Metabolic Impact Assessment for urban planning

Abstract

The functioning of urban systems involves high levels of resource consumption and a complex web of energy, water and material flows. The fundamental aim of this paper is to understand how future urban systems could be designed to be consistently less damaging to the environment. Its main contribution is the proposal of a methodology for evaluating the urban development process from ametabolic perspective, the Metabolic Impact Assessment (MIA). After a brief introduction to evaluation in environmental planning, the paper describes the main influences of MIA, presents a set of principles for a metabolic assessment, and describes in detail the methodology's evaluation procedure.

Keywords:

• urban metabolism
• impact assessment
• environmental planning
• evaluation methodology
• urban form
• urban development

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express a special thanks to the colleagues of the SUME project for all the very interesting and stimulating working meetings and debates that took place throughout the time span of the project. Our thanks also go to the anonymous referees for the very helpful comments made.

The research leading to this paper has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 under the grant agreement no. 212034.