City as an organism: paradigms for the practise of urban design Abstract:

Buildings and urbanization are linked directly into environmental issues such as energy shortages, climate change, loss of land use, environmental health, increased pollution and waste, naming a few of those hazards. As the list of environmental concerns is becoming increasingly alerting, there is a call for rethinking and reanalyzing the modes of creating our buildings and our environment. Across a diverse field of studies, there is an attempt to examine the city, the buildings and the industry as living organisms or ecosystems aiming to learn from their metabolic functions and move construction and production into circular flow model. In this paper I will examine the different practises of metabolism related to the city to comprehend what is a living city and determine how such ideas can be applied in the field of urban design.

1. Introduction: It was the year of 1939 in New York that one of the most successful Worlds fair Expo took place that allow its 44 million visitors1 to take a look at Tomorrows World, where the people of 1960 will have more time, more energy and more tools to have fun2. A few decades after, there was a realization that our dependence on fossil fuels is limited, led by the Oil Crisis of the seventies and the arising of the green movement. In 1987 the influential Brundtland report coined the term sustainable development3 while the manifestation of these ideas and the shift into sustaining cities was brought forward at the World Summit of 1992 where the Agenda 21 project was launched by the United Nations. At present times we know for sure that energy is not an amusement tool and we have to perpetually invent our future with technologies and strategies to economize, store and reuse energy. Today we are facing an environmental anxiety such as augmented green house gas emissions, limited resources, excessive energy consumption, loss of biodiversity, naming a few of those alerts that are menacing not only to the existence of the earth but to the very existence of mankind. The majority of these problems are directly related to the city itself (Bai, 2007, Dodman, 2009): in a world that is becoming more and more urbanized, cities is the infrastructure of economic, political, and human systems that coexist and inhabit the city. The citys infrastructure needs an abundant number of resources to sustain itself and due to diminishing land space most of these resources are being transported to cities causing an apparent environmental burden. The problems that cities encounter today are mostly due to rapid urbanization caused by huge migration of people in the cities (the case of developed and developing countries) or by natural causes of an increase in birth rates (mostly in developing countries). Cities, today in developed countries are home to about 70% of the population, while in developing countries is 44%. According to the UN Urbanization Report (2009) by the year 2050, the worlds urban population is expected to rise at 70% of which, 86% will be living in developed countries and 66% in developing countries. (United NATIONS, 2009). This adds more concerns to the present environmental anxiety. These numbers shows that from today to the year 2050, there will be every week one million people added
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Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_New_York_World's_Fair {William McDonough, 1992 #5}, p.21 3 Sustainable development is defined by the {World Commission on Environment and Development., 1987 #70} as follows: a development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.(p.42)

to our cities, the most significant boost to take place in Asia and Africa. The increasing concentration of people in cities face a large number of environmental and socio-economic problems, but several scientists, regard this urban concentration as the opportunity and challenge for sustainable development.(Geoffery West, 2007, Dodman, 2009; United Nations, 2010). 4 How could this problem of increased population will be addressed is the major challenge for sustainability that our cities face today. In the frame of sustainable development, one way to look at the city in order comprehend, both its complexity as well its modus operandi is to relate it to a living organism. Recent studies present cities as living systems, as organisms, a part of the ecosystem and urban metabolism. (Geoffery West, 2007). The idea to observe at the city in terms of a living entity has many advantages to unfold to the stakeholders that are involved with urban policies, urban planning and urban design. The knowledge that nature provide us is multifold: we can observe functions of nature like the use and consumption of the suns energy, how organisms forms follows function, and how all the waste is recycled. Additionally nature provides theoretical basis in comprehending the city as a complex system or exploring values like diversity translated into the urban social values. The purpose of this paper is to look at closely interlinked doctrines that deal with the concept of the city as a living organism but are poles apart in terms of approach. The different practices that look at city as an organism that undergoes metabolic possesses have different theoretical basis for understanding the city, therefore their approach varies. Urban metabolism is a methodological tool to measure material and energy flows aiming at designing an urban system to perform in circular loops. Urban Metabolism addresses a relational conception which we could argue is a technocratic urban model. C2C, the Metabolism Movement are related to a more functionalist conception of the urban design model. Cradle to cradle focuses on the conceptualization of the circular flow design and economic model. They provide concrete examples in their design ideas at the micro-scale (design of products and textiles) and their ideas are usually focused on the development of new products. Thereby large scale projects remain conventional in their approach of designing circular building cycles, or lack in their literature reference to interventions on the given urban fabric. Apt for the scale of a city, one reference of urban design that deals with the metabolism of the city is to be found in those proposals by the Japanese Metabolism Movement. The Metabolism Movement deals with regeneration and renewal of city spaces through biological concepts of self-maintenance and self-transformation directly through complex structural systems. The idea behind this paper is to bridge these different metabolic theories related to the city as a response to environmental concerns. Hence after, we will interpret the practical and functional applications of these ideas in the domain of urban designing for the future constantly growing city. 2. The different metabolisms of the city

