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This article analyses the issue of smart growth in relation to urban planning. It describes currently available smart-growth tools and provides an overview of the current knowledge base regarding the determinants of local adoption of smart-growth tools. The article evaluates the efficacy of smart growth in bringing compact, pedestrian-oriented, multimodal, affordable, and revitalized forms, and identifies understudied areas regarding smart-growth adoption and outcomes. It also discusses the result of a survey in the United States that reveals little change in the use of plans, zoning, or urban-growth boundaries by local governments from 1994 to 2003.

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Urban metabolism is a multi-disciplinary approach to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate resource flows in urban systems, which aims to provide important insights into the dynamics of cities to make them more ecologically responsible. It has been also introduced into the urban design domain, however most of the attempts concern only tracking of energy and/or material flows to reduce environmental impacts by redesigning closed loops in a specific area. The hypothesis of this paper is that the concept of urban metabolism, and its indicators, could play an important role in advancing the science and practice related to sustainability in urban design and development. At the moment, however we lack indicators to support evaluation of urban design related decisions from the perspective of urban metabolism. The aim of this paper is to explore the application of urban metabolism indicators in urban design based on their characteristics. It reviews development periods of the concept and analytical models of urban metabolism, in order to identify crucial urban metabolism indicators for urban design. Next, these urban metabolism indicators are classified regarding type of analytical model, accounting method, indicator type, and indicator level. Finally, several suggestions are offered on how to integrate urban metabolism indicators into urban design. In addition, directions for future research on the topic are discussed.

Keywords:urban metabolism, urban metabolism indicator, sustainability, CIMO approach Urban metabolism has been advanced as an approach to quantifying energy and resource use and supply in the modern urban system. It is a multidisciplinary approach focused on providing insight into the behaviour of cities for drafting effective proposals for a more humane and ecologically responsible future. Urban metabolism indicators could play an important role in promoting the science and practice of urban metabolism for sustainability. This paper presents a systematic review of literature centred on defining sustainabilityaimed urban metabolism indicators to improve the integration of urban metabolism and urban sustainability. Furthermore, this paper concentrates on two indicator sets (emergy synthesis and material flow analysis [MFA]), examining the relationship between these indicators and the three dimensions of sustainability (environment, economy, and society) in the literature. The paper thus builds a bridge between urban metabolism and urban sustainability in the hope that urban metabolism indicators can be used to measure and assess urban sustainability.A literature review and categorisation of sustainability-aimed urban metabolism indicators: a context, indicator, mechanism, outcome analysis 55