 Nice to see so many people here. I'm very happy to see this and yeah my name is Paul. I have a number of different roles, most of them related to industrial ecology. And here, and this event is centered on earth with metabolism of cities. And one of the goals that we have as an organization is to bring people, insights and knowledge around urban metabolism. It's for many people a new concept and it was for all of us who started this. It was a new concept when we first started doing this. And we feel it's worth knowing about and exploring but you often need some help doing that. It's not something you can find organizations for that do that in your neighborhood. So that's why we exist. And this presentation is going to be about an introduction to urban metabolism so that those of you who don't know what this is about get an idea and understand what we're going to be talking about in the rest of the seminar. So as Arash showed, the urban metabolism concept is an analogy that takes the idea of an organism in a city being similar. So if you think an organism is a cell or a plant or an animal that organism will take inputs from the environment and you'll do something with it, it will grow or transform or just sustain itself and it will be outcomes. Well, if you think of a city, of course there's a lot of similarities happening. There will be resources taken from the environment, a city will grow and change and there are outcomes. So that's where that analogy comes from. And that's what we use as a way to indicate that what we want to study and understand are the materials and resources that go through the city and the impact it has on it. So the goal that we have is to understand resource, use and disposal and extraction to better understand sustainability. But this angle of urban metabolism has always been the same. So if you look at this concept, the same phrase, the same words have been used back in the day in many different disciplines. So you can see in social ecology, in human ecology, in urban ecology many different disciplines use the same term and they mean different things with it. When we talk about urban metabolism, we will generally be talking today from an industrial ecology perspective. And that is one of the perspectives, but it also means that if you think, okay, I know what it means and you meet someone else, they may actually have a different understanding of what that means. Now, let's just look at what we mean with urban metabolism. So we use this analogy to think about resource flows through the city. So we have flows that are created by and interacted with by actors. So we're interested in the flows and we're interested in the actors. But all of that we do through a systems thinking perspective. So we're really keen on understanding the whole. There's been a lot of work done and in the past you've seen a lot of work that focuses on particular elements. And you can say, let's think about carbon emissions in the city or let's think about what it is trying to use. But we feel the benefit of looking at the city as a whole outweighs the complexity that it brings. And you get a more holistic understanding and there's lots of interrelationships. So let's talk more specifically about what it means if we talk about urban metabolism in the city. So first of all you need to think of a city as a system in which we see things going in and things going out. So you have your inputs and outputs and when we talk about those things we talk about materials and energy in principle. So those are the things that the city uses, transforms and then emits again. And in urban metabolism we generally study a number of different flows and because it's a systems thinking approach we try to map everything. So you can think of water energy materials going in and a number of other things going out of the city. And our goal if you think of this is to create a mass balancing exercise that fully maps everything. And that's one of the advantages of this approach. Energy matter cannot be destroyed. So if you take the whole city and you think everything is going in it needs to go somewhere, it cannot disappear. So either it goes out again or it stays within the city. And that's a very useful benefit of this approach because if you do any type of accounting and you try to map your numbers they need to balance just like a checkbook. So that's the benefit of using this approach. But it doesn't stay there. So we don't say okay let's look within a city. The goal is to understand what happens within. So you have a society, you have an economy, you have a built environment they will all interact with energy and with materials that are in the city and we try to understand what happens between all these different actors and what are the connections. So there's lots of interrelations here between different types of materials between different actors in society. You can't just say I follow this from here to here and it's out. So let's take an example. Let's take an example in Kata. So if you look through an urban metabolism lens and let's look at fossil fuels. Particularly petroleum. So petroleum goes into the city. How does it happen? It happens in principle in two different ways. Either by boat, it arrives at the port, it gets uploaded and it goes through pipeline to the chef and refiner or it arrives in Saldana, then goes through pipeline to the refiner in chef and refiner. So that's how petroleum gets brought into the city. What happens? Of course a refiner will transform petroleum into number of different products. So you'll get diesel, you'll get petroleum, you'll get products that lead to tar and plastics. So they have a number of things happening and that come out of there and find their way into the system, into our socio-economic system. The number of these products will be consumed within the city. So people will drive their cars, some of the diesel will go through the unclean power plant that also sits within Kata it will be transformed into electricity with emissions going out. Other products will actually stay in the city. So tar, for instance, will become part of the build environment. And other parts, for instance petrol and diesel will be exported out of the city. If you go to a petrol station in Swellmer it could very well be the petrol that's produced in Kata. So if you look at the flows of this petroleum it goes in a number of different directions. There's a number of different actors involved. The economy uses it in many different ways and it ends up in the environment or in the socio-economic system in a number of different forms. So if you take this turbine metabolism approach you don't just look at your CO2 emissions. Now if you say let's look at turbine metabolism you look at that whole life side within the city. So this deal has been expanding significantly in the past decades. This industrial policy approach has been started a number of decades ago and you can see by the number of studies done there has been quite a strong growth in the last couple of years. And that of course has very much to do with the fact that cities are so much key in this sustainability challenge that we have. And also in the fact that we see that there's a great benefit of using this approach to try and understand sustainability. So if you look at a map where a study is done you can see that lots of it is done throughout the world most of it is in northern hemisphere. So that's also something that creates an unbalanced understanding of cities and of course you can see all kinds of other fields are also less developed in the global south and in the northern north. And it's good that we're here. Now if you think of this approach how can this be used? What do urban tablets do? But from this industrial ecology perspective there are a number of things. Firstly you can do this in monitoring of monitoring of urban resources. You can understand how we flow through the system. If you do any intervention and you want to understand if your intervention is working you need tools to monitor that. And of course the systems perspective is very helpful because you could be manipulating something it has an impact on the main thing you study but something else is also being affected. So that makes it