 Okay great well hopefully you have an idea what's happening in the urban metabolism field how things work you've seen these different projects that are happening in Cape Town and we've discussed some of the issues the challenges that exist so I'll be showing you a project as we've been working on with metabolism of cities to address some of these these challenges so let me first and this this platform is called multiplicity I hope you enjoyed the pun as much as I do so before we go there let me explain a bit about our organization so metabolism of cities Lauren mentioned something that started as a band of people and I think that's quite an accurate description it's very much a project that came up as a passionate side hobby of a number of researchers who all worked in urban metabolism and who felt that it's great to get together and to jointly do things and our main and first project was to put information that we all gathered and we did we all came across on an online open-source website so we were all doing research and we found literature scattered around and we figured let's put a database of what literature exists and how it relates online from there we started growing and adding other tools and sections to the website and we started adding more people as well bit by bit and most people located in different countries so none of us meeting initially and over the years we've met a number of times now but we remain a group of people who get together out of passion to work on urban metabolism and who very much it links back to Sarah's comment we very much care about accessibility of the field itself accessibility of information accessibility be accessibility of data so we try and build generally online tools that help address that so that's the core of our our project we are strong believers in in open source in open access so we bring that in and yeah we think urban metabolism is interesting and has a lot of potential and we also think there are challenges and we try to work in that space and collaboration is key in what we do so that's a quick background on metabolism of cities here you can see we defined a goal for our group for organization so as you can see here to collaborate on system medically improving the sustainability of cities you gotta aim high by creating and sharing urban metabolism knowledge and accelerating its implementation in policy and practice now you can see from that that our event today is very much in line with our goal and it's it that's why it was something that we really wanted to organize and we're very happy that that we could because we feel that these kind of events are our attempt to contribute to this implementation in policy and practice now if you look at this work in urban metabolism it's come up a number of times that data is an issue and there are a number of challenges when you do work in urban metabolism around data so having done an MFA so material flow analysis is one of the accounting approaches to urban metabolism in which you draw up a material balance on any scale but of course in our field on an urban scale and that's needs to be or is often economy wide it's all the materials that go in and out of a city and it's incredibly difficult to get that data that applies to Cape Town but that also applies to Paris or London in no other place is there a system in place to just track everything the borders the boundaries are very porous everybody goes in and out lots of different actors involved etc so that makes that the work of getting data incredibly time consuming and lots of researchers spend most of their time not analyzing or interpreting information they spend it collecting data not necessarily the best use of time but it's what you have to do if you want to do this work at the same time if you look at policy for someone in policy to do something with this you need data first which means you need time which means you need money to just get this going so that's of course a limitation at the same time even if there is data available it doesn't mean you can access it so thinking of material material and energy flows through a city lots of that information sits in private hands or in the hands of government agencies who don't necessarily make it publicly available that is a challenge in itself and yeah it makes life even harder if you know that there's data out there but you just can't get your hands on it the scatteredness is a problem because we look at the system we look at all material flows well who's gonna have all materials in and out of Cape Town or any city no one has that level of data people in the water sector have information on water and then people on the supply side have data on the supply and people on the output side of data and output but that has nothing to do with transport that has nothing to do with food that has nothing to do with construction so it sits in all these different places and you have to go to all these different places to get your data and put it together bit by bit lastly formatting so you'll see some data published in a beautiful government report which is actually some sort of a scant version of a table well you have absolutely no way of getting that into your system other than typing that over you've other people who publish it at least as a spreadsheet but you also see all kinds of other years geo reference data comes in the form of a shape from there are all kinds of different formats in how the data is packaged and also different formats in how data is being published the goal of many organizations is not to provide data for urban metabolism resources researchers they have other goals and they publish based on their needs or their users needs so a wastewater treatment work may publish data on the contaminants in the outflow but they will say percentages they will not report on the total quantity that flows out in that particular material out of their waste water treatment work and you'll see all these different users report in different ways so you have to calculate you have to do all kinds of applications of massaging the data to get it in the right format uncertainty is a whole other issue but you'll see it's difficult this whole data picture is difficult but fundamental we need to get these numbers otherwise we can do our work remember our pyramid so if we look at this pyramid we if you have paid attention you remember that this whole data bit is part of the foundation having systems to record it but as we go up you also see information about the visualizations also important it helps engage people with this make it understandable now remembering this and remembering the difficulty with data we figured okay we need to try and do something that can help address these challenges and given the fact that we do things online and we run a website we figured a potential way of doing this is by developing an online system that helps