Urban planning design needs to account for social and environmental factors to improve efficiency and minimise energy demand, water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of buildings and determine overall urban structure.
By mimicking the energy flow in an ecosystem, urban metabolism considers a city as an entity with distinguishable flows of energy and materials. This is enabled by recent advances in biophysical sciences that have allowed the estimation of energy, water, carbon and pollutants fluxes within a city. However, the limited exchange of information among biophysical scientists and stakeholders such as planners, architects and engineers hampers the effective utilisation of these methods.
Further information: Environmentally friendly urban planning