A literature review and categorisation of sustainability aimed urban metabolism indicators: a context, indicator, mechanism, outcome analysis.

Urban metabolism has been advanced as an approach to quantifying energy and resource use and supply in the modern urban system. It is a multidisciplinary approach focused on providing insight into the behaviour of cities for drafting effective proposals for a more humane and ecologically responsible future. Urban metabolism indicators could play an important role in promoting the science and practice of urban metabolism for sustainability. This paper presents a systematic review of literature centred on defining sustainabilityaimed urban metabolism indicators to improve the integration of urban metabolism and urban sustainability. Furthermore, this paper concentrates on two indicator sets (emergy synthesis and material flow analysis [MFA]), examining the relationship between these indicators and the three dimensions of sustainability (environment, economy, and society) in the literature. The paper thus builds a bridge between urban metabolism and urban sustainability in the hope that urban metabolism indicators can be used to measure and assess urban sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]