address some of these these challenges so we came up with this idea the system we called multiplicity which is basically a data driven online dashboard for urban metabolism so the core features of this at number one we talk about this needs to be user friendly this is not for researchers this is not only for researchers we want this to be accessible by anybody who has no clue what urban metabolism is and still feel this is interesting and engaging and useful at the same time we do want it to be something that researchers researchers can engage with so we come from an academic background and we needed academic rigor in our system so even though there's nice images and scrollable maps we also need to be able to go dive into the data and see where does it come from how is it generated what is the reliability etc remember we believe in open source and open access so that applies to our system as well to anything that we develop licensed as open source and we our goal is to make this data more publicly available so community driven we can't do this by ourselves you've seen how much time it takes to gather data well if it takes so much time why don't we try and involve more people spread the work so you must have heard of the idea of crowdsourcing something and we feel we can apply the same methodology to urban metabolism data for some of the things you need to have advanced degrees to understand what's happening but for many things you don't and there are lots of things related to urban metabolism you can see from all the discussions that lots of information and knowledge can sit with people who just know something about something and that's already useful so to give an example when we study urban metabolism i would love to know where wastewater treatment works are located just knowing where they are what their name is where i can find them that's incredibly useful and you can find it on the website of the government but that's the kind of stuff that takes time to put together you can find a company having published a in their annual report data on their local we have a brewery in Cape Town so they publish data on how much beer they brew here in Cape Town that's incredibly useful but it just sits in this hidden away report that just requires someone to go there and get that out so we feel we need to harness people's enthusiasm interest in this field and say well anybody can help because we need so many pieces of the puzzle that don't need advanced training and whatever training you need we're here to help so replicable and scalable if we think of cities and if we think of urban metabolism work we often encounter when we try to do comparisons between cities we encounter problems that cities are so different that it's very difficult to compare and urban metabolism in itself is already trying to make that easier because of indicators and because of things like that but basically the standard situation if you try to just compare cities you you're talking about you're trying to compare apples and forklifts what we hope to achieve is that we can compare apples and bananas that would be great so then we're already getting somewhere that makes things better and in this whole field there is no such thing as perfect but at least if we advance things we get to the next level of understanding that's already better than where we are now so replicable and scalable we want to roll this out not for one city but for a number of cities and in principle we've set up this online platform that allows people to put data in for Cape Town just as well as Oslo and Mexico City and Bogota doesn't matter the idea is that any city can do this and of course there are local nuances to take into account but we are there to adjust to the local nuances so that at least we can see what's happening in different cities you have the same data set and you can see it across the board so we've been working on this for about a year now it came to our minds a bit more than a year ago and we started working on it as our group of people as an unfunded endeavor just to try and get this out it's still in a prototype version and we still feel there's so much more to do but you got to start somewhere and you got with these kind of things we can tell people about it but the best way is to show people what we have in mind so that people see what's happening and they can envision better what our final goal is so let us go and see some of these things so i know the screen may be difficult to see but you can check things out later as this is also online i need just help from iris finding a right button on this computer as it has a french keyboard can you just do control plus a couple times to make the okay so in our dashboard we have started working with capetown because well i'm located here and you've seen there's a number of researchers in the city making data on capetown relatively abundant um so we figured let's start loading some of the data that we have on there let's start seeing how things look for capetown and then we can take it from there now this system is in our website in the city's tab where you can then see an initial dashboard that shows a little bit of the city okay here we see the other cities that exist in the system as well you can see we're working on a number of other cities that we have lined up with the project we're doing starting at the end of the year and we've also been working with the city of The Hague in the Netherlands where we've also set up a Kickstarter the first initial round of data so if we look at the platform it starts out by a simple homepage that shows a photo a map and in which we describe or list a number of sectors that are relevant to urban metabolism many sectors nearly all but not all many sectors are relevant to urban metabolism because nearly every sector uses resources in one way or another so our ultimate goal is that on this website you can find information on any sector that you're interested in and you can find all information on that sector from an urban metabolism point of view so what kind of information well you can see on the left one thing is data sets so that kind of you know spreadsheets and whatever information we can find on that sector on people in that sector on flows that go through but that's not the only thing so mapping things out wonderful useful we want maps on there we also figure out we want to figure out what research has been done and catalog for each city what journal articles are there what reports are there they have people done theses on the on the city etc remember we want this to be accessible to anybody and just photographic appeal helps a lot and all these places i mean i don't know if you've been here into these these different the ways what the treatment works over there it's great to see that and how many people know what a waste water treatment plant looks like even though every day they depend