Integrating Ecological and Social Concepts for Urban Metabolism Studies

Urban sustainability efforts are increasingly related to concepts from self-sufficient natural ecosystems. Focusing on the metabolic characteristics and pathways of urban areas from an ecological lens can help advance our understanding of how they can be sustainable. The ecological lens allows the simultaneous notion of an urban area as a system and as a natural entity and offers insights into fundamental mechanisms that help identify natural solutions over purely technological ones. This chapter develops a systematic understanding of how urban metabolism aligns with ecosystem concepts and how social dimensions, and associated multi-dimensional and multi-scalar inequalities, add novel characteristics, tradeoffs, and synergies. In doing so, we develop an analytical framework that provides an outlook for sustain-ability goals relevant to urban areas including developing ecologically informed solutions and improving resource efficiency in urban areas.