What if we managed the city as an ecosystem? 

Under the supervision of professors Franck Scherrer from Université de Montréal and Fanny Tremblay-Racicot from ÉNAP, Philippe Genois-Lefrançois led a project aimed at better understanding how urban metabolism can support innovation and inform decision-making in urban planning initiatives that promote the circularity of construction materials and organic matter flows. Discover the summary of their work. 

Summary

This research project, entitled ” Urban metabolism as transition management tool for the circular economy? Study of a transition arena in urban planning ” seeks to explore the capacity of urban metabolism, in its various methodological and narrative dimensions, to support innovation and decision-making in the context of urban planning initiatives geared toward the circularity of construction materials and organic matter flows.

More specifically, the research team examined the modalities and impacts of activating a metabolic perspective through tools such as urban metabolism modeling devices, material flow analysis representations, mapping, and the metabolic semantic field in the deployment of circular urban planning approaches. Using a research-experimentation methodology, the research team was particularly interested in identifying the effects generated by these activations on the structuring of planning mechanisms, the framing of issues, and the design of territorial solutions.

The first phase of the project consisted of a review of experimental approaches to urban planning and governance that explicitly mobilized the urban metabolism perspective. 

This stage enabled us to compile a diverse body of literature covering various experiments and metabolic tools in an urban context, as well as to develop a typology of ways in which these approaches can be linked to the various components of the foresight workshops: visualization of rational utopias, production of metabolic maps, integration of disruptive innovations into scenarios, and collaborative composition of backcasting sequences. The results of this research phase suggest that urban metabolism offers a fertile conceptual toolkit for structuring and enriching territorial co-creation processes, but that this potential has yet to be fully explored and documented.  

This component made it possible to:  

• categorize the different uses of metabolic tools in the context of urban experimentation; 

• develop a typology of possible links between urban metabolism approaches and the different components of a foresight workshop system. 

The second part of the project consisted of developing an urban planning tool inspired by innovation arena methodologies derived from transition management. More specifically, the aim was to create a prototype for forward-looking co-design workshops designed to mobilize stakeholders in the system and innovation niches of a material flow system in a specific area (Montreal boroughs). This prototype is unique in that it integrates several dimensions of the metabolic perspective: knowledge and innovations in metabolic disruption to enrich the imagination of prospective narratives; flow visualization diagrams to visualize possible circular futures; participatory mapping tools to embody co-developed solutions; and integration of constraints related to flows and their dedicated infrastructure in the backcasting stage.    

The next stage of the project will consist of developing four to six co-design sessions in four Montreal territories. These sessions will be an opportunity to adapt the workshop format to local issues and the flows being worked on (construction and biomass). These workshops will aim to collectively imagine localized circular economy solutions adapted to the areas of intervention through the workshop format developed.