Description

<p>For urban metabolism researchers, obtaining data is one of the most important and time-consuming activities. This not only limits research activities, but it also creates a significant threshold for policy makers and others interested in using urban metabolism on a more practical level. The inconsistency and scattered nature of data furthermore complicate the uptake of urban metabolism tools and practices.</p>
<p>In 2018, the Metabolism of Cities community started a project called MultipliCity to try and take on this challenge. This project aims to develop a global network that maintains an online hub to centralize, visualize, and present datasets related to urban resource use and requirements. A network of local volunteers (students, researchers, city officials, citizens, etc) assists with the identification of relevant datasets, and the MultipliCity data hub takes care of indexing, processing, and standardizing the datasets. This allows for a large collection of in-depth data to become available to researchers and the general public, vastly improving access and allowing for more work to be done on analysis and interpretation, rather than on data collection.</p>