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The Urban Metabolism theory makes it possible to quantify design methods and strategies for sustainable urban design based on analysis of urban resource flows. Aiming at improving the urban environment, this paper takes four types of urban resources closely related to residents' lives (i.e., water, energy, organic waste, and food) as evaluation objects and their flow rates as the evaluation indicators, and operates with design scenario models as the core to establish the decision-supportive framework for urban design, which consists of four basic parts: urban status analysis, design scenario setting, design alternatives, and design evaluation. This framework could quickly present design proposals and evaluate their expected performances, providing a basis for decision making in design practice. Then, China World Trade Center area in Beijing is taken as an example to interpret the practical value of the framework by providing guidelines for urban design practices of this area. Finally, the paper points out that instead of showing the optimal design strategy, the final output of the framework just provides decision makers an intuitive understanding of a specific design proposal and the impacts the design intervention would bring to the urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food metabolism is one of the basic processes of urban metabolism. Continuously growing urban population drives sharply increasing food demand with related impacts. Aimed at providing adequate information about dynamic process of urban food metabolism and related environmental footprint to identify measures for future diet optimization and impact reduction, this study systematically analyzed the dynamic characteristics of urban food metabolism on metabolic flux, structure and efficiency during 1978- 2015 based on a case study of Beijing. Life cycle assessment (LCA) approach was used to calculate water-carbon footprint caused by food consumption, and an eco-efficiency index E was constructed to evaluate the efficiency of food metabolism in Beijing. At last, this study explored several effective ways to optimize urban food metabolism. The results indicated that: 1) In 2015, the urban food metabolic flux was 881.4×104 t in Beijing, which increased 3.3 times compared with the one in 1978, while water footprint and carbon footprint increased 6.1 times and 4.4 times respectively. 2) The structure of both metabolic flux and environmental footprint presented the evolution characteristics of shifting from staple food as main food to non-staple food as main food and from plant-derived food dominated diet to diet with equal importance of plant- derived food and animal- derived food. 3) The over-consumption diets, especially high proportion of meat consumption, not only affected the health status of urban inhabitants in Beijing, but also pushed tempestuously per capita environmental footprint of urban inhabitants into a high level, resulting in the eco-efficiency’s decreasing from 1.27 to 0.32. 4) Alleviating the environmental footprint impacts of urban food metabolism should be based on the following aspects: optimizing the industrial supply chain; sparkplugging healthy diet habits and sustainable consumption patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban metabolism is a basic theory for coping with global environmental problems, which is coherent with the aims of national environmental management. This paper analyzed the concept of urban metabolism, and pointed out the meaning for urban metabolism in physical space entities; reviewed the current methods for urban metabolism and its merits and shortages; analyzed the system boundaries, connotation, and methodologies; and summarized the advances on urban metabolism practices in physical space entities. At last, we made conclusions that there were shortages, including conception system, basic theory system, and interdisciplinary integrated theory system in current urban metabolism research, and the current cases studied in urban metabolism were limited and not suitable to the harmony development between society, economy, and environment. In the future, we need to strengthen comparison between different case studies from different countries, develop the prior modes of typical urban metabolism research, identify the mechanism for urban ecosystem, and strengthen the spatial decision support system of environmental management taking urban spatial entity spaces as units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using emergy indices of urban metabolisms, this paper analyzed 31 Chinese urban metabolisms'systematic structures and characteristics in 2000 and 2010. The results showed that Chinese urban metabolisms were characterized as resource consumption and coastal external dependency. Non-renewable resource emergy accounted for a higher proportion of the total emergy in the inland cities'urban metabolisms. The emergy of imports and exports accounted for the vast majority of urban metabolic systems in metropolises and coastal cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, showing a significant externally-oriented metabolic characteristic. Based on that, the related policies were put forward: to develop the renewable resource and energy industry; to improve the non-renewable resource and energy utilization efficiencies; to optimize the import and export structure of services, cargo and fuel; and to establish the flexible management mechanism of urban metabolisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]