Metabolism of Cities Stakeholder Initiative

In October 2016 the Metabolism of Cities website launched the Stakeholders Initiative. This is an effort to create an international network of people that work or have a stake in the field of urban metabolism.

Over the past months we have spread the word about this initiative and we have set up a mailing list with people that are interested to join. We now start to organize specific projects around topics that are of interest. These project will have a duration of 3 months, and they can involve a variety of activities including:

Online forum discussions
Blog posts
Articles about the topic of choice
Webinars / Skype discussions
Collaborative research projects

The specific activities that we engage in will vary by topic and it will likely evolve over time. The first topic of choice was Data Visualizations and this project ran from October-December 2016.

In parallel, we are co-organizing masterclasses in urban metabolism. This is a short set of courses taking place in Brussels in December 2016 and January 2017. Click here to learn more about the Masterclasses.

Our current Stakeholders Initiative is around the creation of a Global Urban Metabolism Dataset. This project continued in January 2017 and is ongoing. In January 2018 we started our Urban Metabolism Interview Series

This Stakeholders Initiative is a new and recent initiative, and open to your input and ideas. So if you have any ideas as to how we can move forward, please don't hesitate to contact us!

Subscribe to the Stakeholders Initiative

Our Stakholder Initiative Projects

Future Ideas

Below you can find some ideas that we are considering for future Stakeholder Initiative projects. If you have any thoughts, information, or related work that you would like to submit, or you would just like to encourage us to pick one of these topics, please let us know!

City profiles Make a short urban metabolism overview of different cities with data available through publications, grey literature and open data. The idea is to briefly present the local characteristics of a studied city and then present its metabolic balance. This could eventually provide comparable analysis of different cities helpful for researchers, local administration, planners, etc.
Teaching urban metabolism How do you teach urban metabolism at your university? What materials do you use? What different formats of teaching do you use? The idea with this project would be to gather good practices and relevant materials (eventually online free courses) to teach urban metabolism. Ideally, we would like to create an open and free course available for everyone online.
Study replication
There are many studies done once (or sometimes a few times) on one city (or a few cities), but much more interesting insights can be obtained if the some study was done again on the same city in another year, at a neighboring city, or even in another country. But we all know how useful it can be to have the exact same study (same methodology) being replicated somewhere else. So how about we try to encourage that?!
Urban metabolism ontology project
The field of ontology relates to the "naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really or fundamentally exist for a particular domain of discourse". And it would be very interesting to undertake an exercise in which we try to name and define the types and classifications of urban metabolism work. At our site we have started doing this by tagging publications and other work, but this system could be much improved. Similarly, keywords in journals and other publications are not standardized and in general there seems to not be a single classification tree for urban metabolism work.