Where does metabolism collide?

The whole set of chemical reactions that keep a living cell or organism going: reactions that build larger molecules and store energy (anabolism) and reactions that break molecules down and release energy (catabolism), organised into linked pathways. DeBerardinis and Thompson's 2012 review Cellular metabolism and disease laid out how cells take in nutrients and route them through these pathways to make energy, building blocks, and signals, and how the pattern shifts in illness. The referent here is real chemistry running inside bodies, scaled by rate and measured in energy per unit time, not a design movement or an accounting of a city's inflows and outflows.[1]

Unit

The rate of an organism's chemical turnover, in energy used per unit time

Recovery means

After a meal or exertion the rate settles back toward the basal metabolic rate, the level a resting body needs just to stay alive

Measured by

Gauged by calorimetry and oxygen consumption for whole-body rate, and by tracing labelled molecules through pathways for the reactions themselves

A named movement in post-war Japanese architecture, launched in 1960 and carried by Kikutake, Kurokawa, and Tange, that imagined cities as living, growing things: huge permanent frameworks fitted with small replaceable units, so a building could renew its parts the way an organism renews its cells. Schalk's 2014 study The Architecture of Metabolism traced how the group borrowed the language of biological growth and renewal to argue for structures that could change over time, as in Kurokawa's capsule towers. The referent is a school of design and its manifestos and buildings, judged as ideas and works, and it is not the chemistry inside a body or a measured tally of a city's resource flows.[2]

Unit

A movement expressed in manifestos, projects, and built works such as capsule megastructures

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Read through its texts, exhibition schemes, and the few realised buildings, and assessed by architectural historians rather than by instruments

A framework that treats a city as if it were an organism and adds up what flows through it: the water, food, fuel, and materials that come in, and the sewage, waste, and emissions that go out. Wolman's 1965 article The metabolism of cities set out this accounting for a hypothetical American city, putting daily inputs and outputs on a per-person basis to expose where supply and disposal would strain. The referent is a way of quantifying a settlement's resource budget, counted in tonnes and litres per person per year, and it borrows the word by analogy: it is neither the literal chemistry of a body nor the Japanese design movement that shares the name.[3]

Unit

A city's yearly inflows and outflows of water, energy, and materials, often per person

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Quantified by material and energy flow accounting that tracks resources entering and leaving a defined urban boundary