Data Qualifications and Data Availability for Resource Flow Analysis in Support of Urban Planning: Amsterdam’s Energy Metabolism

Sustainable urban resource management gains importance due to ongoing urbanization. Cities increasingly show commitment to reduce their environmental pressure. Amsterdam, for instance, has the ambition to generate twenty percent more renewable energy per capita in 2020 than in 2013. To reach Amsterdam’s sustainability objectives, a detailed understanding of the city’s resource flows is required. At what level temporal and spatial resolution should resource flows be analysed to support urban managers in choosing planning interventions, what is the availability of data needed for such analyses and is there a gap between data needed and data available? This research addresses abovementioned question from an Urban Metabolism (UM) and Material Flow Analysis (MFA) perspective, with particular focus on planning and design practice. A case study on the energy objectives of Amsterdam is presented, which is threefold. Firstly, the energy targets of the City of Amsterdam were translated into data needs. Secondly, the status quo of data availability was assessed. Thirdly, data gaps were identified. Results show that two types of data needs can be distinguished: 1) data required for assessment (benchmarking) of the objectives, strategies and corresponding indicators, and 2) data required to inform the interventions that put the strategies into practice. Detailed knowledge of space-time dynamics, up to hourly data on building block level, showed to be essential to inform interventions that relate to the coupling of supply and demand and the sourcing of secondary resources. For Amsterdam, limited monitoring data is available. Especially data with a high temporal resolution is lacking.