ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the urban resource nexus and draws on a range of literatures from geography, political ecology, and planning. It acknowledges the lack of conceptual clarity in nexus research, while adopting the basic understanding of the nexus referring to the interlinkages of demand, consumption, and waste cycles between different categories of resources, and puts this into dialogue with renewed interest in "urban metabolism" in scholarly literature. Urban metabolism conceives of cities as akin to organisms that take in food and other resources and release waste into the environment. The added value of urban metabolism is precisely how it can break down nature–society oppositions. Governance of the urban resource nexus involves questions of urban design and ecological management. The fragmented nature of urban local bodies and the management system are not able to respond to cities' complex, fast-growing, and interdependent systems.
