Developed in 1970's Howard T. Odum, a systems ecologist, wanted to emphasize the dependence on the source of almost all energy on the planet: the sun [REF].
Currently, the Urban Metabolism (UM) approach, as deducted from international literature, has been applied several times to assess and describe urban flows and impacts related to them, using different tools such as Material Flow Analysis (MFA) (Ioppolo et al., 2014) [REF].