Proceedings of the 1 st International Conference on Research Methodology for Built Environment and Engineering Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 17-18 December 2013 1 Urban Metabolism: A Research Methodology in Urban Planning and Environmental Assessment Farah Ayuni Shafie a , Dasimah Omar a and Subramanian Karuppannan b a Faculty of Architecture, Surveying and Planning, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Malaysia b Faculty of Health Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Puncak Alam, Malaysia E-mail address corresponding author: farahayuni@salam.uitm.edu.my ABSTRACT Urbanization can cause environmental impacts to the cities as a result from the increasing population, high demand of natural resources and environmental pollutants production. Urban metabolism has emerged as a leading methodology for quantifying energy consumption and use patterns in urban environments. Though typically applied as a method of accounting for total energy and materials inputs and outputs into cities, urban metabolism has offered significant value for revealing urban populations focus and speed up consumption over time. Therefore, urban metabolism can simply be defined as all materials and commodities needed to sustain the city’s inhabitants at home, at work and at play. There are few methods that can be used to assess urban metabolism of a city. This paper aims to discuss two main approaches; economic input-output analysis (IOA) and material flow analysis (MFA). These two approaches encompass the input of material and natural resources to the environmental output from the human activities. Approaches in urban metabolism is anticipated to provide an informed and rapid evaluation on the existing city environmental performance and assist in decision making of a future urban development planning. Keywords: urban metabolism, economic input-output analysis, material flow analysis INTRODUCTION The urban metabolism framework provides a rigorous tool for analyzing relevant energy pathways at different scales and can lead to the development of management systems that increase resource use efficiencies, recycling of wastes and conservation of energy. Urban metabolism analysis emerged from a growing understanding of the limited availability of fossil fuels and their impacts on the environment as well as ideas about efficiency of that use (Holmes & Pincetl, 2012). The application of urban smart management proposed in is finding how cities can perform their activities by learning from natural ecosystems, for example using their materials, energy and water in a more balanced way by practicing control, efficiency and effectiveness thus minimizing the pollution, waste, noise and consumption of inputs (Lemos, 2011). Kennedy et al 2011 provides some evidence that urban metabolism study can be a tool in guiding sustainable green building design, planning ecologically sensitive design for a city and design new sustainable cities that will somehow benefits people in a long run. The evidences are discussed through urban sustainability indicators; inputs to urban greenhouse gas emissions calculation; mathematical models of urban metabolism for policy analysis, and also as a basis for sustainable urban