The concept of urban metabolism has been profusely used by various disciplines over the last and current century to describe different urban phenomena. One theme that appears to gain importance in the interdisciplinary field of urban metabolism is the spatial dimension. In this article, we have carried out a bibliometric and qualitative analysis of the use of this multi-faceted notion in order to understand the place of space in urban metabolism research. Our results show that several communities within the urban metabolism field use and manipulate space for their research according to different approaches (territorial economic, socio-political, socio-ecological, governance and urban planning, and modeling). We discuss recent contributions of these communities and their approaches, their limitations, and a future agenda that might cross-fertilize them in order to embed space more consistently in urban metabolism research.