Urban Metabolism-An Approach for Enhancing Resilience

Along with the increase in the size of the city and the high rate of urban-ization, unsustainable urban development can cause severe ecological and environ-mental issues because cities are essential points of contact between natural and socio-economic systems and places where human activity is concentrated. In addition, urban areas are becoming extremely vulnerable to risks caused by a wide range of sources, including the climate change and urban disasters. However, it is not clear how the urban system relates to one another across different scales within a city or how cities compare to one another in terms of their capacity to survive, recover from, and adapt to various sources of stress. In the meantime, the concept of resilience has been around for long time, and it has seen a great benefit in implementation in urban planning and disaster preparedness. Further, in recent years, urban metabolism has been widely implemented as a valuable framework for assessing an urban system’s energy efficiency, material recycling, waste management, and infrastructure. The integration of urban resilience and urban metabolism as concepts can be of tremen-dous value to the development of strategies for sustainability. This chapter discusses the integration of the resilience concept and the urban metabolism framework, and it also provides case studies that illustrate how this integration can be put into practice and its implications. Reengineering cities and urban life to control and balance unsus-tainable and unequal urban metabolisms must be implemented. The development of theoretical and practical approaches to urban metabolism requires interdisciplinary collaboration.