Accounting for urban metabolism in urban planning the case of BRIDGE

Urban metabolism considers a city as a system and distinguishes between energy and material flows. Bottom-up approaches are based on quantitative estimates of urban metabolism components at local scale, considering the urban metabolism as the 3D exchange and transformation of energy and matter between a city and its environment. Decision Support Systems (DSS) are capable of supporting complex decision making and of solving semi-structured or unstructured problems through a computer interface that presents results in a readily understandable form. The main goal of the FP7 project BRIDGE is to develop a DSS and use it to propose modifications on the metabolism of urban systems towards sustainability by evaluating how planning alternatives can modify the physical flows of the above urban metabolism components. The BRIDGE DSS integrates bio-physical observations and modelling with socioeconomic issues in five European cities that were selected as case studies for pilot application. This study describes the design and implementation of the BRIDGE DSS.