Assessing the Urban Metabolism of Informal Settlements: Understanding Infrastructure Configurations and Measuring Resource Use

The dynamic and increasing urbanization prospects of the global South pose several challenges for human development. Urban Metabolism methods and analyses are vastly promoted as tools to aid in understanding, quantifying, and providing useful insights and outcomes. In this research Urban Metabolism scholarship and perspectives have been reviewed and considered as a whole into a discussion and development of a methodology that is designed to be applied to Informal Urban Settlements within cities of developing countries, more specifically Brazil and South America. The distribution and disparities of studies and the scholarship is analyzed before moving to a proposal of a mixed-methods focused on a Material Flow Analysis quantification itself, mainly focused on infrastructure configurations and quantifications, in addition to resource consumption flows, such as water, energy and waste. A pilot research composed of a site visit and Participant Observations done in a field research, which supports the methodology development and its qualitative analysis is also reported. The methodology development, its findings, and limitations are presented and are designed to allow future research to be done using the method to improve the body of scholarship which partially neglects that the specificities of these areas differ from the largely studied formal areas in the global North.