Metabolism of Islands launched
In October 2018 a collaborative project between Simron Singh at Waterloo University and Metabolism of Cities was initiated, revolving around the development of a sibling website called Metabolism of Islands. After launching a prototype version of this website in March, an official first version of the Metabolism of Islands website is now live at www.metabolismofislands.org.
Simron Singh, co-founder of the Waterloo Industrial Ecology Group, has done extensive work on island metabolism and his research group is actively involved in research projects in a number of mostly Caribbean islands. There is significant overlap between island metabolism and urban metabolism. Not only are underlying tools and methodologies often the same, but in some cases the same systems are being studied (for instance, Hong Kong is both an island and a city, and thus features in both disciplines).
The Metabolism of Cities website is an open source intiative, with all source code licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. This made it possible to adjust the website's code and develop a sibling website that uses much of the same code, but that is tailored to a different audience. Over the past months, the following adjustments have been made to accommodate this change:
- Structural adjustments were made to allow for the Metabolism of Cities platform to support multitenancy. This means that both Metabolism of Cities and Metabolism of Islands can run off the same core code, and in fact share the same database, by simply displaying different parts of the database depending on which website is being visited.
- The navigation menu was modified to suit the needs of Metabolism of Islands. This website has its own navigation menu, which is based on the structure that is present at Metabolism of Cities but where needed some pages were removed or replaced.
- The homepage structure was duplicated but its content was adjusted (island-specific visualisations were made for this specific purpose).
- Additional adjustments were made to allow for independent management of the website's content for some parts, and joint management of other parts (e.g. the publications library or the data management for city-islands).
Metabolism of Cities would like to thank and congratulate the Metabolism of Islands team on their achievement, and on launching this first sibling website of Metabolism of Cities. The first data portals for Grenada, Jamaica, Trinket Island and Samothraki Island are being developed, with many more islands being lined up, and it is exciting to see how both websites can jointly continue to collaborate and expand!