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 sustainability of cities by providing a unified or holistic viewpoint to encompass all of the activities of a city in a single model.
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[edit] History
Karl Marx may have been the first to discuss urban metabolism. He used metabolism to describe the material and energy exchange between nature and society in as a critique of industrialization (1883). He advocated that urban metabolism becomes a power in itself (like capitalism), and will control society unless society is able to control it.
- “Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can only consist in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate to their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.”[1]
Later, in reaction against industrialization and coal use, Sir Patrick Geddes, a Scottish biologist, undertook an ecological critique of urbanization in 1885, recognizing that the availability of energy and materials imposed strict constraints on society. He concluded by establishing a physical budget for urban energy and material throughput. Geddes was far ahead of his time in conceiving cities as living machines with metabolism; so much so that his initiative was not accepted. In 1965, when Abel Wolman, a sanitary engineer, used urban metabolism in his A Typical American City study. He defined urban metabolism as, “all the materials and commodities needed to sustain a city’s inhabitants at home, at work, and at play.” The three problems he identified are water supply, water pollution, and air pollution. The definition was updated again in 2007 in The changing metabolism of cities by Kennedy et al (2007), which updated the definition of urban metabolism to, “the sum total of the technical and socio-economic processes that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy, and elimination of waste.”[2]
[edit] Uses
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 sustainability 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.[3]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Karl Marx, Capital Volume III (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 959.
- ^ Kennedy, et al. (2007) The changing metabolism of cities.
- ^ Gandy, M. (2004). Rethinking urban metabolism: Water, space and the modern city. City, http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/about-the-department/people/academics/matthew-gandy/files/pdf2.pdf
[edit] References
- Newman, P. W. G. (1999). Sustainability and cities: extending the metabolism model. Landscape and Urban Planning, 44, 219-226.
- State of the Environment Advisory Council. (1996). State of the Environment Report 1996: CSIRO.
- Wolman, A. (1965). The metabolism of cities. Scientific American, 213(3),179-190.
[edit] External links
- Encyclopedia of the Earth article: "Urban Metabolism"
