About the Book Understanding Urban Metabolism addresses the gap between the bio-physical sciences and urban planning and illustrates the advantages of accounting for urban metabolism issues in urban design decisions. Urban metabolism considers a city as a system, and distinguishes between energy and material flows as its components. Based on research from the BRIDGE project, this book deals with how the urban surface exchanges and transforms energy, water, carbon and pollutants in cities. This book also introduces a new method for evaluating how planning alternatives can modify the physical flows of urban metabolism components and how environmental and socioeconomic components interact. The inclusion of sustainability principles into urban planning provides an opportunity to place the new knowledge provided by bio-physical sciences at the centre of the planning process, but there is a strong need to bridge knowledge and practice, as well as for a better dissemination of research results and exchange of best practice. This book meets that need and provides the reader with the necessary tools to integrate an understanding of urban metabolism into urban planning practice. Table of Contents Part 1: Introduction 1. Urban Metabolism 2. Decision Support Tools for Urban Planning 3. The BRIDGE Approach Part 2: Measurements and Modelling of Physical Flows 4. Physical Fluxes in the Urban Environment 5. Environmental Measurements in BRIDGE Case Studies 6. Use of Earth Observation to support Urban Modelling Parameterization in BRIDGE 7. Meso-scale Meteorological Models in the Urban Context 8. Urban Air Quality Models 9. Urban Energy Budget Models 10. Urban Water Balance and Hydrology Models 11. Urban Carbon Budget Modelling Part 3: The Socioeconomic Components 12. The Use of Communities of Practice to Involve Stakeholders in the DSS Design 13. Collection of Socioeconomic Data and Indicators for Urban Integrated Modelling 14. Combining Environmental and Socioeconomic Data Part 4: The BRIDGE DSS 15. The BRIDGE Impact Assessment Framework 16. The BRIDGE DSS 17. Decision Making under Certainty: Use of Foresight for Assessing Planning Alternatives 18. Guidelines for Urban Sustainable Development Part 5: Conclusions 19. Conclusions