Improving the resilience of Italian cities through urban water metabolism

In recent times, accelerating urbanization, increasing scarcity of resources and waste production require a redesign of urban systems towards a more sustainable management. Global changes force urban systems to find solutions that minimize the demand of resources and to shift from linear to circular metabolism, in which recycling and reusing are key activities. The most critical urban flow is water, followed by energy and material flows: water is vital for our survival, it is not renewable or replaceable and it represents the largest component in terms of sheer mass of the urban metabolism of a city (Kennedy, Cuddihy & Engel‐Yan, 2007). Urban metabolism and Material Flow Analysis are widely acknowledged tools to monitor and assess resource use, in order to comprehend cities’ environmental impact and propose adequate sustainable development policies. However, due to the complexity of contemporary urban phenomena, it is difficult to understand what happens within those urban systems and to answer to these current pressures. Urban metabolism studies consider the city as a “black box”, quantifying in‐flows and out‐flows. Indeed, resources availability depends strongly on local context characteristics that enable the reduction of input water flows, maximizing the reuse of wastewaters and closing water loops. Along with the new challenges of sustainable design, it is possible to define different scenarios and roadmaps for compact cities, following the principles of urban metabolism and developing decision support systems. The project aims to measure the degree of sustainability of a Roman city district, mentioning the potential improvements in terms of closing water cycles and outlining strategies to boost territories’ competitiveness. The innovative approach enables sustainable actions at the neighborhood level, through the identification and assessment of a set of green projects to suggest pathways that enhance the modification of water metabolic flows.