As global centers of population and economic activity, cities consume vast amounts of resources. The demand for energy, building materials, water, mobility, and consumer goods in cities fuels unequal environmental change in multiple dimensions both inside cities and at distal locations beyond their borders. At the same time, access to these resources and the essential services they provide is also grossly unequal within and between urban areas. This makes cities critical to just decarbonization and to equitably achieving a range of other societal sustainability goals. To support the necessary transition to a more sustainable urban future through policy and urban design, cities need robust metrics to track their environmental performance. This course introduces graduate students to cutting-edge methods to measure and map the stocks and flows of energy and materials in cities and their related environmental impacts. 

We start with an introduction to the interdisciplinary metaphor of urban metabolism – the churn of material and energy flows within and across urban boundaries – and theories of urban land teleconnections, planetary urbanization, and other multi-scalar conceptualizations of urban processes. We then review current methods to quantify the metabolism, including input-output analysis and carbon accounting protocols for cities. Students then learn how to develop bottom-up estimates of the environmental footprints of cities using methods from industrial ecology – material flow analysis, life cycle assessment, carbon footprint – and a variety of novel data sources. Solutions inspired by engineering, industrial/urban symbiosis, and allied fields will be proposed and tested to promote more sustainable cities via group projects on a case city. Course deliverables include quizzes, a midterm exam, individual papers and multimedia reflections, tutorials, and a large group project.