Where nothing ever grows
No rain nor rivers flow
Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?

I grew up with Band Aid and Bob Geldof. Their 1984 song ”Do they know it’s Christmas” is one of those soundtracks of my youth; the songs you’ve heard so many times that you’ve stopped listening. Like so many other everyday things, they blend into the wallpaper and you stop noticing what’s special about them.

But the other day, I accidentally really listened. Band Aid sings about starvation, vulnerability, and… water. The song came about to raise awareness, and above all money, for the famine in Ethiopia brought about by drought. Geldof and his friends did a lot to bring attention to the drought problem. But now more than 30 years later, water is still a huge global challenge. For reaching SDG6 on water and sanitation, drastic increases in capital and O&M expenditure will be needed if conventional technology (read piped water and water-borne sanitation) is to be employed. In 2016, a World Bank team calculated the annual investment need to around 200 Billion USD per year up to 2030. That requires a 300% increase of sector investments.

Clearly we need to rethink water and sanitation solutions to meet SDGs. As the head of UNESCO Irina Bokova pointed out recently, we need to engage science and innovation much more. Maybe we have just gotten so used doing things the same old way that we have stopped noticing that we could do things differently. Just like Bob Geldof’s song, our WASH technologies have blended into the wallpaper.

So how have we at WaterCentre@KTH confronted this need for innovation in the past year?

First of all we have tried to make our own university a more open place for the exchange of ideas, and water knowledge in general, with the surrounding society. We have organised meetings engaging with practitioners and entrepreneurs, with politicians and bureaucrats, with students and school kids, with other citizens and of course with other scholars. Examples are our lunch seminars, a science fair at the Nobel Museum, the seminar and workshops held in at our launch in March and of course, a website, our LinkedIn-network and this Blog. Our communicative efforts go far beyond the presentation of results. To make a difference in society, we must also listen and not just speak.

Secondly, we have pushed for collaborations where our job is to create new and ‘crazy’ combinations of expertise. We have brought together KTH experts in business management, energy, nanotechnology, chemistry, biology and robotics, city planning, history, computer science and electronics… and yes; the occasional water engineer. All this to find new approaches to water challenges in society and “open up” designs that have been closed for a very long time. In our collaborative efforts we have worked together with our long-standing partners City of Stockholm, IVL, and SEI. We have also strengthened our relationship with a diverse set of organisations like Water Aid, Jehander AB, Värmdö municipality and Race for the Baltic.

Thirdly, we have worked hard to leverage resources for innovation and research that will make an impact. Just like all researchers, we have submitted a string of applications as part of wide consortia and entered many other types of processes aimed for catalysing new research and innovation projects, in Sweden and globally. One of the positive outcomes of our catalytic work is a deepened collaboration with City of Stockholm around digitalisation in water and other infrastructure. Stockholms Stadshus AB – the holding company of the city’s utility companies in water, waste, energy, housing, ports, heating, and more – will finance a doctoral student at KTH in digitalisation and infrastructure with focus on water. This is a step towards a closer collaboration between the university and the city, and a model to ensure that we work towards societal goals.

Will this make a difference for the global challenges of water? Could a collaboration with Värmdö have any bearing on water shortage in Ethiopia? Yes it could. We are past the point in history when solutions are developed in the (post-)industrial North and then exported to the global South. As we have seen from other parts of industry, not least in mobile banking, ICT and mobility, solutions that develop in places like Kenya or India may well find a market in richer countries. Disruptive innovation in water or energy will affect us in the North as well as the South and we can learn from each other.

So as we move forward into 2018 looking for innovative, sustainable WASH solutions, the global outlook is with us also in the local setting. The importance is the quality of the cooperation and the trust we create in our partnerships. With that trust, we dare question things around us; the things that emerge out of the wallpaper; the things that we can change. And we can look into the future with curiosity and optimism.

Thanks for a fascinating 2017 – and wishing you all a Happy New Year!!

David Nilsson

Director, WaterCentre@KTH

Slow-down, infiltrate, filter. These are the reassuring mantras at the heart of efforts to emulate the drainage patterns of natural systems and a practical strategy to mitigate the increasingly severe effects of urban flooding. Departing from the traditional hard-surfaced approach of “pave, pipe and pump” this naturalised approach to drainage represents the blue strand in the budding concept of “Green Infrastructure” (GI) which weaves together stormwater management, landscape, ecology, air quality, climate change adaptation, public health and recreation in the urban setting.

All infrastructure development requires significant space and careful planning. Green infrastructure even more so, as water is encouraged to slow, stop, infiltrate and evaporate where it falls. At the same time, the intensity of severe rainfall events is rising in many regions, requiring more space to deal with ever-increasing flows. So what does sustainable drainage and green infrastructure mean in different cities, especially for rapidly growing cities like Nairobi, Kampala or Lagos where the majority of new urban residents will live in low-income, dense and “informal” neighbourhoods where there is little space?

Many cities rightly feted for their achievements in Green Infrastructure – for example Portland, Melbourne, or Stockholm – represent different geographies. But they are also typically wet and temperate, well-resourced, and well-coordinated. Not seldom are they re-generating underutilised spaces when implementing GI approaches (e.g. Hammarby Sjöstad). Other successful strategies make use of new opportunities created by the vacation of previously occupied land (e.g. in legacy cities like Detroit).

Image: Hammarby Sjöstad (Mikael Sjöberg/mediabank.visitstockholm.com). Top Image: Kibera rooftops (Joe Mulligan).

Image: Green Infrastructure development in the Cody Rouge area of Detroit (Joe Mulligan)

Green Infrastructure in the East African city: a pipe-dream?

In the rapidly growing cities where we are working in East Africa the catch-all concept of Green Infrastructure could have significant co-benefits, but also faces some knotty challenges. In many cities the public land along natural drainage paths is inhabited by the city’s poorest and most vulnerable (see for example Parikh et al, 2012); residents’ solution to a lack of affordable housing. The density, imperviousness and lack of sanitation services in these settlements create hotspots of flooding and public health risks while leaving little physical or political space to manoeuvre. Divisive planning regulation, sometimes stuck in the colonial era, increasingly intense extreme rainfall events, and the appropriation of green space into dense developments through both “formal” and “informal” processes compound the physical and social problems.

Video: flash flooding after 15 minutes rain in Andolo, Kibera (Pascal Kipkemboi)

A discussion on the potential and constraints of GI in rapidly growing cities is now timely with new investments in the networked and stacked infrastructures of roads, drainage, water and sewerage, as well as more holistic approaches to “slum-upgrading”, being planned in many cities. At the same time there is the risk of locking-in unsustainable practices and long-life infrastructures. In Nairobi, today there is concern that the proposed city-wide Stormwater Masterplan will encourage traditional hard drainage solutions that don’t activate the potential of green and open spaces and that are inflexible to future climate change.

Site, Settlement, Watershed – Networking Green Infrastructure from the Bottom-Up

As major upgrading works take time to plan and implement we also need to think about interim improvements to reduce daily risks for residents. In our work at KDI we have been piloting a number of sustainable drainage techniques in the Kibera neighbourhood of Nairobi at the very local scale. In practical terms, these include GI elements such as planted revetments, bamboo plantation for erosion control, structured detention and infiltration (using soft drink crates instead of expensive “stormblocs”) and rainwater harvesting. Even when harder drainage solutions are the only spatially viable solution, there are opportunities to improve public health, access and safety, and to create green, open and productive public space for social interactions, play and economic activity.

Image: Green Infrastructure and Public Space at the small scale in the Kibera settlement (Joe Mulligan/Pascal Kipkemboi)

At the larger scale Green Infrastructure in dense urban areas implies some unavoidable trade-offs. The question is; can residents and local authorities come together to discuss acceptable levels of risk and negotiate appropriate re-housing while creating space for social and ecological functions? The success of enumeration and participation processes in Kibera run by intermediaries such as Slum Dwellers International and Akiba Mashinani Trust (see Mitra et al, 2017) suggest this could be possible. If layers of local knowledge, scientific understanding of flooding, appropriate re-housing and integrated planning can be combined with green infrastructure as an organising framework, the co-benefits of ecological remediation, climate change adaptation, improved services and local development opportunities could be realised. That’s a lot to factor in, but demonstrating that GI techniques can actually work in dense, urban and low-income areas at the small scale might be a starting point for inserting them into larger discussions.

