The aim of this project is to identify roles, opportunities, and pathways for cities to foster circular economy: 1) to reduce significantly the energy, water, and material resource uses, and related environmental impacts; 2) to build resilience to ever-increasing uncertainties from globalization and climate changes; and, 3) to become more liveable for growing populations in different urbanization contexts in China and Europe. It will involve working with the four cities of Beijing, Malmo, Shanghai, and Vienna. This will be achieved by developing, establishing, and implementing quantitative methods for urban metabolism, and proposing urban resource cycles, to provide foundations for building urban resilience to social, economic, and environmental stress. Through our cross-partner collaboration distributed in the four case-study cities, researchers will apply the methodologies to each other’s cities for comparative and synthesized knowledge creation. Integrated solutions will have embedded results from policy exercises and elicited stakeholder shared values which will provide bounds of acceptability for these ‘liveable’ cities.