RECREATE

Resource nexus for transformation to circular, resilient, and liveable cities in the context of climate change. As the fraction of people living in cities continue to expand around the world, urban metabolism analysis can help decision makers develop cities to become resource efficient, climate friendly, resilient and equitable.

IVL Swedish Environmental Institute, together with leading universities and academic institutes from Sweden, Austria and China, are working to create sustainable, resilient and liveable cities through the perspective of urban metabolism analysis. Through the lens of urban metabolism, the goal of this project is to identify roles, opportunities, and pathways for cities to foster circular economy.

Urban metabolism is a model used to study the flow of energy and resources as they enter cities, how they are used and consumed, and how they exit cities as wastes. By studying urban metabolism, we can get a better understanding of how resources are used and ways to reduce negative environmental impact.

The project is working with four cities: Beijing, Malmö, Shanghai, and Vienna with the objectives to analyse how we can:

1. Significantly reduce energy, water and material resource use, and related environmental impacts;
2. Build resilience to the ever-increasing uncertainties of globalization and climate change; and
3. Make cities more liveable for growing populations in different urbanization contexts in China and Europe.

We are developing and implementing quantitative methods for urban metabolism and proposing urban resource cycles (that is, the urban transformation and circularity of the flow of materials and resources) to provide foundations for building urban resilience to social, economic, and environmental stress.

Through our cross-partner collaboration distributed in the four case-study cities, the project’s researchers will apply various methodologies across the cities for comparative and synthesized knowledge creation. Integrated solutions will have embedded results from policy exercises and elicited stakeholder shared values which will provide bounds of acceptability for these liveable cities.

• Identify key inherent strengths and the current sustainability status of four study cities: Beijing, Malmö, Shanghai and Vienna.
  
• Analyze the urban systems in terms of metabolism, trade-offs of efficiency and redundancy, and ecological footprints.
  
• Identify pathways and key opportunities where cities can foster the transformation to be more liveable, circular, and resilient.
• Identify key current challenges hindering evolution to the circular economy.
• Assess the ecological footprints of future scenarios in the studied cities that embrace a circular economy/industrial symbiosis approach, whilst minimizing life cycle environmental impact and remaining within reasonable local boundaries of shared resources.

Urban metabolism is a model to study the flow of energy and resources as they enter cities, how they are used and consumed, and how they exist cities as wastes.

By studying urban metabolism, we can get a better understanding of how resources are used and ways to reduce negative environmental impact.

As the fraction of people living in cities continue to expand around the world, urban metabolism analysis can help decision makers develop cities to become resource efficient, climate friendly, resilient and equitable.

More information about the RECREATE project can be found on this JPI Urban Europe webpage External link, opens in new window..