There is a need to better understand water use behaviours at a finer granularity, both in quantitative terms and in terms of developing better understanding of the underlying qualitative drivers. Working in collaboration with stakeholders including facilities managers, sustainability professionals and water companies we are developing long-term repeatable scientific explorations of water use in university student accommodations. Such estates offer several advantages including:
Our ambition is to develop a stronger understanding of the demand side of what can be called the ‘urban hydrosocial cycle’ through the development of better data collection and analytical tools, and through application of these to Bristol and other global case study cities.
Research at UWE, Bristol since 2012 has already revealed that:
The blue line shows baseline (no intervention) water consumption by an average resident on an average day. The other lines show the impact of various hard and soft interventions.
Our first peer-revised academic papers reporting on this research were presented at the 2016 Water Efficiency Network (Watef) and Royal Statistical Society conferences, here and here.