Abstract
For his settlements homo sapiens has developed, over thousands of years, technical equipment to support and ensure sustenance of water, energy, biomass and construction materials, to maintain the flows and stocks of these goods and to manage the disposal of waste. This technical equipment, a prosthetic outer envelope of the biological skin of humans, evolved in urbanization to a complex artificial physiological system of densely settled and highly mobile human societies. The byproduct of globalization is a net of urban systems embracing Planet Earth. It is the anthroposphere with its own technical metabolism (Baccini and Brunner in Metabolism of the Anthroposphere. MIT Press, Cambridge MA 2012a).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Baccini, P., & Brunner, P. H. (2012a). Metabolism of the anthroposphere (2nd ed.). Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Baccini, P., & Brunner, P. H. (2012, Aug–Sept). Do you know the stocks and flows of your real economy? The European Financial Review.
Baccini, P., & Oswald, F. (1998). Netzstadt: Transdisziplinäre Methoden zum Umbau urbaner Systeme, vdf, ETHZ, Zürich.
Faist, M. (2000). Ressourceneffizienz in der Aktivität Ernähren (Resource efficiency in the activity „To Nourish“) (Ph.D. Thesis). ETH Zurich Nr. 13884, Zurich.
Oswald, F., & Baccini, P. (2003). Netzstadt: Designing the urban. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Pfister, F., & Baccini, P. (2005). Resource potentials and limitations of a Nicaraguan agricultural region. Environment, Development and Sustainability, 7, 331–361.
Wolman, A. (1965). Metabolism of cities. Scientific American, 213(3), 179–190.
Zhongjie, L. (2010). Kenzo tange and the metabolist movement: Urban utopias of modern Japan. London and New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baccini, P. (2018). Metabolic Properties of Urban Systems: Changing Paradigms in the Cultural Evolution of Human Settlements. In: Viganò, P., Cavalieri, C., Barcelloni Corte, M. (eds) The Horizontal Metropolis Between Urbanism and Urbanization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75975-3_38
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75975-3_38
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75974-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-75975-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)