Image: A conceptual “Rivers and People” plan by KDI in 2016 for the co-development and rehabilitation of the Ngong River in Kibera.

Joe Mulligan, is a civil and environmental engineer and associate director of KDI working on water and drainage strategies in multiple contexts for more than ten years. He is also an industrial PhD student at KTH Division of Strategic Sustainability Studies.

Vera Bukachi is a civil engineer and the senior research coordinator in KDI’s office in Nairobi and is completing a PhD at University College London’s Centre for Urban Sustainability and Resilience where she has also taught urban drainage and flooding.

The water closet was invented at least 3,000 years ago. Well, not in its present form, of course. But simple flush toilets were used in the early Mediterranean cultures of Crete, and  then adopted by the Romans. Who handed them down to the modern Europeans much later. Isn’t it puzzling that the flush toilet is still considered the pinnacle of sanitation innovation in most parts of the world? Something that everyone  somehow aspires to have. Are there any other examples of technologies that have become stabilised in the same manner? I mean, seriously; after three thousand years, couldn’t we really have come up with something smarter? Stabilised is hardly the term to give justice to the situation; fossilised is probably more fitting.

This is just one of the many examples of how we have come to take certain things about water for granted. The ways we use and manage this scarce and vital resource through technology, our practices, values and attitudes have developed over hundreds and thousands of years. Through time, we have established patterns and socio-technical systems, some of which are now increasingly difficult to change. In many cases, we have become blind to our own behaviour, since we have gotten so used to them. The human cognition is triggered by anomalies, not stability, after all. We simply stop registering patterns that remain the same year after year, decade after decade. Now, in a world that is changing fast, politically, economically, demographically and environmentally, we run the risk of not being able to adapt fast enough.

More of the doom-and-gloom, anyone? Actually, that is not what this blog is about. To the contrary; we think this blog is about curiosity. At this very moment in time, there is a need to reflect and rethink water, so as to start imagining other patterns. Other ways of managing, using, thinking and valuing water. What we think is needed is an enlarged space to explore these ‘others’ and to encourage a reflective practice in both academia and in the water professions. And there’s a couple of way of doing that.

One is by breaking up truths about who holds the “privilege of problem formulation ” – as it once was put by Swedish philosopher and author Lars Gustafsson. Let many different voices be heard!

Another is by moving your own frame of reference. If we are – for instance – to study the water and sewerage systems in Sweden from the viewpoint of say Kenya or Uganda, you also start seeing new things. In fact, you’ll note that there might be more innovation activity going on in places like Kampala, Nairobi or Dar es Salaam, than in most Swedish municipalities, when it comes to digital payments and business models, innovative distribution methods, container-based sanitation, nutrient recovery etc. Our own patterns suddenly becomes visible, and you start asking questions around them again. What you can’t see; you can’t change.

Finally, a bit of boldness is required. Stupid ideas are often just stupid. But we must still have the courage to say them out loud. Sometimes they are not stupid at all at closer look. Innovation history is full of examples where new and first-glance ‘stupid’ ideas later revolutionised entire branches. And change can come fast. Ask the managers of FACIT, a world-leading office machine manufacturer who missed the shift from mechanical to electronic calculators and rapidly went out of business…

In this blog we will ask of scientists, practitioners and others, to reflect on what could be done differently when it comes to water, but also what works already. Can we re-think some parts? What could a different future look like? How can we refill our stock of knowledge, practices, values and attitudes for a water-wiser world?

Please leave comments if you want to add your own perspective to a post on this blog. Or contact us on watercentre@kth.se

Dive in!

David Nilsson, Director WaterCentre@KTH

KTH Royal Institute of Technology