Urban Symbiosis

Urban Symbiosis developed and empirically grounded a new concept in urban sustainability: urban symbiosis, defined as the mutually beneficial, citizen-led sharing of materials and resources within cities. Drawing on industrial symbiosis as an intellectual precedent but reorienting it toward citizen agency and social exchange, the project argued that resource circularity in cities is driven as much by social motivations as environmental ones.

The empirical core of the project was a case study in London, UK, examining how residents and community organizations share food, materials, tools, and other resources. Analysis revealed that participants frequently cite social connection, community building, and personal wellbeing as primary motivations — often more so than environmental concern or resource efficiency. This finding challenges dominant framings of the circular economy, which tend to foreground material flows and environmental metrics at the expense of social dynamics.

The project produced a typology of resource circularity in cities (Goldstein, Levy, Hawes & Finn, 2026) and a companion paper examining the motivations, mechanisms, and outcomes of urban symbiosis (Levy, Finn, Goldstein & Hawes, in review). Together, these offer both a conceptual framework and an empirical foundation for understanding citizen-led resource sharing as a distinct and undertheorized dimension of urban sustainability.

This work was also the subject of Dani Levy’s MS thesis, which was an impressive piece of scholarship in its own right.