very helpful to use this kind of approach for a moralistic understanding. Here we have an example of K-Town, material flows through K-Town. So this is a material balance in 2013 in which you see how things flow through the city. And this is a kind of diagram, century diagram that we use a lot to visually represent how physical flows move through a city. Here are some other examples so you can think of urban capitalism as a territorial study what happens in the city. But you don't necessarily want to stop there because the impact of the city isn't limited to what happens in the city. What matters in the end is what is the impact of everything that we do outside of the city. The production of the goods that we consume has an impact. The disposal of our products may be outside of the city but it's the impact we generate. Here's an example of what happens in the city, the urban capitalism, numbers and they can see visually what's the impact that happens outside of it. And again, having these numbers helps a lot in understanding where we have to look and what really makes sense. And if you think for instance of water you may very well be aware that the water we consume to shower and prepare food is a fraction of the water that we indirectly consume by, for instance, eating food to just throw food. A fraction of the water is what we use to cook it, for instance. And that's also something very important to take into consideration. Other things you can track over time, this is an example I think of Paris and the energy being consumed in Paris and what materials are used for that. But a very topical moment is circular economy. But when you talk about circularity you need to also understand how are we going to measure this? And again, urban capitalism comes in as a useful tool to help track that circularity. And you can actually see if you look at what is the origins of your flows coming into your city that are being consumed after those origins are not from within your city or from within your country. And you can see well circularity could be very difficult to achieve if you bring in so many things from outside and you dispose of them outside as well. There's also a very geo-reference component to our work because we really talk about a place, we talk about a city and we also talk about in the city where does something happen. So you can do a lot of mapping and understanding of the physical space and what places are important. And again, it's very relevant that we're here. This place is very important for solid waste and for our wastewater. And that has to get here somehow and that transport and that infrastructure that you need is very specific. And that understanding and that information mapped out is incredibly helpful for a number of different things that you can do. You can also see how you can identify drivers and you can try and link what you find out with your urban capitalism work. You can try and link that to other indicators and you can see, okay, how does density play a role? Does that impact different urban capitalism flows? Is it income? Is it number of buildings? So doing these kind of mapping exercises can help you see relationships that otherwise may be difficult to understand. You may have heard of which the idea of taking materials that are embedded in the city taking them out again. And that's incredibly relevant these days as resources are running out and in any case it's often not the most sustainable to keep. Taking things from the environment if you already have it around. In order to understand how to do urban mining you need to understand the stocks that are present in the city. Urban capitalism uses flows to understand the resources but flows lead to stocks. Because the flow that goes in and doesn't go out right away creates a stock. So that the urban stock helps you understand what you can do in terms of urban mining. Now, if we look at sustainable resource management this is an interesting graph you may not be able to read it but let me go through it. So what in the end we would like to achieve as a society is strategy and decision making that helps create a sustainable resource management practices. But you can't just do that. You need a solid foundation in order to take decisions. So what does that foundation need but one layer down are indicators. You need to base your work on some indicators to help inform your decision making. Understanding visualizations so if you also think of policy and practice it's often not ideal to go through data tables and spreadsheets. So visualizations help a lot one level down. Understanding the uncertainty this is not a perfect field and you need to try to limit your uncertainty to make sure that the things that you do are based on data information that is as good as possible. Modeling models and scenario building is part of what you do as well. Try and figure out what's the impact of taking something out here. What would be the impact of installing a new technology here. All of that in the end you need to base on data. Data informs all this kind of models and creates information about uncertainty and that feeds into the other levels and in the end you need assistance to generate data. All of that is not easy. Let's just think about this whole story about petroleum. Well you need someone who tracks information a system that catches information about how the petroleum moves through the city. Sure, Chevron keep track of the petroleum that they buy. Do they share to answer this question? But then what happens if they sell their different products? Who keeps track of that? Who keeps track of how much fuel you put into your car? Or how much fuel is put into a power plant or global industry? So it gets very messy very quickly. So we need systems to capture data then we have reliable data and then we build up. So what we like we work at the bottom part of this. We work on creating systems on capturing data creating visualizations but we want to reach decision makers. We are no decision makers. We come from an academic background and we do play around with it and one of the reasons that you're here is to try and say okay we think you want to base your decisions on a solid scientific underpinning and that is sometimes it's difficult to do that. And we'd like to see can we bridge that gap and other ways in which you can tell us this is what we miss or this is what this approach potentially could offer or this is how it will not be beneficial. We need to have that conversation to try and also inform us as to what is the kind of information that you need. So that's the goal of today to try and see if we can improve this trend. So these concepts of urban metabolism may be new to you you may have heard of it it may be something that Tony knew however it may very well be that you've used an urban metabolism approach or thinking which you just didn't call it that and we see that a lot so if you now think about what we talked about what is urban metabolism this systems thinking approach taking flows and understanding the actors I'll show you an example this same approach is done in this report but they never go with that this is a report by the city the water development performance plan something like that they publish every year and this report mandated by national government is that it includes a water balance this water balance need to describe exactly how the water supply comes into being is used in the city and goes out of it so it describes all the quantities it is a balance it needs to balance it describes where it's being used which industries and in the end it's a systems thinking approach to the whole side of water in the city nowhere in this document will it mention urban metabolism but it's exactly the kind of thinking that we practice and we have names written we have other tools that we use and we know that a lot of people use the same but just don't label it and we'd also love to hear from people maybe if you use this you've never told it that and we hope that we can bring some more understanding and some different tools and ideas to that same thing okay that is a bit of an introduction of what urban metabolism is I hope that makes sense yeah, I'll hand over to Lorna to field any questions thank you