urban planning, 107(3), pp.193-202.
6. Bai, X., 2016. Eight energy and material flow characteristics of urban ecosystems. Ambio, 45(7), pp.819-830.