Visualizing water‐energy nexus landscapes

Abstract

Over the past decade, the water-energy nexus (WEN) has emerged as a prominent framework with which to analyze and visualize interconnections between energy production, freshwater resources, and the hydrological cycle. The WEN is a fundamentally geographic concept embedded in landscapes. WEN analyses often include landscape visualizations, yet these are rarely conceptually rigorous; consequently, the visual-representational dimensions of WEN analyses remain relatively weak. Our paper addresses this gap through a meta-review of 503 WEN visualizations sourced from 336 scholarly articles. Based on this analysis, we argue that WEN visualizations often depict complex landscapes as technical systems, while eliding broader considerations of the multiscalar, spatiotemporal, and hydrosocial dimensions of water and energy. In response to these limitations, we offer an alternative approach to visualizing hydrosocial landscapes that draws upon parallel work in geography and cognate disciplines.In the concluding section of the paper, we formulate a set of interdisciplinary recommendations to guide the production of more theoretically-informed nexus visualizations grounded in the concepts of spatiality, temporality, and hydrosociality.

The urban politicization of fossil fuel infrastructure: Mediatization and resistance in energy landscapes

“…With the growing discourse around ecological security and urban resilience, Hodson and Marvin (2009) argue that urban regions are increasingly presenting themselves as leaders in the reconfiguration of infrastructure to face threats like climate change and ensure the protection and autonomous management of amenities like secure water access. However, there are definite consequences in emphasizing certain metabolic flows and defining what is deemed more “essential” in terms of resilient infrastructure and landscape (Anguelovski et al, 2016) but also in representing territories and the relations between different flows (for example, between energy and water use) in biased and selective ways, often ignoring certain epistemologies, conditions, and modes of life, especially of Indigenous nations (Robb et al, 2021).…”