Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb 25, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Dissertation advisor: Dr. Ronald G. Phillips. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・論文博士 / 博士(地球環境学) / 乙第12828号 / 論地環博第8号 / 新制||地環||24(附属図書館) / 31315 / 京都大学大学院地球環境学舎地球環境学専攻 / (主査)准教授 西前 出, 教授 渡邉 紹裕, 教授 小方 登 / 学位規則第4条第2項該当 / Doctor of Global Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

The thesis  is set in Mongolia, looking specifically at Ulaanbaatar City. As a native Mongolian with an educational background in a European context, an opportunity was presented to offer a critical appraisal of the city from an outsiders perspective informed by a deeper cultural understanding of the context. The city is observed from a masterplanning scale starting from the beginnings of its built urban history to its current state. An interrogation of the development plans for 2020/ 2030 and research conducted during a site visit in January provides the basis for a housing proposal. The design proposal acts as a criticism on the development seen during the urbanization of Ulaanbaatar and is a reactionary response to the problems identified during the first half of the thesis. A unit and tower typology is developed that attempts to study the traditional form of dwelling, a ger, while also being informed by the soviet architecture and decoration seen throughout the city. The site strategy employed addresses issues of preservation of ger districts, the downsizing of green public spaces within the city and a lack of architectural intent in the recent housing tower blocks that is invading the city fabric.

On observe depuis 2005 une sismicité intense à 10 km d'Oulan Bator ce qui a permis d'identifier une faille active, Emeelt, sur le terrain. Après le calcule d'un modèle de vitesse 3D, j'ai appliqué la tomographie double différence pour obtenir une localisation précise des séismes. Ils marquent au moins trois branches parallèles orientées N147° comme la faille vue en surface. L'activité sur la faille principale d'Emeelt (MEF) s’étend sur 15 km, les branches Ouest et Est, moins actives, sur 10 km. La profondeur de l'activité s'étend entre 4 et 15 km. L'activité sismique semble concentrée à l'intersection avec des failles Mésozoïques et les contrastes Vs/Vs suggèrent la présence de fluides. Les 10 essaims identifiés montrent une activité croissante et une migration spatiale avec le temps. Le calcul de 2 scénarios possibles, un M ~ 6.4 et un M ~ 7, indique un important impact sur la ville d'Oulan Bator, avec une intensité minimum de VIII et localement IX pour M=6.4 et X pour M=7. / We observe since 2005 a high seismic activity at 10 km from Ulaanbaatar that allowed us to identify a new active fault, Emeelt, in the field. After computing a 3D velocity model, I applied Double-Difference tomography to obtain a precise localization of earthquakes. They trace at least three parallel branches oriented N147° like the fault seen at surface. The seismic activity on the Main Emeelt Fault (MEF) is along at least 15 km, on the West and East branches, less active, along 10 km. The depth of the seismicity extends between 4 and 15 km. The activity seems concentrated at the intersection with Mesozoic faults and Vp/Vs contrast suggests the presence of fluids. The 10 swarms identified show an increasing activity and a spatial migration with time. The calculation of 2 possible scenarios, one M ~ 6.4 and one M ~ 7, shows an important impact on Ulaanbaatar, with a minimum intensity of VIII and IX for M=6.4 and X for M=7.

