The study of urban metabolism and its role in urban planning

Cities are growing rapidly, 68% of the world population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, this rapid growing leads to rapid and continuous demand in resources as inputs to the urban system which creates an urgent need to deal with it as output as well. This complex, diverse and multi stakeholder’s environment the city with conflicts among its ecological, economic and social aspects, is facing a common question which is how to achieve sustainability? New studies on sustainable urban planning call for a more integrated approach to answer this question the concept of urban metabolism (UM) has expanded from its biological under-standing to analyze the interrelations between the natural, human and built environment in cities, and how they interact with their hinterlands at various scales. The notion of urban metabolism has been employed in various disciplines and has recently started to influence urban planning and policy. This paper aims to examine how the UM concept can be integrated into urban planning by recognizing the most used methodology of UM analysis.at the end of research we compared different approaches of UM studies and criterias which were analyzed.