ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with tracking the intellectual history of urban metabolism in industrial ecology, urban ecology, and Marxist ecologies and focuses on the industrial ecology interpretation of urban metabolism. It discusses the common research approaches used for tracking resource appropriation within cities. The chapter examines the limitations and shortcomings of these approaches in explaining the environmental impact of urban activity. It also discusses key emerging themes in urban metabolism scholarship. The chapter derives a definition of the urban from the perspective of urban metabolism discourse. Urban metabolism conceptualizes the city as an organism that consumes energy and materials and in effect produces goods, services, and waste. While urban metabolism methodologies, such as emergy synthesis and exergy analysis, cannot be communicated easily to non-experts, other methods, such as ecological footprint, have been shown to capture the imagination of stakeholders, including those at local authorities. Urban metabolism conceptualizes cities as organisms in order to explain the impact of urban consumption on the environment.