<div>The security, resilience and sustainability of water supply in urban areas are of major concern in cities around the world. Their dynamics and long-term trajectories result from external change processes, as well as adaptive and maladaptive management practices aiming to secure urban livelihoods. This dissertation examines the dynamics of urban water systems from a social-ecological-technical systems perspective, in which infrastructure and institutions mediate the human-water-ecosystem relationship. </div><div><br></div><div>The three concepts of security, resilience and sustainability are often used interchangeably, making the achievement of goals addressing such challenges somewhat elusive. This becomes evident in the international policy arena, with the UN Sustainable Development Goals being the most prominent example, in which aspirations for achieving the different goals for different sectors lead to conflicting objectives. Similarly, the scientific literature remains inconclusive on characterizations and quantifiable metrics. These and other urban water challenges facing the global urban community are discussed, and research questions and objectives are introduced in Section 1. </div><div><br></div><div>In Section 2, I suggest distinct definitions of urban water security, resilience and sustainability: Security refers to the state of system functioning regarding water services; resilience refers to ability to absorb shocks, to adapt and transform, and therefore describes the dynamic, short- to medium-term system behavior in response to shocks and disturbances; sustainability aims to balance the needs in terms of ecology and society (humans and the economic systems they build) of today without compromising the ability to meet the needs of future generations. Therefore, sustainability refers to current and long-term impacts on nature and society of maintaining system functions, and therefore affects system trajectories. I suggest that sustainability should include not only local effects, but consider impacts across scales and sectors. I propose methods for the quantification of urban water security, resilience and sustainability, an approach for modeling dynamic water system behavior, as well as an integrated framework combining the three dimensions for a holistic assessment of urban water supply systems. The framework integrates natural, human and engineered system components (“Capital Portfolio Approach”) and is applied to a range of case study cities selected from a broad range of hydro-climatic and socio-economic regions on four continents. Data on urban water infrastructure and services were collected from utilities in two cities (Amman, Jordan; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), key stakeholder interviews and a household survey conducted in Amman. Publicly available, empirical utility data and globally accessible datasets were used to support these and additional case studies. </div><div><br></div><div>The data show that community adaptation significantly contributes to urban water security and resilience, but the ability to adapt is highly heterogeneous across and within cities, leading to large inequality of water security. In cities with high levels of water security and resilience, adaptive capacity remains latent (inactive), while water-insecure cities rely on community adaptation for the self-provision of services. The framework is applied for assessing individual urban water systems, as well as for cross-city comparison for different types of cities. Results show that cities fall along a continuous gradient, ranging from water insecure and non-resilient cities with inadequate service provision prone to failure in response to extant shock regimes, to water secure and resilient systems with high levels of services and immediate recovery after shocks. Although limited by diverse constraints, the analyses show that urban water security and resilience tend to co-evolve, whereas sustainability, which considers local and global sustainable management, shows highly variable results across cities. I propose that the management of urban water systems should maintain a balance of security, resilience and sustainability.</div><div><br></div><div>The focus in Section 3 is on intra-city patterns and mechanisms, which contribute to urban water security, resilience and sustainability. In spite of engineering design and planning, and against common expectations, intra-city patterns emerge from self-organizing processes similar to those found in nature. These are related to growth processes following the principle of preferential attachment and functional efficiency considerations, which lead to Pareto power-law probability distributions characteristic of scale-free-like structures. Results presented here show that such structures are also present in urban water distribution and sanitary sewer networks, and how deviation from such specific patterns can result in vulnerability towards cascading failures. In addition, unbounded growth, unmanaged demand and unregulated water markets can lead to large inequality, which increases failure vulnerability. </div><div><br></div><div>The introduction of infrastructure and institutions for providing urban water services intercedes and mediates the human-water relationship. Complexity of infrastructural and institutional setups, growth patterns, management strategies and practices result in different levels of disconnects between citizens and the ecosystems providing freshwater resources. “Invisibility” of services to citizens results from maximized water system performance. It can lead to a lack of awareness about the effort and underlying infrastructure and institutions that operate for delivering services. Data for the seven cities illustrate different portfolios of complexity, invisibility and disconnection. Empirical data gathered in a household survey and key stakeholder interviews in Amman reveals that a misalignment of stakeholder perceptions resulting from the lack of information flow between citizens and urban managers can be misguiding and can constrain the decision-making space. Unsustainable practices are fostered by invisibility and disconnection and exacerbate the threats to urban water security and resilience. Such challenges are investigated in the context of urban water system traps: the poverty and the rigidity trap. Results indicate that urban water poverty is associated with local unsustainability, while rigidity traps combined with urban demand growth gravitate towards global unsustainability. </div><div><br></div><div>Returning to the city-level in Section 4, I investigate urban water system evolution. The question how the trajectories of urban water security, resilience and sustainability can be managed is examined using insights from hydrological and social-ecological systems research. I propose an “Urban Budyko Landscape”, which compares urban water supply systems to hydrological catchments and highlights the different roles of supply- and demand-management of water and water-related urban services. A global assessment of 38 cities around the world puts the seven case studies in perspective, emphasizing the relevance of the proposed framework and the representative, archetypal character of the selected case studies. </div><div><br></div><div>Furthermore, I examine how managing for the different dimensions of the CPA (capital availability, robustness, risk and sustainable management) determines the trajectories of urban water systems. This is done by integrating the CPA with the components of social-ecological system resilience, which explain how control of the different components determines the movement of systems through states of security and resilience in a stability landscape. Finally, potential feedbacks resulting from the global environment are investigated with respect to the role that globally sustainable local and regional water management can play in determining the trajectories of urban water systems. These assessments demonstrate how the impact of supply-oriented strategies reach beyond local, regional and into global boundaries for meeting a growing urban demand, and come at the cost of global sustainability and communities elsewhere.</div><div><br></div><div>Despite stark differences between individual cities and large heterogeneities within cities, convergent trends and patterns emerge across systems and are revealed through application of the proposed concepts and frameworks. The implications of these findings are discussed in Section 5, and are summarized here as follows: </div><div>1) The management of urban water systems needs to move beyond the security and resilience paradigms, which focus on current system functioning and short-term behavior. Sustaining a growing global, urban population will require addressing the long-term, cross-scale and inter-sector impacts of achieving and maintaining urban water security and resilience. </div><div>2) Emergent spatial patterns are driven by optimization for the objective functions. Avoiding traps, cascading failure, extreme inequality and maintaining global urban livability requires a balance of supply- and demand-management, consideration of system complexity, size and reach (i.e., footprint), as well as internal structures and management strategies (connectedness and modularity).</div><div>3) Urban water security and resilience are threatened by long-term decline, which necessitates the transformation to urban sustainability. The key to sustainability lies in experimentation, modularization and the incorporation of interdependencies across scales, systems and sectors.</div><div><br></div>