Call for papers: Urban metabolism in transition: Integrating space, function, services, and practices for the next generation of metabolic studies

Urban metabolism in transition: Integrating space, function, services, and practices for the next generation of metabolic studies

Cities embody a unique interplay between dynamism and persistence. While their long-lasting physical structures exhibit path dependency and inertia, these are continually reshaped by evolving activities, practices, and institutional arrangements. The urban metabolism —understood as a city’s energy and material throughput and stock accumulation—is shaped by these tensions between permanence and change, local heterogeneity and global interdependence, grassroots innovation and institutional inertia. Moreover, metabolic patterns and their pace of change vary significantly across cities depending on their physical characteristics, cultural norms, socioeconomic structures, governance regimes and technological development. Additionally, the built environment influence wellbeing and public health.

Despite increased recognition of cities as dynamic socio-ecological systems, urban metabolism research has not yet fully captured the integration between resource flows and the spatial, functional and institutional dimensions of cities—nor the connections to the hinterlands that sustain them. Since the seminal contributions of the 1960s and 1970s, urban metabolic studies rooted in industrial ecology have laid essential foundations for analyzing urban resource demands and emissions, as a lens to understand cities’ relations with natural environments. Recent calls have emphasized the need to expand this perspective by integrating spatial heterogeneity, urban functions, services and practices, and addressing justice, wellbeing and resilience (Bertoldi & Perrotti 2025; Streeck et al. 2025). However, the impact of unequal infrastructure distributions on urban populations (Pandey, Brelsford & Seto 2025) and the influence of built environment on health and exposure to climate risks (Hoeben, Otto & Chersich 2022; Tong 2024) are only rarely addressed in urban metabolism research. A novel agenda is needed to fully embrace the complexity of cities in the next generation of metabolic studies.

Full scope of the Special Issue

As urban land cover and infrastructure are projected to triple by 2050 (compared to 2015, cf. IPCC 6th Assessment Report), the stakes for understanding and reshaping urban metabolisms have never been higher. This calls for socially grounded and spatially explicit approaches that can link metabolic rates with socioeconomic and natural functions. Also essential is to incorporate insights from urban ecology—highlighting the interactions between built form, ecological processes, and ecosystem health—and political ecology’s analysis of how power, governance, and inequality shape urban resource flows and environmental outcomes. Together, these perspectives can inform a new generation of metabolic studies capable of supporting just, sustainable, and resilient urban transformations while bringing awareness of the intellectual paradigms and normative approaches underpinning urban metabolism research.

This special issue aims to advance this agenda by welcoming contributions that integrate spatial form, functional diversity, services, and social practices into metabolic assessments. It encourages explorations of urban nature, equity, wellbeing, and governance through interdisciplinary and paradigm-aware approaches. Integrating perspectives from urban and political ecology, degrowth research, planning and circular economy practices, this issue seeks to broaden and deepen the next generation of urban metabolism studies.

We invite theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions on topics including but not limited to:

Guest editors:

Daniela Perrotti
University of Louvain, Brussels, Belgium

Kangkang Tong
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

Ilona M. Otto
University of Graz, Graz, Austria

Bhartendu Pandey
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA

Dominik Wiedenhofer
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, Austria

Manuscript submission information:

A Virtual Special Issue (VSI) is an online-only grouping of Special Issue articles traditionally assigned to a single Special Issue. The articles in a VSI will be assigned a unique identifier and published in a regular journal issue. The unique identifier allows for simultaneously adding the article to a VSI in ScienceDirect.com. Articles grouped together in a VSI retain their original citation details. A VSI speeds up the publication of individual articles as, unlike the publication process for conventional Special Issue articles, a VSI does not need to wait for the final article to be ready before publication.

A detailed submission guideline is available here: Guide for authors. All manuscripts and any supplementary material should be submitted through the online editorial system Editorial Manager®. The authors must select the article type of  “VSI: Urb_Met” in the submission process.

Submission Deadline: 21 January 2026

References:

Bertoldi, N. & Perrotti, D. 2025. Linking systems to agencies in urban metabolism studies: A conceptual framework and computational analysis of research literature. Ecological Economics, 227, 108397

Hoeben, A.D., Otto, I.M. & Chersich, M. F. 2022. Integrating public health in European climate change adaptation policy and planning. Climate Policy, 23, 609–622

Pandey, B., Brelsford, C. & Seto, K. C. 2025. Rising infrastructure inequalities accompany urbanization and economic development. Nature Communications, 16, 1193

Streeck, J., Baumgart, A., Haberl, H. et al. 2025. Quantifying material stocks in long-lived products: Challenges and improvements for informing sustainable resource use strategies. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 221, 108324

Tong, K. 2024. Urbanization moderates the transitional linkages between energy resource use, greenhouse gas emissions, socio-economic and human development: Insights from subnational analyses in China. Journal of Cleaner Production, 476, 143776