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Measuring the Urban Metabolism

  • Publish On 19 January 2023
  • Claire Doussard
  • 4 minutes

Claire Doussard is an urban planner and researcher in the field of urban development. She focuses on measuring urban metabolisms and comparing various types of urban fabric in order to define the most environmentally friendly forms and ways of operating. Reviews and perspectives that face a great difficulty: data collection!

Bibliography

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Article

The Acceleration of the Economy

Michel Henochsberg

Article

The Acceleration of the Economy

The acceleration of our daily lives is fueled by novelty, innovation, and, in turn, the dematerialization of goods. In his book La Place du marché [The Place of the Market], the economist Michel Henochsberg investigates current upheavals from the perspective of economic history. He believes a return to the circulatory nature of the economy is playing out after a break of two centuries corresponding to the industrialization of the world during which the productive model prevailed. The circular flow model of the intangible economy, its financial and commercial aspects, its permanent quest for accelerated flows of assets and cash would thus be no more than a return to the roots, the reconciliation of the economy and its concept. Michel Henochsberg was an economist, PhD in Economics and Sociology.

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Urban Metabolisms: Combining Complex Approaches

Philippe Chiambaretta

Article

Urban Metabolisms: Combining Complex Approaches

Beyond the debates surrounding the Anthropocene—dating it, taking responsibility—the need to combat the disastrous effects of human development on the planet is beyond doubt. Acknowledging that these consequences are specifically incarnated in cities, architect Philippe Chiambaretta points toward a paradigm shift—moving from a mechanical vision of the world to an idea centered on the living—that reactivates the notion of a metabolism. The concept of the living allows us to go beyond the dualism and anthropocentrism introduced by modernity, driving us toward a symbolic and practical idea of the city as an urban metabolism and pointing toward an approach that takes the ecological challenge into account in order to “manage” the city. Flying in the face of the formal pride of the architect, the figure of metabolic planner emerges, able to combine complex visions and approaches, notably by moving beyond the traditional rifts between urban protagonists, working toward an intense diversity of uses, opening up temporal dynamics, and by reintegrating the living.

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Sensors "Visceralization"

Joseph Paradiso

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Sensors "Visceralization"

Urban responses to environmental issues are split between advocates of a return to/of nature and those who promote the technological solutions of the smart city, based on sensors and data. Joseph Paradiso, Director of the Responsive Environments Group at MIT, studies the interactions between individuals and computing technology. He explains how portable electronic sensors known as wearables allow access to a set of data that modify our experience of space and profoundly impacts the built environment. Electronic interfaces autonomously determine our needs, permitting the optimization of comfort and energy consumption. He sees a world of information becoming established in the real world, articulating wearables in real time with the general digital infrastructure. Carrying this virtual bubble along with us will even cause the notion itself of the individual to be modified. The roles of the virtual and the real also seem destined to change in his opinion, accompanying a “visceralization” of sensors and the digital, source of an increase in power of our sensorial capacities.

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