Metabolism and Urban Design: Insights from the Champs–Elysées, Paris

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

A study was conducted to investigate the impact of urban design and planning towards optimizing urban metabolism in a selected study area in Paris. The proposed hypothesis representing three case studies is relevant towards contemporary urban setting. it is noteworthy to mention that such study is important and lacking in contemporary literature review. However, there are some minor suggestions that the authors can consider. My comments are attached.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer 1,

Thank you for your feedback. Here are our responses to your comments.

We added more contemporary literature review to support our introduction.

We adressed nearly all of the issues that you pointed out in the pdf of our article, except for 3. 

We did not include images of the pavement in figure 4, because there are still negociation between PCA and the city of Paris about the look of the pavements they want to use for the avenue.

Furthermore, we did not summarize all of the data in one table because it would be too big for the article. However, all of the data sources are presented in the appendix provided with the article.

We also did not understand your comment on figure 6 (now 5). The assets type are clearly written on the Sankey diagram, so there is no need to add those in the legend.

Otherwise, we thank you again for your comments and hope this new version will be satisfactory enough for publication

Reviewer 2 Report

In the manuscript reviewed, the concept of metabolism used to understand the city-environment relationship and its relations with planning were investigated specifically in Paris. It is an interesting and well-organized study. I suggest the authors discuss the relationships between urban spatio-temporal dynamics and urban metabolism in detail to improve the scientific soundness of the study. All in all, the manuscript can be published in the journal after minor revisions.

Author Response

Dear reviewer 2,

We thank you for your kind comments.

Following your advice, we added some content regarding the urban spatio-temporal dynamics  of urban design and their impact on metabolism. We notably cited more contemporary sources related to this topic, such as Kolkwitz et al (2022) as well as Voskamp et al. (2020) in the introduction, and added some comments in the discussion.

Thanks again for your feedback !

Reviewer 3 Report

The submitted article “Metabolism and urban design: Insights from the Champs-Elysées, Paris” is interesting and good article. This kind of few studies hence is very desire. In my opinion manuscript is written correctly, concisely in most parts (some mistakes) and remarks should be corrected before acceptance of publication). Below I pointed most of mistakes and matters for exploration.

1-     In Introduction I need recent articles with any information about priority of studies/Justification.

2-     In introduction the emphases should be placed on Justification.

3-     In Introduction, please include recent articles to identify regions of high erosion potential.

4-      Summary-should include with points (most important issue).

 In my opinion this is good paper for sustainability, I recommend minor revision. 

Minor editing of English language required.

Author Response

Dear reviewer 3,

We first want to thank you for your feedback.

Following your comments, we updated our introduction by adding more recent literature on urban metabolism in order to justify the gap we are addressing in our paper. Therefore we put more emphasis on the justification of our approach.

However, we did not understand your comment about the identification of regions with high erosion potential, which is not the topic of our paper.

Otherwise, we thank you again for your comments!

Reviewer 4 Report

Using the Champs-Élysées in Paris as a case study, this manuscript aims to demonstrate how the concept of metabolism can be utilized by professionals to formulate urban design hypotheses. It also seeks to evaluate the potential of each of these hypotheses in mitigating adverse environmental impacts and guiding urban design decisions. The following suggestions are provided for improving the manuscript.

L 27. It is recommended to incorporate more literature on global urbanization, particularly focusing on its adverse effects on the environment and ecosystems. Such as "Evaluating trends, profits, and risks of global cities in recent urban expansion for advancing sustainable development. Habitat International…” and "Mapping global urban land for the 21st century with data-driven simulations and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Nat. Commun...” .

L 38-45, Avoid excessive citations, especially if this study primarily focuses on the last approach.

L 69. First, by leveraging the notion of metabolism for urban design. This approach advo…. It appears that something may be incorrect.

L69-83, L110-115, L247-251. Poor organization

Context and design hypotheses should not be a part of the method.

Fig. 1 appears fragmented, with the meaningful part being a very small portion of the overall figure. Fig. 2 could potentially be incorporated into Figure 1.

Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 could be condensed. The current state and projected state could be differentiated using distinct colors.

Flowchart is highly needed to introduce the idea, outline the steps, and clarify the data sources for metabolic analyses.

I did not understand how the design hypotheses impact the metabolism of the avenue. Are there clear and detailed steps or formulas provided?

 Moderate editing of English language required.

Author Response

Dear reviewer 4,

We first want to thank you for your feedback. Here are our responses to the issues you raised.

We incorporated the literature you suggested, as well as more contemporary sources in our introduction.

We carefully proofread the article and reorganized the parts of the article you deemed poorly organized.

Concerning the figures : we merged figure 1 and 2 as suggested, and improved the contrast of figure 3 and 4 (as it was suggested by reviewer 1) so you can better understand  the distinction between the existing and projected states of the avenue.

To make our methodology clearer, we added a whole new section in the methodology (3.a), to outline the steps that we took for this paper, and added some comments in section 3.c to explain a bit more how we establish the impact of the design hypotheses on metabolism through comparison. As it was impossible to clarify all of the data sources in the paper, please refer to the supplementary material we provided with the paper.

Finally, we decided to keep the context and design hypotheses in the methodology section, as it is quite common for papers published in sustainability, and as the other reviewers did not suggested to do so.

Otherwise, we thank you again for your comments and hope this new version will be satisfactory enough for publication!

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper has been well revised.