ABSTRACT

Industrial ecology and urban ecology are distinct disciplines with different professional communities, but they share many common concepts and approaches. This chapter explores the ways industrial and urban systems and the science relating to them interact, through reviewing the history and main areas of research within each discipline, common and distinctive approaches, cross contributions, and emerging frontiers. Material and energy flow analysis, which is a common approach in both industrial and urban ecology, is used as an example to articulate linkages between the disciplines. While they have different starting points and remain as separate disciplines, there is also a merging and coevolving trend in research scope and methodology in urban ecology and industrial ecology, with industrial ecology extending its scope to include literature dealing with social and management dimensions, and an increasing volume of literature addressing production and consumption subsystems within cities appearing in urban ecology.