Growing or Steady Cities? Accounting the Urban Metabolism of Italian Cities

This contribution aims to identify a theoretical model to develop tools for reducing cities GHG emissions. Cities’ urban metabolism is responsible for at least 70% of total GHG emissions. To reach future reductions of GHG emissions we need a tool to account urban metabolism. We suggest to use a consumption- based model instead of conventional production-based models of accounting. In this survey we used data coming from National Italian Institute for Statistics covering tha length of time from 2002 to 2010. Data collected and elaborated show that the urban metabolism of the Italian cities is, at the aggregate level, stable in time. It means that, as it has been revealed by many studies, western urban systems have reached saturated consumption patterns. Expecting or forecasting future strong increasing levels of consumption will be difficult.