Abstract
Cities play a crucial role in the development of nations, since they are responsible to concentrate energy from diverse forms and transform it into higher quality outputs. An alternative way in assessing urban agglomerates is by means of Odum’s macroscope, represented by the eMergy synthesis method, which allows understanding and quantifying the energy flows driving cities functioning. The macroscope is able to identify the relationship of dependence among cities and their surrounding environment that provides less concentrated resources to be transformed into high quality products and information, as well as undesired by-products. After two decades developing studies related to urban systems and the Odum’s macroscope, the research team of Paulista University in Brazil acquired experience and maturity to write this conceptual analysis about how Brazilian cities work. Several cases are provided (including anabolic and catabolic ones) to sustain final insights towards more sustainable cities in Brazil. The main identified characteristics about how Brazilian cities work, derived from the case studies presented, can be summarized as: (i) the growing importance of studies focused on cities including their surrounding supporting areas to assess their sustainability; (ii) the need for both macro and micro perspectives when assessing cities’ sustainability; (iii) the importance in using Odum’s macroscope for a holistic understanding of cities’ sustainability performance; (iv) the importance in using Odum’s macroscope to understand how to achieve higher quality of life; (v) the use of macro and micro perspectives in supporting public-oriented policies.
Highlights
Cities play an important role in the development process of nations and are the places where people advance socially and economically
Cities and Odum Macroscope allowing access of their entire population to basic services. In face of these challenges, the efforts to achieve cities that are more sustainable are mandatory, and include the development of theoretical approaches that help to deal with urban metabolism and resilience and practical approaches that help to quantify the results of each action through the use of well-selected and representative performance indicators
The most powerful characteristics of emergy synthesis is its ability to recognize and compare energy of different quality (Brown et al, 2004), resulting in an objective value-quantifying method that allows ranking the influence/effect of all the flows that come from the natural environment, using a common unit
Summary
Cities play an important role in the development process of nations and are the places where people advance socially and economically. Cities and Odum Macroscope allowing access of their entire population to basic services (energy, housing, and transportation) In face of these challenges, the efforts to achieve cities that are more sustainable are mandatory, and include the development of theoretical approaches that help to deal with urban metabolism and resilience and practical approaches that help to quantify the results of each action through the use of well-selected and representative performance indicators. The most powerful characteristics of emergy synthesis is its ability to recognize and compare energy of different quality (Brown et al, 2004), resulting in an objective value-quantifying method that allows ranking the influence/effect of all the flows that come from the natural environment, using a common unit (sej; Odum, 1996) This hierarchy of energy flows proposed by Howard Odum’s self-organization and transformation concepts was empirically confirmed by Giannetti et al (2019). As part of the urban metabolism analogy, the “anabolism” and “catabolism” are used to represent, respectively, the “creation” of complex highquality products and the “dismantling” of complex structures into simpler ones
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