Compare methods

	Urban Metabolism Analysis	Urban Resilience Assessment
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1965	2016
Originator	Abel Wolman (the metabolism-of-cities concept)	Resilience-theory and urban-planning scholarship (synthesised by Meerow, Newell & Stults)
Type	Accounting of material and energy inputs, stocks, and outputs of a city	Framework or composite index assessing a city's capacity to absorb and adapt to disturbance
Seminal source	Wolman, A. (1965). The metabolism of cities. Scientific American, 213(3), 178–190.	Meerow, S., Newell, J. P., & Stults, M. (2016). Defining urban resilience: A review. Landscape and Urban Planning, 147, 38–49.
Aliases	Material Flow Analysis, Urban Material and Energy Flows, City Metabolism Accounting, Urban Mass Balance	City Resilience Index, Urban Resilience Framework, Resilience Capacity Assessment, Disaster Resilience of Place
Related	4	4
Summary	Urban metabolism analysis treats a city as a living organism that ingests materials, water, energy and food and excretes wastes, emissions and outflows, accounting for these flows to understand and improve a city's resource use. Drawing on the biological metaphor that Abel Wolman introduced in his 1965 'The metabolism of cities', the method draws a system boundary around the urban area and constructs a mass and energy balance of everything entering, accumulating in, and leaving it. The resulting per-capita flows and efficiency indicators expose how resource-intensive a city is and where interventions could close material loops.	Urban resilience assessment evaluates how well a city can absorb, adapt to, and recover from shocks such as floods, earthquakes and pandemics and from chronic stresses such as poverty and ageing infrastructure. Most assessments are framework-driven composite indices: they define resilience dimensions — infrastructural, social, economic, ecological and institutional — gather indicators for each, normalise and weight them, and aggregate to a resilience score or profile. Because, as Meerow, Newell and Stults documented, 'urban resilience' is defined in conflicting ways across the literature, every assessment must first take a position on what resilience means, for whom, and against which disturbances.