This is explained because economies of scale are apparent in the city: as the city becomes dense and compact, it is cheaper to create the citys infrastructure using less natural resources per capita and it becomes efficient to re-organize social functions like education and health care in an optimal way. ({Geoffery West, 2007 #65} Also studies of urban form related to energy show that the more compact the city, there is a reduced energy demands, due to the advocacy of high density and mixed-used urban form. The compact city is considered to have a sustainable urban form as a result in proximity of homes to work, use of cycling, use of the cities mass transport system, conversation of the country side, and revitalization of the inner city areas. ({Burton, 2000 #69}.

Today with rising environmental distress we are experiencing a crucial turning point in politics, education, urban policies and sciences that attempt to direct their research and policies in ways to address there arising problems. Greenhouse gases, generation of waste, pollution, and consumption of natural resources are all environmental problems created by cities. Studies have shown that in terms of ecological footprint the cities impact extends well beyond its boundaries5. Cities are consumers of energy and materials, producers of artefacts and waste and they have been very often described in biological terms both in the classical studies of social urbanism (Writh 1938, Simmer 1964) and recent research related to sustainable development. Understanding the city as a living organism, at one hand, embraces the research of biological systems and living entities, learning from their capacity to grow and interact with their environment and then attempting to imitate their living functions into building structures, or used as a theoretical basis for reinventing the functions of the city. The theory of living systems is created by scientist James Miller as an attempt to explain the nature of life, through a generalization about the existence of all living systems. According to Parent(1996), Living Systems are described as: open selforganizing systems that have the special characteristics of life and interact with their environment. This takes place by means of information and material-energy exchanges. Living systems can be as simple as a single cell or as complex as a supranational organization such as the European Union. Benne (2011) explains that a city is similar to a living system because it is open in the way it facilitates connections and interactions, it changes and evolves over time, it is healthy when it is ethnically and culturally diverse and where the community is active. Other approaches concentrate at examining the natures capacity to be selfsustained, taking in only the necessary energy it needs and evolves without creating excess waste that burdens the biosphere. 2.1 Metabolism of a city as a circular flow of energy, materials and waste Studies that look into nature as a holistic ecosystem, propose to imitate metabolic processes in nature where a living organism creates no waste and everything becomes a feedstock for something else. This is one of the basic idea brought forward by the authors of Cradle to Cradle that propose a systematic method to conception and production, eliminating toxic materials so waste becomes food for the biosphere or is upcycled into a new industrial cycle. The authors of C2C imagine building like trees and cities like forests. For McDonough William, (2002): Cities are organisms. They have metabolisms. They are linked to their regions through complex networks, both natural and cultivated, that circulate biological nutrition-food, wood, fiber, water-and technical nutrition-the hardware and software of the 21st century. These flows of nutrients are the twin metabolisms of the living city. They talk about an ultimate state that the city can accomplish when having two regenerative metabolisms that will feed the urban organism. The biological one is about the materials that return back to the soil safely and the technical ones go back to the industry. For McDonough and Braugnart the city as an organism is the idyllic model that can be attained when a city metabolises its energy and materials. The city is becoming alive by harvesting the energy of the sun, inserting windmills, promoting local and organic food production, planting trees, managing rain
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For example, London needs a surface area around 125 times its surface are to supply the city with its needs. This is equivalent to 2.8 hectares per person, while in North America the ecological footprint comes to 4-5 hectares per person. Source: Dodman (2009), p.185

water all practices of a well organised process where everything is governed by a flow of regenerative cycles6. This notion of a circular economy is based on earlier ideas about industrial ecology and industrial metabolism. Ayres, the first author to bring to surface the notion of industrial metabolism urges to learn from the biosphere and favour an industrial metabolism that results in reduced extraction of virgin materials, reduced loss of waste materials, and increased recycling of useful ones (1989, p.x). Ayres, (1994) create an analogy between the organism that ingests energy-rich, low-entropy materials ("food") to provide for its own maintenance and functions, as well as a surplus to permit growth and/or reproduction[]the excretion or exhalation of waste outputs, consisting of degraded, high-entropy materials(p.23) and the industrial activities, that are also materials-processing systems driven by a flow of free energy [] because both are examples of self-organizing "dissipative systems7" in a stable state, far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Models of industry as an ecosystem and industrial metabolism have also a similar application in cities. Though, due to the complexity, scale and different interchanging mechanisms that describe the city, the practise of urban metabolism that attempts to measure all activities and processes that take place in the city becomes a much more difficult and intricate process. The idea of measuring in mass or joules the inputs and outputs of a city suggests a model aiming for equilibrium in terms of resources consumed and the capacity of the biosphere to provide for those resources (inputs) or absorb the waste (outputs). The ultimate goal would be to regulate these flows into a circular metabolic system following the example of nature where there is no waste. On a predominantly urban planet, cities will need to adopt circular metabolic systems to guarantee their sustainability across time, considering not only the citys boundaries but as well as that of the rural environments on which they depend. Outputs will need to become inputs into the urban production system. The reasoning behind urban metabolism is similar to that of Cradle to Cradle, but they work on different scales and with different tools. C2C remains a design and economic model, without performing energetic measurements, such as Life Cycle Analysis, to prove whether their strategy of upcycling is really more environmentally viable than re-use. The first model of urban metabolism developed by Wolman, (1965), evolved around the idea that a city should be conceived as living organism that consumes water and food and produces biomass and waste. The parallel between a city and an organism is clear: Cities transform raw materials, fuel, and water into the built environment, human biomass and waste (H. Decker, 2000, p.715). Wolmans first model measured the five direct inputs-outputs of stock of an imaginary city of one million inhabitants. These are: Energy Water, Nutritients, materials and waste. Wolman presented efficiency ratios of pollution as generated from emissions and fuel related to energy consumption. Recent metabolic studies extended the model of Wolman in which there is an absence of urban dynamics and where the city is viewed as a mere black box8. The expanded models start to include factors such as demography, socio-economic indicators, education, community quality, employment, GDP indicators. In these measurements land use indicators are also used such as density, age of housing, taxations or regulations, transportation parameters of people and goods. Urban metabolism updated definition by Christopher Kennedy is the sum total of the technical and socioeconomic processes that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy, and elimination of waste (2007, p.44).
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(McDonough, 2002) A dissipative system is a thermodynamically open system which is operating out of, and often far from, thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment with which it exchanges energy and matter. 8 (Costa, 2008 p. 375)

The importance of understanding a citys metabolism can provide us with a variety of indicators to be adopted by policy makers and create future sustainable models of the city. Despite the fact that this has been an exercise practiced by academics in the last thirty years, it has not been commonly used in city planning developmental policies (Peter W.G, 1999, p.220). Christofer Kennedy, one of the prominent authors on urban metabolism is questioning: what use are the urban metabolism studies for urban planning and design? [] Most studies of urban metabolism have primarily been accounting exercises (2011, p.1) providing indicators on urban sustainability, measures of energy consumption, material flows and wastes. The use of the concept of urban metabolism in the field of urban design is relatively not developed, counting only a few projects by university students in MIT and the University of Toronto. The urban metabolism model often lacks to address the human social organizations or interpret their dynamics resulting from demography and social trends in the city. A physician Geoffrey West believes that this is a major piece of the puzzle toward [] transition to sustainability. (pg.7301) 2.2 Metabolism as a fractal network Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt are two physicists that changed the direction of their research towards cities, driven by the urge to respond to the rapid urbanization and the resulting environmental problems that these generate. Their stimulation? Living organisms and their metabolisms: Organisms as metabolic engines, characterized by energy consumption rates, growth rates, body size, and behavioural times, have a clear counterpart in social systems (Geoffery West, 2007, p.7302). Progressing on the work of Max Kleiber, a biologist who discovered in the early 1930s that the metabolic rate of essentially any species increases equally to the mass of the animal raised to the power of . This indicates that the growth of all species follows the same sublinear growth, and the bigger they are, the longer they live and the less they consume. How then are cities similar to a living organism in terms of their growth, body size and consumption of energy? Every organism, like every city, is extremely different to one another, each having a unique history, different sizes and an evolution into a unique environment. But in biology, like in the cities, the growth rate expresses an economy of scale, all this indicated by graphs showing a sublinear growth of animals related to their mass. The bigger you get, the less energy you use. This idea of scalability used in the domain in biology was adopted to scientifically quantify cities. Geoffrey West and his team have proven that the population (like the body mass of an organism) is the constant to measure all the other components that make the city. West and Bettencourt have analysed an extensive urban data to find out whether and in which ways cities behave like living organisms. The data included energy consumption, economic activity, demographics, infrastructure, innovation and even patterns of human behaviour (Geoffery West, 2007). What their results evoke is that like living organisms, cities perform according to a quantifiable mathematical model that functions according to economies of scale. By the demonstration of mathematical models they have proved that by doubling the population of a city, there will be an increase of roughly 85% in the citys infrastructure, following the biological rule that as one gets bigger, it needs less energy to sustain itself. In the case of the city this is possible as infrastructure used at higher densities re more efficient, therefore more economically and environmentally viable. However, as the city doubles in size there is an approximately 15% increase (more than an expected linear growth) in all urban indicators: wealth, waste, number of petrol

stations, length of roads, wages, crime, HIV, flu, patents, number of police, pedestrians walking speed, naming a few of these parameters demonstrated in their graphs. The authors argue that despite any unique characteristics that a city possesses, they all fall into a same urban system that obeys a scaling relation in terms of their population. They further dispute that this universality in the quantifying cities has been the result of human social dynamics that transcend biology and redefine metaphors of urban metabolism (p.7306). This constant of 15% of urban indicators is the result of social networks, because as the population increases there is more people that move into the city, where people are the origins of creativity and innovation, providing stimulants for economic growth. West intriguing calculations indicate that all cities are exactly the same with each other in terms of characteristics and growth patterns: the only variable being the population input. Despite the interesting observations that cities are in fact a living and have similar growth patterns to other living organisms, we can argue that such an approach limits considerably the experience of the city and true values that mark the identity of every city. 2.3 Metabolism in a regenerative urban planning At the same time that Alber Wolman was developing the first metabolic model of how to calculate the flows of energy, materials, water and nutritients in the city, five young Japanese architects have already published their manifesto presented at the World Design Conference in Tokyo, Metabolism 1960, Proposal for a new urbanism. Metabolism is an apparent link with our previous discussion on urban metabolism, but the Japanese Metabolists were concerned with direct interventions in the urban space. The metabolism movement tends to respond to urban problems directly by implementation and by practice as for example representing urban plans that present the city as a process, as to reproduce the way ecological systems respond to change. The mise-en-scne of the Japanese Metabolism Movements urbanistic ideas is aiming to investigate how ideas of urban metabolism or the city as an organism can move from a conceptualization level or a scientific measurement exercise and start acquiring a spatial and visual form as a more direct way to respond to the citys changing needs. The manifesto, Metabolism 1960, Proposal for a new urbanism was presented at the World Design Conference in Tokyo and edited by the member of the group N. Kawazoe. The movements ideas and aspirations were radical, yet very local, in the sense that they trying to disconnect from the modernist movement and generally from western architecture that was expanding rapidly at the time mainly brought forward by the group CIAM. Their ideologies presented a veritable Japanese identity and were derived from meanings of Japanese culture and religion. The movement was responding to actual urban problems in the 1960s Japan: rapid urbanization, expansion of cities and an increase in urban population. The response was manifested in large scale urban projects and infrastructures that were flexible and adaptable to societys changing needs. The projects developed by Metabolists brought forward ideas and detailed plans of how the city could be developed at the biological level. The Metabolists gave birth to the design of megastructures; those were buildings at the scale of a city and the response to adapt to the unpredictable growth and change that occurs in the city. These contained living units which could be replaced or renewed without intervening on the whole structure. They introduced high technology to create a biological urbanism that would be kept alive by constantly renewing its parts.

The proposals of the Metabolism Movement were based on dynamic, self-organizing, forms that suggested a new understanding in the concept of Living system in urban design due to the capability of self-maintenance and self-transformation. Nyilas, (2011) described the properties of Living Systems, a theory developed further by Noble-laureate physicist Erwin Schrdinger in is book What is life?, and related them directly to the urban projects of the Metabolists. Schrdinger suggested that the properties of life are to be understood by looking at the relationship between living organisms and their environment. Through this insight, he developed a new understanding of living systems by introducing the notion that organisms are self-organizing systems. The principle of self-organization refers to several dynamic phenomena, the most important ones being self-maintenance and selftransformation. Self-maintenance is the capacity of an organism to sustain the integrity of its physical structure, while at the same time allows perpetual change for its different parts. Self-transformation depends on the flexibility for change that suggests a high degree of internal plasticity for the different parts within the body. Investigating the metabolism movement enables us to understand visually in an urban design model, how living systems can interact, maintain themselves and change. The movement has initiated the thinking of a city as a process (Tange) and tried to imagine its spatial functioning and internal operation in biological terms. Through the examination of the (mostly unrealized) works of the Metabolists, the following biological features are addressed: Kikutakes project of a Towers Shaped Community, 1958, the living units of the structure responds to an individual living cell that can be freely added or removed which suggests a flexibility of change and self-maintenance. Kikutakes vision at even bigger scales also presents the same biological analogy. For the project Marine City he studied the reproduction process of a eukaryotic9 cell to plan a city that grows, expands and reproduces in the same way. Kawazoes approach to a citys development is also based on natures structuring principles, and he is mostly concerned with the process of metabolism. He pronounced: The Metabolism of our life will be operated in such a way as to follow the order of Nature, while Nature will be developed at the hands of Man. Man and nature will be unified into one, and the whole earth will become one huge living thing.10 Kurokawa unfolded the meaning of metabolism by stating that different functions of a city have different life spans exemplified in his project Urban design for a New Tokyo. Kurokawa suggested that different functions of the city with similar life cycles should be connected together in a flexible manner to create a new urbanism. The durability and scale that exists between various urban structures like transport, living units and architectural structures varies extensively. He proposes an urban design strategy to enable flexible expansion amongst these different elements. Similarly in the MIT Boston Harbour Project, Kengo Tange established a new prototype by linking major structures that have longer life-cycles (the infrastructure) and those having shorter life-cycles (the living units). The resulted proposal was a megastructure to accommodate 25,000 people, where the different functions (circulation, living spaces and urban spaces) of the city were divided in different levels. Equally the subject of flexibility is addressed by the potential of replaceability of living units, hence the suggestion of self-maintenance of a system. At the same time, there was a potential for a linear extension of the structure that is defined by the continuous flow

Wikipedia definition:Eukaryote is an organism whose cells contain complex structures enclosed within membranes. All species of large complex organisms are eukaryotes, including animals, plants and fungi
10

Kikutake, 1960, p.50 , as quoted in Nyilas 2011

of circulation spaces, and this aspect of the planning refers to the Living Systems phenomenon of self-transformation. We can argue that at a certain extent, there is a link with the theories of Cradle to Cradle in the matter of life-cycle thinking. C2C is also inspired from nature (maybe in a more romantic way) and suggests that we start to think of products in a life-cycle consequence from conception to disposal in order to eliminate waste. This implies that all the components of a product should be replaceable, flexible and easy to deconstruct. These techniques are well evident to the products that are now certified C2C, yet we have not seen a similar direction in the architecture of C2C. On the building scale a similar method of systematic deconstruction has been examined by several authors aiming at a reduction of construction and demolition waste by reusing components of the building and facilitating maintenance. These authors embrace the idea to look at a building by an analysis of the layers it comprises. Habraken, (1998) identify two layers of a building, the structural frame that acquires a long life and the space making items that are often reused and replaced during the buildings life. Brand, (1994) in a more expanded and inclusive analysis categorizes the buildings in 6 layers11 and highlights the importance of in terms of technical and social benefits in an approach to design and constructing in this layered manner. The Metabolism Movement has provided practical models that show how urban from can evolve and grow over time. The sustainability agenda was not high in their priorities but we can argue that such an approach addresses many of our contemporary concerns: the megastructures are compact and well connected to transport hubs; their flexibility allows for gradual transformation, implying re-use and re-adaptation, therefore conserving natural materials. Even though, the ideas of the Metabolists and the conquest of the city through their biological megastructures have failed, we seem not to have any better schemes to accommodate growth and change that are anticipated in the decades to come. 2.2 Metabolism to create bottom up building materials The Metabolism group, a purely architectural movement has generated a city that selfgrows by itself according to actual social and economic conditions that the city needs. The city as a process was metaphorical as the process was man-made; it was represented trough completed set of architectural drawings and illustrations that beautifully captured their vision. What if literally, buildings were to grow in an evolutionary process, from bottom-up? Merging the science of biology and the practise of architecture, a more present reference to the use of metabolism into the discipline of urban design is the work of Rachel Armstrong who is working together with UCLs AVATAR12 team(Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research). Armstrong is proposing like the Metabolism movement, an architecture that is an organized system that grows organically, repairs itself, and is regenerative, but unlike the Metabolisms this is a bottom up process, where

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From longest to shortest lasting these are: a. Site (The buildings geographical location), b. Structure (any load bearing part of the building), c. Skin (the exterior surfaces), d. Services(all systems within the building), e. Space plan (the interior fit out) and f. Stuff (furniture and appliances). 12 AVATAR is founded in 2004 at the Bartlett School of architecture by Neil Spiller

materials are developed from zero, and issues such as design are not addressed in the conventional way. In order to confront with the increasing concerns of sustainability and the one way of material transfer of energy in our cities their proposal is to actually connect cities with nature though the development of metabolic materials13. The actual chemical exchange of metabolism is used as the common language to create such technologies that will be able to respond directly to their environment; these metabolic materials can be exploited to create hybrid building-scale circulatory systems that can generate their own skins, capture carbon and convert toxic by-products into harmless limestone-like materials. This is examined through the use of new technologies, the merging of unconventional computer techniques with the creation of artificial protocells and chemical transitions of inert to living matter. The project also involves an interdisciplinary team of scientists working on synthetic biology and complex chemistry that together with architects are investigating the potentials of such materials in the field of architectural design, urban design and sustainability. Their study of architectural materials is conducted from a bottom up approach: there is an assembly of primitive chemical system, called the protocell, which is a chemically programmed agent based on the chemistry of oil and water. These protocells share the properties of living systems but are not alive since they are DNA-less agents. Yet these protocells have living characteristics like move around and sense their environments; communicate with each other and undergo complex physical behaviours from which many of them are architectural. (Armstrong, 2010). Armstrong, (2010) states that the use of this Living Technology provides a wide range of applications in the building industry: []a new portfolio of urban materials, such as building coatings that protect buildings against flood water, footpaths that rise according to water levels and materials that have self-healing properties. Protocells can also make a chemical change within the landscape of a microenvironment. []Applications are materials that have a symbiotic relationship with existing architecture, such as paints that can metabolically fix carbon dioxide, solar panels that produce biofuels from urban carbon dioxide and claddings that produce water in desert situations. These generated materials are being investigated in order to create a new type of architecture that grows and repairs itself and that is capable of self-assembly and organization. These experiments look to be still at an early stage and similar technology has not yet being tested at large scale. However the research team is working on largescale projects as for example their idea to reclaim Venice from its fearful relation with the sea and resolve the concerns of over flooding and damaging structures. The protocells in this case, are formed by absorbing of carbon dioxide that is dissolved in water. The protocells are programmed to move away from light, towards the dark foundations of the city where they gradually penetrate and strengthen the wood piles and start overtime to develop an artificial limestone reef spreading over the city. 3. Living Urban Practises

