Urban metabolism of ASEAN night markets based on biological principles

• Main Author: Maria Rallah Villaseca
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2021-01-01
• Series: City and Environment Interactions
• Subjects: Urban ecosystems; Material flow analysis; Street vending; Micro and small-to-medium enterprises; Living cities; Industrial ecology
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590252020300362

In urban metabolism, attaining sustainability includes viewing urban areas as organisms and manipulating urban stock flows from linear to circular systems to mimic natural ecosystems. Thus, quantitative studies such as material flow analyses are common but criticized as excluding of non-quantifiable factors like culture. This study sees urban areas as biological organisms and aims to defend it through a constructive analysis based on ethnographic data collected. Here, ASEAN Night Markets (ASM) are seen as microcosms of complex urban areas. The concept of urban areas as living organisms is explored by contextualizing stock flows in Night Markets (NM) of Bangkok (Thailand), Davao (Philippines), and Ho Chi Min City (Vietnam) parallel to biological principles of metabolic exchange. In biology, metabolism is the molecular exchange patterns occurring within organisms to sustain life. The discourse includes epistemological correlations of biological macromolecules to urban stocks, comparisons of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production to economic activity in ASMs, and commonalities in factors that sustain the organism and the ASMs. The abduction is that night markets are stem cells of cities, where non-quantifiable factors such as culture and policy are nucleic acids that carry instruction molding its spatiotemporal configurations. The findings expound on the impact of the paradigm to the development of urban areas.