Beyond Old Pipes and Ailing Budgets: Systems Thinking on Twenty-First Century Water Infrastructure in Chicago.

ABSTRACT: Cities are increasingly burdened by aging water infrastructure. Deferred maintenance and upgrades are compounded by emerging concerns over contaminants, extreme weather events, demographic shifts, equity, and affordability of water services. These and other evolving twenty-first century conditions prompt changes to urban water infrastructure and related systems that have wide ranging outcomes. This work demonstrates two complementary techniques for analyzing these complex systems, through the example case of Chicago. Chicago has some of the oldest urban water infrastructure in the US and supplies drinking water to more than 5 million people. Recent efforts to improve the physical and financial components of Chicago's water system have run into a gamut of social and environmental issues. He

SUBMITTER: Erban LE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7970536 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature