In this three-week summer programme, students are taught how to leverage the potential of cities via a new paradigm for urban planning and design: urban metabolism. While this concept has been around for over 50 years, recent interest in it has rejuvenated the fields of urban studies, industrial ecology, and architecture. Urban metabolism can be defined as the sum total of the technical and socio-economic processes that occur in cities, resulting in growth, and production of energy, materials, and waste. The city is viewed by its ‘material flows’, generally defined into water, energy, materials (including food), and waste. These flows consist of inputs (local, regional, and global inflow of resources), throughputs (energy required to transform these resources and waste produced by any process), and outputs (the material outcome of this process).  

This interdisciplinary course unravels the complexity behind  truly sustainable urban development. Through studying examples from Amsterdam and by sharing best practices and key challenges from their home contexts, participants will learn about several aspects of urban resilience from ecological, economic, and cultural perspectives.  

Through the use of different tools, scientific methods and analysis, students will experience experimental urban design both theoretically, and gain an introduction to innovative tools and methods, able to apply their knowledge learned in a wide variety of settings. 

Want to get to know more about studying in Amsterdam? Follow us on social media and join our summer community. Get a feel for our summer school vibe and our academic and social community, and learn about studying with us through the eyes of past summer school students. 

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Looking for an alumni perspective? Read this interview with Piotr Barzack, who attended The Circular City in summer 2018. 

Dr. Daphne Truijens is an evidence-based policy and innovation specialist, currently working as a sustainability consultant at TheRockGroup. TheRockGroup is a boutique sustainability consultancy with offices in Amsterdam, Brussels and Cape Town. Daphne has over 10 years of experience working with academia, business and government on finding research-driven solutions for wicked societal issues. Her focus areas are sustainability  and healthcare and wellbeing. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and (behavioral) Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, and an MA in philosophy of science and LLM in legal theory from Leiden University. In addition, Daphne is the founder of the THRIVE PhD Academy helping researchers make more impact, and has held several advisory board member positions including Open Research Europe from the European Commission.

Cas Smitmans (MA) has extensive experience working as a sustainability professional in various roles such as advisor at TheRockGroup and as a teacher. Cas has helped set up various professional educational programs, such as summer schools & traineeships. Cas holds a BA in Business administration from Radboud University & a MA in Global Business & Sustainability from Erasmus University Rotterdam. In different roles Cas has helped organisations, and especially people within those organisations, with tools to steer towards sustainable practices.