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{Armstrong, 2010 #62} defines metabolic materials: The characteristic of metabolic materials is that they possess the living property of metabolism, which is a set of chemical interactions that transform one group of substances into another with the absorption or production of energy. This transfer of energy through chemical exchange directly couples the environment to the living technology and embeds it within an ecosystem.

We have reviewed diverse literature that studies the city as a living organism, as a way to learn from natures capacity to be self-sustained. We have looked into diverse theories across the different disciplines as a way to determine which kind of practises we can adopt in the urban design process. The enviromental problem is well stated by the measurements in the frame of urban metabolism but can be solved by new conceptions via design. Designers, architects and urbanists play a crucial role in reducing the anthropogenic effects on the natural environment. In effect, as Van der Ryn Sim, (2007) point out , the environmental crisis is also a crisis of design14, as designers and architects are responsible for a wasteful of energy and resources. The Japanese Metabolism Movement is the only group that has directly applied their ideas into an urban design model, treating the city as such organism. One major limitation of their concepts is that they seem to fulfil their own personal aspirations as architects, without addressing the human factor in their design. We have also discussed the urban metabolism approach as an accounting exercise that estimates all the sources (inputs) that go in the city and outputs-sinks that are accumulated in the city. The knowledge that the metabolic urban models reveal are manifold. For example we can know how natural ecosystems change because of our meat consumption, or the relationship between urban patterns and environmental performance. But how does urban design change according to this model. Can cities be evaluated just in terms of their emissions? Can they be understood in such terms by the citizens? Criticism by Gissen, (2007) that the C2C approach remarkably reduces water consumption, energy use, and carbon output but he adds we cannot evaluate society through simplistic metabolism equations alone. Such an approach reduces the vibrancy of urban life to measures of chemical inputs and outputs. Is one city better than another based on its carbon footprint?(p.2) These practises raise a series of questions about urban practises: they all seem to have left aside the human factor as a part of the process of making a living city. Humans are the most living component in the urban realm, yet they seem to remain idle in the interpretations of city as living organism. What kind of approaches and planning will be best for creating a living city indeed? On a metaphorical base a city like an organism; it could be dying, or it might be healthy or sick. Several contemporary urban practitioners are performing urban acupuncture to assess a particular sick condition and act by pressing on the appropriate point to release energy in the city. This strategy equally regards the city as a living breathing organism, targeting the citys critical point, and using the smallest effort to get a maximum body condition and efficiency. Sustainable projects, then, serve as needles that revitalize the whole by healing the parts. This has been a technique widely practised: Jaimie Lerner, The ex-three times mayor of Curitiba, one of the most successful sustainable cities15, has followed such approaches and managed to re-boost the economy of Curitiba through numerous social reforms. Lerner, (2003) describes the tactics he used in his book Acupuntura Urbana: I believe that some medicinal magic can and should be applied to cities, as many are sick and some nearly terminal. As with the medicine needed in the interaction between doctor and patient, in urban planning it is also necessary to make the city react; to poke an area in such a way that it is able to help heal,
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{Van der Ryn Sim, 2007 #17}, p.26 Curitiba received the United Nations Environmental Award (UNEP) in 1990, the Worldwatch Institute Prize in 1991 and the CITIES Award for Excellence in 2002. Furthermore: Its residents use 25% less fuel than other Brazilians, recycle 70% of the citys garbage, and an astounding 99% of them claim to be happy with the way their city is run. Source:

