"Impact assessment of urban scenarios: an overview"

As widely recognized, urban sustainability approaches, as well as other place-based approaches to Industrial Ecology (IE), should incorporate methods for measuring the environmental impacts caused by the activities established in such contexts. Urban Metabolism (UM) studies traditionally stop at the identification and quantification of mass or energy flows. Scholars have recently affirmed that the more promising way to fill this gap is that of integrating UM and life-cycle-based approaches to develop a multi-scale framework for the environmental impact assessment of urban scenarios. This article proposes a literature overview on these issues highligthing potential and limitations of such a perspective.