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Growing urbanisation poses major challenges to the pressure on water resources, whose current approaches and infrastructures do not allow cities to be resilient in the face of global change. The entire small water cycle will have to be rethought to transform the city and integrate new services (urban agriculture, heat island and flood control, recreational areas, etc.). The reuse of treated wastewater, at the heart of the water-energy-material-environment nexus, is a major lever for supporting the transformation of the urban territory, in particular because of the number of levers available to play on its management, its treatment or as an object of urban development. In order to reflect on the potential of reuse in this context, we propose to lead this application area via the reflections that are carried out within the REUSEinCITIES programme supported by the BETTER metaprogramme.

The objectives of REUSEinCITIES are:

• To inventory the strengths and means to be mobilised to contribute to answering the specific questions linked to the water cycle in urban areas. The diversity of the disciplines involved (social and economic sciences, technology, agronomy, ecology, engineering sciences, etc.) makes the inter-INRAE research departmental character a strong specificity of such a network at the crossroads of issues such as source separation, the role of urban planning and architecture in these questions, urban ecology, farms and urban agriculture, small water cycles, etc.
• Coordinating actions/projects/funding requests between the different laboratories and, in general, between all the actors on this theme within the different INRAE research departments involved.

Contact: Jaime Nivala and Mathieu Sperandio (see contact details on the contact page)