improve, and create positive chain reactions. It is indispensable in revitalizing interventions to make the organism work in a different way. (p.1) The method of Urban Acupuncture contrasts greatly with large-scale urban projects that are target oriented, expensive, and need a lot of time to be realised. Professor James Southern of the SCI-arc University explains that such tactics are micro-targeting, low-cost, democratic and empowering for the urban residents. The process consists of identifying the urban spaces that are in need for renewal; due to existing technology it is now feasible to locate such abandoned sites in a few minutes. Nickolas de Monchaux professor at UC Berkley uses technologies like JAS Digital and Autodesk that use GIS to map unused spaces though cities. This method offers countless opportunities for development of green space and sustainable buildings. Many notable urban renewal projects have adopted tactics of Urban Acupuncture, whether it is a conscious or unconscious approach. Past projects that fall into this category is the rehabilitation plan of Barcelona in the 1990s, or at a smaller scale the revitalization of abandoned spaces in post-war Berlin16. Diverse urban movements are adopting similar techniques without coining the exact term, but they all fall into the same category. (D.I.Y. Urbanism, Pop-up Urbanism, City Repair, Guerrilla Urbanism). In US, another movement that goes by the name Tactical Urbanism follows the same approach of making a living city by incremental, small-scale improvements are increasingly seen as a way to stage more substantial investments .(Lydon, 2011, p.1). All their initiatives included projects that are, fast, cheap and flexible offering local solutions to existing challenges and following a deliberate, phased approach to instigating change. Many cities have started to experience these discrete spatial interventions that boost up the city from a bottom-up approach. The common denominator of these practises is that they try to achieve a large-scale transformation in the city, by promoting small, bottom-up interventions. The MetaboliCity project has chosen 4 areas in London, where they reclaim unused urban space for the use of local food production by citizens participation. MetaboliCity is a project inspired from the way a city that metabolizes its resources and waste in order to supply its inhabitants with the basic nourishment they need (Jones, 2010 ). The project focuses on socio-economic effects but as well in dealing with the improvement of urban ecology as a whole. Their application in urban design was achieved by creating a connectivity and biointegration between the built environment and the surrounding ecosystems through an investigation of a more synergistic relationship between structure and energy.(p.5) Through different urban practises that exist today in the city we are experiencing a move from fixed, end-goal oriented practises to more flexible approaches. These initiatives and goals are set by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, (2009), that amongst their propositition are practises that are: strategic rather than comprehensive; action and implementation oriented through links to budgets, projects and city-wide or regional infrastructure; stakeholder or community driven rather than only expert driven. This shift into a more flexible and community participatory planning enhances the citys condition as living, given that inhabitants are becoming more participatory in citys practises, and projects are not fixed but are rather flexible to
16

City officials have transformed urban spaces (of which their owners could not traced) into what they have called pocket parks, urban forests, playgrounds, etc

accommodate for unforeseen urban changes. Because in nature not everything is planned and spontaneity is much a living features than a drawback.

Further Questions and research How could we make use of urban metabolism into a functional/spatial model when have to create places for the people in cities? Can we adopt urban models that follow this circular life pattern, while at the same time incorporating the often neglected socio-human value? Can we draw a correlation between the process of deriving an urban metabolism model with a systemic understanding of the design process in architecture and planning? Further references of the city as an organism in the architectural and urban practice- Text on biomimetic architecture and design . How can we include people in the making of places, of cities that are undergoing circular metabolic loops. Include humans input and output in a circular loop. (like Curitiba residents). What do living systems teach us about the attributes of a healthy and regenerative city and what are the implications for city planning and design? Explore how designers can nurture bottom-up, social activities that revalue leftover spaces of the city as inspiring and useful places. What does it mean in the frame of policy making, the implication that city can perform living organism?

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