Linking systems to agencies in urban metabolism studies: A conceptual framework and computational analysis of research literature

This study outlines a conceptual framework linking a conceptualization of agency in urban metabolism studies with a systems-based perspective. To this aim, we engage with contributions to socio-metabolic studies, notably from social ecology, that are not directly concerned with the urban dimension but explicitly question how systems and actors shape each other and how social practices can influence the distribution of resource flows and stocks and their interdependencies. Based on those contributions, we identify three critical axes of investigation that help track implicit uses of the concept of “agency” in urban metabolism studies and constitute the pillars of our proposed framework: (1) characterizing structures comprising urban social-ecological systems – understood as patterns of connections among elements and subsystems – as actors, (2) identifying the chains of events that such actors influence by exerting their agentic capacities, and (3) associating those same actors with definite agentic dimensions, i.e., specific modalities of agency. By drawing on methods from computational linguistics, text mining, and semantic network analysis, we extract concepts cognate to “urban metabolism” from a relevant body of research literature. Through our framework, we show how such concepts define forms of agency that can be ascribed to structural components of urban social-ecological systems.