Developing and Understanding Design Interventions in Relation to Industrial Symbiosis Dynamics

Urban Farm DB summary

This paper addresses "Symbiotic Urban Agriculture Networks" (SUANs), a class of symbiotic networks aiming to close material and energy loops between cities and urban agriculture, and the difficulties private and public stakeholders face implementing technological and organisational design interventions given the complexity of the agricultural and urban environment. Arguing that existing research on Industrial Symbiosis (IS) dynamics relies mainly on historical practice data and provides only a partial understanding of symbiotic networks as sociotechnical complex adaptive systems, it proposes a conceptual Design Science method combining Design Science theory, participatory methods and agent-based modelling to develop grounded, tested design rules for SUANs. It also lays out a research agenda for further strategy, design intervention and model development through case studies, but reports no results from an actual case application.