Potential Self-Sufficiency in Energy, Water, and Nutrients in a Swedish Urban Neighborhood: Codesign and Evaluation of a Decentralized and Integrated Infrastructure System

The development of new urban areas offers a unique opportunity to improve urban resource management, where a more local resource provisioning, through decentralized and integrated infrastructure systems, can be put forward as an alternative approach for potentially reducing the environmental impact and increasing the resilience of vital functions. This study is based on a transdisciplinary workshop series with local stakeholders in the Swedish municipality of Knivsta, where a conceptual model illustrating a future decentralized and integrated infrastructure system was iteratively developed, resulting in a possible design with high societal relevance and feasibility due to this transdisciplinary process. The performance of selected solutions, in terms of the annual level of self-sufficiency in energy, water, and nutrients, was quantified, where the potential for a local provisioning of resources in a typical multifamily building neighborhood in Knivsta was up to 66% for heat, 24% for transportation, and 38% for vegetable supply. For a neighborhood with the same population, but with single-family houses requiring a larger area for both the buildings and private gardens per person, the potential was 31% for heat, 10% for transportation, and 210% for vegetable supply. Electricity, water, and graywater management could be fully supplied in all studied cases. Our findings demonstrate that decentralization and integration can provide important opportunities for utilizing resources in the urban environment, contributing to the desired functions of energy, water, and nutrients, even in countries with relatively cold and dark climates, although these are not enough for urban areas to be fully self-sufficient with their current levels of resource consumption.