Mapping resource urban systems

Mapping resource effectiveness across urban systems

Congratulations to Grantham Scholar Ling Min Tan for the publication of Mapping Resource Effectiveness Across Urban Systems!

Ling Min specialises in urban metabolism, which is a way to map cities by comparing them to a living system. If you want to find out more about urban metabolism, then you can read our interview with Ling Min.

Mapping resource effectiveness across urban systems

In this new paper Ling Min finds that cities can be resource-effective if they have a more diversified industrial structure. Diversification would extend the pathways of resource flows allowing the circularity gap between the suppliers and consumers to close.

We asked Ling Min to explain why this paper is important:

‘This work addresses the sustainability challenges of urbanisation to advocate implementation of effective resource-use in the development agenda for sustainable cities,” says Ling Min. “It examines the interdependencies within an urban system by quantifying and mapping resource effectiveness across the inter-connected urban network as a whole.

‘We have developed a novel taxonomy of resource-use behaviours in cities based on their effectiveness performances and clustering patterns. This means we can identify the hotspots of imports in cities and redirect resources to where they are most needed, based on the system overall resource effectiveness to maximise the use of all resources available.’

If you want to read the whole paper, then you can find it on npj Urban Sustainability here.