- The role of social innovations in a revised urban metabolism concept framed by sustainable development paradigms   73 kb by    Gezik, Peter | petergezik@gmail.com    Short Outline This paper presents the outputs of the research focused on a revision of urban metabolism conceptual framework, and a suggestion for a new approach considering social innovations as a key component shaping and redirecting metabolic processes and determining a city’s sustainability. Abstract The urban metabolism concept emerged in the mid-sixties when Wolman (1965) compared metabolic processes of material and energy transformation into the performance and waste occurring in living organisms with processes in the cities. Based on this concept, researchers have been struggling to develop a better understanding of energy and material flows in urban socio- ecosystems, and between them and the surrounding environment, with a special focus on their environmental impacts. Since the late twentieth century, output measures from urban metabolism analyses have been utilized for indicating urban sustainability and livability. Unfortunately, the last 50 years of this theoretical concept’s development focused on precise energy and material flows measuring, and has not brought decisive progress in the comprehensive interpretation of urban metabolic processes. In the last decade many authors have called for an expanded urban metabolism concept which can overcome the inconsistencies and be utilized as a widely applicable system-based approach (Goonetilleke et al., 2011; Minx et al., 2010; Pincetl et al., 2012;). Some authors argue that a city is a complex, dynamic, collective entity which should instead be compared to a socio- ecosystem, rather than to an individual organism. They point out that individual components of a whole not only cooperate, as it is in organisms, but they also compete and do not rigorously rely on an overall decision- making executive (Golubiewski, 2012; Marshall, 2009). There is a lack of information provided in available literature, in terms of which components determine a distinct metabolism of a respective city and how these specifics should be taken into account in the analytical and regulatory processes. There is also a knowledge gap in how changes in the metabolism modify spatial and functional structure of complex and dynamic urban areas, how to manage these changes as well as what the drivers of these changes are. Pincetl et al. (2012) argue that “without being able to attribute flows to people, places, and uses, it is nearly impossible to determine the metabolism of a specific city”. In this paper, reported interdisciplinary research, based on critical analyses of available literature and data sources from multiple urban metabolism case studies (Barels, 2009; Havranek, 2008; Minx et al., 2010) challenged the urban metabolism concept and outlined possible paths for its further extensions with high potential to overcome the aforementioned gaps. Social innovations understood as “the generation and implementation of new ideas about social relationships and social organization” (Mumford, 2002) alongside technical and economic innovations were found as crucial phenomenon in urban metabolism. Character and development of innovations shape technical and socioeconomic processes that occur in cities and determine the character and extent of urban structure modifications. They seem to be possible drivers which expand, reduce, create or eliminate resource use, waste production and impacts on the environment. A targeted analysis of the innovation’s character and their site-specific potentials can possibly specify past, present and further orientation of metabolic flows. Further research on the role of innovations in urban metabolism has the potential to outline pathways regarding how cities can move from one metabolic state to another, possibly, more sustainably. This paper has the ambition to expand the concept of urban metabolism as a generally applicable theoretical background for further studies and experiments regarding the interplay between social innovations and material, and energy flows in urban metabolism. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper