Co-designing grounded visualisations of the Food-Water-Energy nexus to enable urban sustainability transformations

Cámara-Menoyo, C., Porto de Albuquerque, J. , Suchomska, J., Tregonning, G. and McInerny, G. (2024) Co-designing grounded visualisations of the Food-Water-Energy nexus to enable urban sustainability transformations. Environmental Science and Policy, 154, 103712. (doi: 10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103712)

Abstract

In the past few years, the Food-Water-Energy (FWE) Nexus has emerged as a key concept to address the complex relationships and interdependencies between food, water, and energy systems. Cities are an important context for understanding the FWE nexus given their significant footprints and complex socio-ecological systems, but researchers have only recently started to explore an explicit urban perspective on food, water, and energy interrelationships. This paper tackles a particularly significant knowledge gap in this context by introducing an approach to co-design visualisations of the FWE nexus that are understandable and actionable for the various stakeholders involved in urban governance such as citizens, communities, governments, non-governmental and private-sector organisations. Drawing on user-centred design and inspired by the dialogic pedagogy of Paulo Freire, we present and evaluate the co-design process of a FWE nexus visualisation tool for stakeholders engaged with pre-school education in Słupsk, Poland. Our results provide evidence that this co-design process has been effective to developing a new critical consciousness in the participants about how their everyday choices are related to the FWE nexus, enabling them to change perspectives, leading to more sustainable choices. We propose that our co-design process can be used to develop 'grounded visualisations' of the FWE nexus, i.e., visualisations that are grounded in the experiential situations and lived realities of stakeholders, thus offering an effective support for decision-making that could open pathways to sustainability transformations.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: This study was conducted in the Creating Interfaces project, funded within the framework of the Sustainable Global Urban Initiative (SUGI) Food-Water-Energy Nexus program. This program has been set up by the Belmont Forum and the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe and has received funding from the European Union's Horizon, 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement #730254 and the following national funding agencies: United Kingdom Research and Innovation funding was received through the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) grant ES/S002235/1; the National Science Center (NCN) of Poland funded this work under grant #UMO-2017/25/Z/HS6/03046.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Porto de Albuquerque, Professor Joao and Tregonning, Dr Grant

Creator Roles

Porto de Albuquerque, J.: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft, Project administration, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization
Tregonning, G.: Methodology

• Authors: Cámara-Menoyo, C., Porto de Albuquerque, J., Suchomska, J., Tregonning, G., and McInerny, G.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Urban Studies
• Journal Name: Environmental Science and Policy
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISSN: 1462-9011
• ISSN (Online): 1873-6416
• Published Online: 27 February 2024
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2024 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Environmental Science and Policy 154:103712
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons license