Welcome to our blog

Published on Sep 22, 2016

The Metabolism of Cities is an open source urban metabolism platform that aims to bring together people, data and publications in one central place.
 
We strive to:

• encourage dissemination and collaboration between urban metabolism stakeholders (academia, urban administrations, NGOs, local inhabitants, etc),
• to host and create open data repository that can be used for environmental monitoring or to compare cities,
• to enable a global laboratory (under construction) in the field of urban metabolism in order to experiment, create and share new knowledge.

All code for this website is hosted on github and we invite programmers to help us improve the website and the online MFA software. But you don't need to be a programmer to help improve this website (see below!). Sign up for our mailing list if you wish to receive updates about changes and additions.

Who are we

 
As said before Metabolism of Cities is an entirely open source and free platform.  It is run by a group of volunteers (Paul, Aris, Gabriela, Rachel) that are passionate about the field of urban metabolism and wish to contribute to it (have a look at our description and the team section).
 
We think that by this platform it would be possible to make this concept more accessible to researchers, governments, urban planners and the number of other stakeholders.  We have all done research about urban metabolism and we have faced similar challenges such as data collection, looking for relevant literature, learning about assessment methodologies, figuring out which assumptions needed to be made in order to address data gaps, etc.  All these challenges are extremely time consuming and can become a barrier to its wider use.
 
Therefore, this platform is an opportunity for us to make the concept of urban metabolism more mainstream, more accessible and more useful tool stakeholders.
 

Why start a blog in Metabolism of Cities?

 
The idea of this section is to provide a place to present, discuss and share ideas, thoughts, studies, data, findings and methodological aspects of urban metabolism. We will strive to post on a regular basis (every when two weeks) about a new aspect of urban metabolism. With this section, we also wish to show why the urban metabolism field is essential to tackle current urban environmental issues. As per the rest of the website, this section is open and we encourage you to share with us your newest study but also to contribute by writing a blog post.