Compare methods

	Urban Resilience Assessment	Urban Metabolism Analysis
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2016	1965
Originator	Resilience-theory and urban-planning scholarship (synthesised by Meerow, Newell & Stults)	Abel Wolman (the metabolism-of-cities concept)
Type	Framework or composite index assessing a city's capacity to absorb and adapt to disturbance	Accounting of material and energy inputs, stocks, and outputs of a city
Seminal source	Meerow, S., Newell, J. P., & Stults, M. (2016). Defining urban resilience: A review. Landscape and Urban Planning, 147, 38–49.	Wolman, A. (1965). The metabolism of cities. Scientific American, 213(3), 178–190.
Aliases	City Resilience Index, Urban Resilience Framework, Resilience Capacity Assessment, Disaster Resilience of Place	Material Flow Analysis, Urban Material and Energy Flows, City Metabolism Accounting, Urban Mass Balance
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	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.