Tuffaha and Sallay make a decisive scalar move by transferring urban metabolism from the metropolitan aggregate to the street. Their iconic idea is that streets are metabolic conduits: water, energy, waste, mobility, biota and climatic pressures are not abstract citywide quantities but flows whose inequalities become materially visible in neighbourhood form. Working across four contrasting areas of Amman, the study adapts established metabolic indicators to a finer spatial grain and combines quantitative scoring with residents’ perceptions. This dual method reveals discrepancies that city-level statistics obscure, such as the difference between measured waste performance and experienced cleanliness, or the relation between green infrastructure, walkability and socioeconomic advantage. The conceptual operation is one of disaggregation without fragmentation: the systemic logic of metabolism is retained while its effects are located in ordinary streetscapes. The work connects industrial ecology to urban design, environmental justice and situated observation, demonstrating that infrastructure becomes politically legible when flows are mapped where bodies actually encounter heat, traffic, vegetation, waste and access.
URBANISM MEETS ART