Project Description

The University campuses are complex organizations that look like the cities in many physical aspects, and, knowing this, we can compare them to little urban centers that involve many activities supported by a system of networks that transport various resources, like water, energy and materials.

Just like the cities, this urban part also has similar problems with regard to resource consumption and waste disposal in the environment. Understanding how much, how and when these resources are used and discarded, will be na importante step, because this knowledge will contribute to the perception of the existence of inefficient use of resources.

Commonly on college campuses, the flow of resources trash are manipulated in a disassociated mode, a comprehensive and integrated understanding of the key resource flows of a campus will allow, a completely view of the system, helping to identify faults. This way, urban metabolism studies are interesting and are widely used for the analysis of urban systems in an integrated way, because it is a comprehensive assessment tool that provides a tangible perspective on energy efficiency and emissions control.

However, although numerous studies of urban metabolism have been conducted to understand cities, few have been applied to college campuses, and the few studies conducted in this area, authors chose to analyze only one campus at a time, or when they opted for a comparative analysis, studies analyzed campuses located in different regions, resulting in wrong results.

Therefore, in order to obtain substantial data for a more assertive metabolic analysis of university campuses, this investigation proposes to use the urban metabolism approach in university campuses located in a single region, studying 09 (nine) university campuses in the northeast region of Brazil. During the production of this investigation, humanity was surprised by the COVID-19 pandemic, a fact that we could not forget to take into account, this fact completely changed the behavior of all activities around the world, including the university campuses.

In this way, the approach will have as its main objective, to understand the metabolic behavior of the main northeastern campuses through the accounting of resource input flows and waste output discharged into the environment, before, during and after the pandemic, identify which are the determining characteristics of the metabolic performance of university campuses, finally, it envisages the creation of metabolic indices that can be used by planners and designers in simulating the metabolic behavior of northeastern campuses, creating conditions for managers to trace paths towards a more sustainable territorial management.

Key words: Urban Metabolism, University Campus, Material Flow Analysis, COVID-19

Project Team

• Eduardo Palheta
• Paulo Pinho (Supervisor)

Financial Support

• Federal University of Ceará - Brazil

Stage of Progress

• In progress