Abstract

Cities are responsible for approximately 80 percent of the Green House Gases emitted worldwide and they play a crucial role in the fight against climate change. Historically, societies unable to solve their environmental crisis have either migrated or become extinct. Early societies may have even achieved a better consistency among their resource extraction, use, and life-cycle, a viscosity more in tune with their ecosystems than our own. In comparison, the natural world has provided ideal models of resource balance that have evolved over millions of years. Native ecosystems are composed of an abundance of life forms that utilize local resources in a way that is synergistically supportive of each other. Therefore, cities themselves must be viewed as complex ecological systems and this attitude must include any approach to designing cities and managing their use of resources. No cities in the world have yet to succeed in fully implementing a complete, integrated, circular metabolism resource plan. However, the two most important inspiring cities in Europe are examined in this research, both pertaining to circular metabolism and biomimicking nature towards becoming carbon-neutral cities. The way these two cities in two different climate zones design, engineer, plan and implement resource saving strategies, where for example waste is recovered as resource, and how they globally benchmark the life-cycle of their urban systems are examined and compared.