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. The first week of the course will unravel the academic and theoretical perspectives behind sustainability approaches, the second week will dive into methods and tools for a more hands-on approach, and in the final week, participants will perform their own material flow analysis of a given neighbourhood in Amsterdam. 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. 

Abe Hendriks (MSc) is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen and Ghent University, examining the politics of sustainability transitions, more specifically the transition to the circular economy. Abe received a Bachelor's degree from the University of Amsterdam after finishing the study Future Planet Studies. He subsequently received a Master's degree from the University of Amsterdam in Entrepreneurship and a Master's degree in Sustainable Management from Uppsala University in Sweden. His research focuses on how the circular economy is imagined as a desirable future in different regions of Sweden and the Netherlands, and in particular, how different conceptualizations of circularity have emerged, and which ones have become dominant as a result. Next to his doctoral research, he's involved in teaching in the Bachelor programme on Global Responsibility & Leadership at University College Fryslân, at the University of Groningen, and in the Master programme on Sustainable Management at Uppsala University. 

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. 

Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter

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