Urban Metabolism

Urban Metabolism is a model to facilitate the description and analysis of the flows of the materials and energy within cities, such as undertaken in a Material flow analysis of a city. First used as an exploration and comparison modeling tool by Abel Wolman in "The metabolism of Cities". The use of the Urban Metabolism model offers benefits to studies of the sustainablity of cities by providing a unified or holisitc viewpoint to encompass all of the activities of a city in a single model.

The concept of ‘urban metabolism’ has been used to describe the resource consumption and waste generation of the cities for some time (see for example, Wolman, 1965). Historically, first suggestions that quasi-organism analogies may help in understanding cities - including references to 'metabolism' - were made by the Chicago school of urban sociology (Burgess and others). Presently, the great advocate and populariser of the term has been the British educator and author Herbert Girardet. More recently the metabolism frame of reference has been used in the reporting of environmental information in Australia and it has been suggested that it can be used to define the sustainability of a city within the ecosystems capacity to support it. A strong theme in present literature on urban sustainablity is that of the need to view the urban system as a whole if we are to best understand and solve the complex problems.

Uses of the model are however not restricted to strictly functional analysis, as the model has been adapted to examine the relational aspects of urban relationships between infrastructure and citizens