Research on cities and urban spaces has recently increased the focus on their role as engines for transformation towards sustainability. Science policy documents, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), and other national science foundations call for international action taken towards inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable human settlements. They increase funding for interdisciplinary research, but also for research with actors and practitioners in participatory settings, aiming with results towards developing innovative solutions and engage in living labs and experiments.
This development has also implications for high quality research in Industrial Ecology. Interdisciplinary methods and studies such as those for the Urban Metabolism form already an important stepping stone on the complexity of built environment, infrastructure, water, sanitation and water systems. However, the questions arises how such established approaches can be complemented while maintaining high quality research designs in a way that puts an emphasis on building up on such system understanding to move to finding concrete and practically applicable, and sustainability solutions.

The workshop aims at sounding the chances of solution-oriented research that contributes to system-based analyses of the urban metabolism. Participants are expected to leave the workshop with hands-on approaches for their own research that incorporates elements of solution-orientation.