Urban Consumption: New Theories, Models, and Methods (17:00 UTC)
Session Organizer : Benjamin Goldstein and Sybil Derrible
Institution : University of Michigan, University of Illinois Chicago
Location / Local Time : Ann Arbor, Michigan / 12:00 - 1:00 PM EST
Abstract :
Cities are at the forefront of today’s most pressing sustainability challenges. Urban consumption—encompassing the ways in which cities and their inhabitants use energy, materials, land, and water—is a key driver of global environmental change, significantly contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, and environmental injustice. In the face of accelerating climate change and mounting social inequality, there is an urgent need for cities to reduce their resource use, lower carbon emissions, and become more just and resilient. Industrial ecology offers powerful frameworks and analytical tools to assess the sustainability of cities and to help cities become more sustainable.
Understanding the underlying drivers of urban consumption, as well as its multifaceted social and environmental consequences across time and space, is a complex challenge. The patterns and impacts of urban consumption are shaped by a dynamic interplay of technologies, infrastructures, policies, economic systems, and cultural practices. This session highlights pioneering speakers who are advancing the field of industrial ecology and its allied disciplines with innovative theories and analytical methods. Their work helps illuminate the causes and consequences of urban consumption and provides new conceptual and practical tools to navigate the transition toward sustainable and equitable urban futures.
Speakers and Talk Descriptions:
- Sybil Derrible (University of Illinois Chicago; Co-organizer)
- Title: Causality in Urban Metabolism: Better Understanding How We Consume Energy and Resources
- Description: Causal discovery tools can map the decision-making processes that people adopt when consuming energy and resources. Using these tools can help policymakers develop more targeted and effective policies that go to the root cause of overconsumption.
- Benjamin Goldstein (University of Michigan; Co-organizer)
- Title: Urban Symbiosis - The latent potential of grassroots material circularity in cities
- Description: Citizens shape urban resource circularity everyday through projects, small and large. However, urban sustainability scholars and practitioners prioritize large-scale circularity activities (i.e., conventional recycling, industrial symbiosis in cities, etc.) This presentation advances a theory of “urban symbiosis” as a way to study and support citizen-led resource circularity that is strongly embedded in cities.
- Joe Bozeman III (SEEEL Lab, Georgia Tech)
- Talk Title: Dancing with Justice and Degrowth
- Short Description: In this talk, Dr. Bozeman explores the tenets of justice, equity, and degrowth. He will focus on the codependency of these concepts and applications as it relates to urban consumption.
- Hua Cai (uSMART, Purdue University)
- Title: Urban Consumption in Transition: Sustainability Trade-offs of Shared Mobility, Electrification, and AI
- Short Description: Emerging technologies such as shared mobility, electrification, and AI bring opportunities to enhance urban sustainability but also generate their own environmental impacts. This talk will discuss how the adoption and use of emerging technologies impact urban consumption through their competition and complementary relationship with existing systems.
- Brandon Finn (Informal Sustainability Lab, University of Michigan)
- Talk title: Informal Sustainability
- Description: The informal economy is central to urban processes and the livelihoods of billions of people. It enables work when formal market barriers prevent access, and allows basic survival and upward mobility. Despite this, informality presents immense challenges, as people often work without formal protection or legal recourse. Informality is also essential for global supply chains, but compromises their transparency and traceability. In this talk, Brandon Finn will discuss cobalt supply chains and the gray spaces of informality, as well as their relationship to sustainability and inclusion.
- John Mulrow (Degrowth Institute)
- Title: Degrowth is Sustainable Consumption at a Global Scale
- Description: To stay within planetary boundaries, urban sustainability design and analysis must be situated in extra-urban, or macroeconomic, context. In our global economy, which is committed to endless expansion, the savings from localized impact-reduction efforts are typically redeployed to fuel growth; they are not actually saved. The tools of industrial ecology can yield meaningful results by pairing with degrowth: an intentional downscaling of the global economy.
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