Urban Living Labs: how to enable inclusive transdisciplinary research?

The Urban Living Lab (ULL) approach has the potential to create enabling environments for social learning and to be a successful arena for innovative local collaboration in knowledge co-creation and experimentation in the context of research and practice in sustainability transitions. Nevertheless, complex issues such as the urban Food-Water-Energy (FWE) Nexus present a challenge to the realization of such ULL, especially regarding their inclusiveness.We present ULL as a frame for a local knowledge co-creation and participation approach based on the project "Creating Interfaces - Building capacity for integrated governance at the Food-Water-Energy-nexus in cities on the water". This project aims at making FWE Nexus linkages better understandable to the stakeholders (citizens and associations, city government, science, businesses), and to facilitate cooperation and knowledge exchange among them. This paper focuses on and discusses inclusiveness as a key aspect and challenge of ULLs and on what literature and our experiences in this regard suggest for the advancement of the concept of ULL towards ULL 2.0. These findings often also relate to framing transdisciplinary research in a wider sense.

Minimizing greenhouse gas emissions of an industrial wastewater treatment plant in terms of water–energy nexus

In this paper, (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions of an industrial wastewater treatment plant were monitored. GHG emissions originated from treatment processes were considered as the direct emissions and determined using closed chamber method. GHG emission due to energy consumption was regarded as the indirect emissions. In the second stage of the study, it was aimed to reduce GHG emissions in terms of water–energy nexus. If the plant is operated under design conditions, energy consumption would be lower according to water–energy nexus. Also, the effect of design conditions on GHG emissions was investigated. Firstly, the correlation was defined between GHG emissions and operational parameters in terms of chemical oxygen demand (COD) and wastewater flow rate using Monte Carlo simulation. Then, design COD and wastewater flow rate were simulated to determine the possible GHG emission for each month. The simulation results show that minimization of GHG emissions might be possible if wastewater plant is operated under design conditions. The minimum greenhouse gas emission in the result of the simulation study is 8.25 kg CO2-eq/d if the plant is operated under design COD and flow rate. Total reduction in GHG emissions is approximately 30% if the plant is operated under design conditions.