Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland.
ETH Zürich, Institute of Environmental Engineering, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland.
Environ Sci Technol. 2020 May 5;54(9):5312-5322. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.9b05222. Epub 2020 Apr 20.
Recent developments in high- and middle-income countries have exhibited a shift from conventional urban water systems to alternative solutions that are more diverse in source separation, decentralization, and modularization. These solutions include nongrid, small-grid, and hybrid systems to address such pressing global challenges as climate change, eutrophication, and rapid urbanization. They close loops, recover valuable resources, and adapt quickly to changing boundary conditions such as population size. Moving to such alternative solutions requires both technical and social innovations to coevolve over time into integrated socio-technical urban water systems. Current implementations of alternative systems in high- and middle-income countries are promising, but they also underline the need for research questions to be addressed from technical, social, and transformative perspectives. Future research should pursue a transdisciplinary research approach to generating evidence through socio-technical "lighthouse" projects that apply alternative urban water systems at scale. Such research should leverage experiences from these projects in diverse socio-economic contexts, identify their potentials and limitations from an integrated perspective, and share their successes and failures across the urban water sector.
高收入和中等收入国家的最新发展趋势表明，其正逐渐摒弃传统的城市供水系统，转而采用更加多样化的源分离、分散化和模块化替代解决方案。这些方案包括无网格、小网格和混合系统，旨在应对气候变化、富营养化和快速城市化等紧迫的全球性挑战。它们可以实现资源的闭环回收，并且能够快速适应人口规模等边界条件的变化。转向此类替代解决方案需要技术和社会创新，随着时间的推移共同发展成为综合的社会技术型城市供水系统。目前，高收入和中等收入国家替代系统的实施情况令人鼓舞，但也突显了需要从技术、社会和变革性视角来解决研究问题。未来的研究应采用跨学科的研究方法，通过具有社会技术创新性的“灯塔”项目来生成证据，这些项目将在更大规模上应用替代型城市供水系统。此类研究应借鉴不同社会经济背景下这些项目的经验，从综合视角确定其潜力和局限性，并在城市供水部门内分享其成功和失败经验。
