Metabolism of Cities is a non-profit collective, aiming to facilitate collaborations that create and share urban metabolism knowledge and accelerate its implementation in policy and practice. Ultimately, Metabolism of Cities strives to contribute to improving the sustainability of cities by focusing on better understanding the environmental impact of resource stocks and flows.
As an organisation, Metabolism of Cities brings together academics, professionals, local governments, and other institutions to jointly work on projects that further the spread of knowledge and application of urban metabolism. Metabolism of Cities runs an online, open source platform where information is shared, and around which people and organisations can get together. This platform is also the primary vehicle through which Metabolism of Cities seeks to make available open source tools, organise community activities and educate the general public around urban metabolism and urban sustainability. However, there are also a number of offline or different forms of engagements that Metabolism of Cities pursues. The collective’s services include:
- Hosting data-thons to help cities, universities or other stakeholders to gather and visualize resource and waste flows and stocks data from a specific territory, over a short period of time. The result is an urban metabolism dashboard for your city as well as a new platform for collaboration between local stakeholders.
- Training / Education / Capacity Building on the topics of urban metabolism, circular economy in cities, industrial ecology, material flow analysis, open data, open science, etc. to help cities and other stakeholders understand urban metabolism and how to use urban metabolism to tackle urban and territorial resource/waste challenges in a systemic manner.
- Completing urban metabolism studies and developing circularity roadmaps. Metabolism of Cities has extensive experience in studying the metabolism of cities and regions including measuring the stocks and flows of materials and co-developing an operational roadmap or action plan to transition towards a circular and low carbon society.
- Completing urban metabolism public awareness campaigns.
- Conducting research in policy and practice, and co-developing urban metabolism research with academics and research institutes around improving methodologies, database structures, tools, etc.
We aim to gather and curate (all) knowledge around urban metabolism in order to make it accessible to different target audiences.
We will compile our high-value datasets and reports of "CityLoops - Closing the loop for urban material flows" an EU Horizon2020 project with 28 partners. (Official project website: https://cityloops.eu/) in this repository.
Additionally, Metabolism of Cities (Official website: https://metabolismofcities.org/) hosts a Data Hub serving as a central repository for a wide variety of information pertaining to urban metabolism in cities around the world. Whether you are looking for resources on a city’s infrastructure, stocks and flows, biophysical characteristics, or more, the Data Hub’s well-defined structure allows users to easily search through available information. As an ongoing project, this tool is continuously improved through crowdsourcing uploads of new data and information sources. Contribute to this ongoing project, fulfill your information needs, and explore what the Data Hub has to offer! (https://data.metabolismofcities.org/)