Author | Diana PardoThe concept of metabolism is something exclusive to living creatures and, in fact, in 1965, Wolman referred to its purely urban meaning as the “Ecological conceptualisation of cities”.What this idea wants to transmit is a change of paradigm in terms of understanding the creation and development of cities. His proposal indicates that we should visualise cities as living creatures that grow and develop and, at some point, may even disappear. From this perspective, cities as artificial systems can be designed from a perspective that fosters a sustainable urban ecosystem.To do so, our perspective needs to change and the way in which cities work needs to be analysed, based on ecological principles and methods. By comparing a city with a living organism, all its energy and material flows have to be considered.

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