Your Circularity journey on Metabolism of Cities

At Metabolism of Cities, our objective is to enhance the circularity of your city. To get started, you can follow the decision flow chart below that outlines the steps you can take to make your city more circular:

With this visual guidance, you can decide on various options of assessments openly available to you. You can either choose to conduct these assessments independently or seek our assistance if needed (info[at]metabolismofcities.org). Feel free to explore different assessment options and determine the most suitable path for your city to follow.

The three main assessments that we developed as part of the CityLoops project are the:

• Sector-wide Circularity Assessment (SCA)
• Urban Circularity Assessment (UCA)
• Circularity Hotspot Analysis Method

Overall, if a city or other entity is interested in urban circularity, we recommend the UCA. It gives an overall picture of the material flows for two years, which is a great starting point to determine the status quo and any first trends.

What you can do with the results

Are you curious what you can do with the results and what those actually are? Check out the following pages:

• Why should cities carry out the UCA?
• What are the UCA outputs?

Your journey with Metabolism of Cities

At Metabolism of Cities we provide many resources, such as the ones that you can find on these pages. These are designed open-source, open-access and made accessible so that anyone can freely use them.

However, if you are a highly ambitious city or organisation, committed to the process and want expert help from a team of dedicated material flow analysis, circular economy, and more broadly urban sustainability experts, email us at (info[at]metabolismofcities.org).

Our services include:

• Coaching to determine what you want and need.
• Hosting data-thons to help cities, universities or other stakeholders to gather and visualise resource and waste flows and stocks data from a specific territory, over a short period of time. The result is an urban metabolism dashboard for your city as well as a new platform for collaboration between local stakeholders.
• Training / Education / Capacity Building on the topics of urban metabolism, circular economy in cities, industrial ecology, material flow analysis, open data, open science, etc. to help cities and other stakeholders understand urban metabolism and how to use urban metabolism to tackle urban and territorial resource/waste challenges in a systemic manner.
• Training / Education / Capacity Building on the advanced usage of our tools and tailored tutorials
• Completing urban metabolism and (urban) circularity studies and developing circularity roadmaps. Metabolism of Cities has extensive experience in studying the metabolism of cities and regions including measuring the stocks and flows of materials and co-developing an operational roadmap or action plan to transition towards a circular and low carbon society.
• Completing urban metabolism public awareness campaigns.
• Conducting research in policy and practice, and co-developing urban metabolism research with academics and research institutes around improving methodologies, database structures, tools, etc.