Resilience is an increasingly popular concept in academic research and public discourse and is closely connected to complex systems theory. This article reviews research on resilience and complexity in industrial ecology and the broader academy by conducting a bibliometric analysis of the academic literature over a 40-year period (1973–2014). The review revealed a large body of scholarship composed of five clearly identifiable intellectual communities, with resilience theory from ecology especially influential. Based on the study of ecosystems, these scholars conceptualize resilience as a dynamic and adaptive property of systems with multiple stable states that evolve over time. In comparison, resilience research in industrial ecology is limited and underdeveloped. Bibliometric analysis of this literature yielded just 37 publications and a scholarly network with no well-formulated research communities. This contrasts with industrial ecology scholarship on sustainability; a similar search yielded 1,581 publications. Given the emerging importance of the resilience concept and its relevance for sustainability issues, industrial ecology should expand research efforts in this area. The growing body of industrial ecology scholarship on complex systems provides a foundation to do so, as does the field's long-standing practice of using ecological principles to inform the study and design of industrial ecosystems. The article concludes by discussing how industrial ecology would benefit from incorporating principles of dynamic resilience and, conversely, how industrial ecology approaches could advance broader resilience scholarship.

Resilience and Complexity: A Bibliometric Review and Prospects for Industrial Ecology

The political ecology of food: Carving ‘spaces of possibility’ in a new research agenda

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – China’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure program across 138 countries and counting – has provoked concern among observers that China is exporting its pollut...

Green development or greenwashing? A political ecology perspective on China’s green Belt and Road

Summary
Shaping sustainable, equitable African cities requires strengthened investigations into the cities’ current resource flows, infrastructure systems, and future resource requirements. The field of urban metabolism (UM) offers multiple forms of analysis with which to map, analyse, and visualize urban resource profiles. Challenges in assessing UM in African cities include data scarcity at the city level, difficulty in tracking informal flows, lack of standardized methods, and the open nature of cities. However, such analyses are needed at the local level, given that city practitioners cannot rely purely on urban planning traditions of the global North or the typically broad studies about urban Africa, for supporting strategies toward sustainable urban development. This article aims to draw together the concepts of sustainable development and UM and explore their application in the African context. Further, the article estimated resource profiles for 120 African cities, including consumption of biomass, fossil fuels, electricity, construction materials, and water, as well as emissions of carbon dioxide. These resource profiles serve as a baseline from which to begin assessing the current and future resource intensity of these cities. It also provides insights into the cities’ relative resource impact, future consumption trends, and potential options for sustainability interventions.

African Urbanization: Assimilating Urban Metabolism into Sustainability Discourse and Practice

Urban metabolism studies have gained momentum in recent years as a means to assess the environmental performance of cities and to point to more resource-efficient strategies for urban development 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2399808318797131

Can urban metabolism models advance green infrastructure planning? Insights from ecosystem services research

This paper considers the limits and potential of ‘urban metabolism’ to conceptualize city processes. Three ‘ecologies’ of urban metabolism have emerged. Each privileges a particular dimension of urban space, shaped by epistemology, politics, and model-making. Marxist ecologies theorize it as hybridized socio-natures that (re)produce uneven outcomes; industrial ecology, as stocks and flows of materials and energy; and urban ecology, as complex socio-ecological systems. We map these scholarly i...

Eric Duchemin

Papers

The boundaries of urban metabolism Towards a political–industrial ecology