on it so just putting up photos of the infrastructure that goes with this is incredibly interesting at the same time if you think of different cities i would love to see apparently in brussel they incinerate all their waste i have no idea what an incinerator looks like so if i could go on a platform and just even if all i do is browse photos i think we already bring people a bit closer to the idea of resources and the infrastructure that's behind it and how things move through a city okay so i'll show one of the sectors that we've set up in capetown that we started setting up so let me go up so now we're in the water section so what we do is we try and describe how does water move through and what is related to the water industry in this case capetown so we didn't have to describe the process or the life cycle of water the number of ways of doing it but one of the first things we do is we try and describe the different bits and pieces that are related to that process so water is first in the sketchment area it gets collected in dams it goes to water treatment works it goes to reservoirs it gets pumped around in the city it is being consumed it then goes to waste water treatment works it goes out in marine outfalls and you also have your treated effluent now all of these things have bits of text and information in them so people can click on any of these things and then read up so if i'm a user and i say i want to learn what's what's the deal with water i go through there maybe you can click on one um you go through that section and all you do is you just click and you say okay let me read up on that short paragraph in capetown we were very lucky that with the water crisis some great documentation was developed by the city on exactly this on explaining what is this infrastructure and all the processes around water so that's the top part then as you go down you'll see that the next section shows some of the data sets that we have on water um this is something that will take time to populate but we start by just putting in what have what have we found so far and you can see here maybe you can do preview of the other one so there's an interesting data set on on oh sorry in the preview um on the wastewater effluent it's in the open data portal of the city of capetown and it has data on what has been going through each of in terms of volume through each of these wastewater treatment works this is the kind of information that's incredibly interesting for a research or point of view but if you don't know where to go it takes time it takes effort to find this data and when you download it it's difficult to process it and here with a couple clicks you can just explore you can see which is the biggest wastewater treatment work how has volumes changed over time so that's the kind of stuff that we try to show people in a more visualized visually appealing way while also allowing people to dig deeper so for a data set if you go down a bit in the form of up if you look at this this profile you can see where it came from what was the original source you can see some data quality indicators you can go to a table and get all the the numbers you can download data and you can see if you want to replicate this data set what are the steps i need to take and sometimes the steps are go and download sometimes the step are follow these 20 procedures to transform that into what you need but we need to share it with people so that we can continue to update the information and others can see how it came about so there's a number of as you can see number of different ways of visualizing data and all that's needed is that a user uploads a data set in a particular format because remember we want this to be crowdsourced you don't need to have a a degree in programming or visualization to get this so all a user does is they format data in a particular order column a is the time frame column b is the place column c is the volume something like that copy from a spreadsheet into a field click next review their data describe how they got it and the system does this the system creates this overview shows this creates the the different ways of visualizing data if you georeference it it can put it on a map no we'll show it there yeah okay so um that's the data set part and there's there's much more to it but just to give you a brief overview we also very much into this mapping thing and to put things on maps so as long as we have information about where a waste water or water infrastructure is located we can have the system generate a map of that so if you go further down so here you see the different pieces of infrastructure that exist in the water sector at least that we have identified um and as you go down depending on our internet um you'll see a map pop up um that displays all those different pieces of waste water infrastructure so you can see where remember we saw earlier in the same press in this in the same block we saw the map of all the waste water treatment works that is a an image that's great to see but it's difficult to get hold of it now once someone has uploaded the information here anybody can get hold of this information you can browse it maybe you can just if you see on the right hand side it's the different types of infrastructure you can you can click and filter and what you can do is you can click on any of them you'll see their profile and maybe just open the random one so here we can see this is clip hugo so waste water treatment works yeah um and actually i've opened the one for the cape flash because that's where we're at so as we go up this is each of the piece of infrastructure has an individual profile so this shows where we are right now this cape flats waste water treatment works someone up well in this case it was me but it could be anybody someone uploads data on the gps points what this is what the name is and then the system creates this profile so it puts it on the map it shows a satellite image the moment someone else or the same person uploads a data set and says this is related to this place the system pulls it together and says okay that's linked to this waste water treatment work so the same data set we saw before of all the ways where the treatment works it's one upload but it's then separated out and filtered out so people see it in different ways um yeah and if someone takes a photo it can be uploaded there and we can browse and see what's happening at that place so that gives you an idea if you go back to the the water page oh sorry go to waste so it gives you an idea of what's happening in the water sector this is replicable to any sector so we've done the same with waste so same idea describe the sector get some text on there people can orient themselves um put data sets on there that are available on what's happening in waste if you go further down show what's the infrastructure that exists around waste we have one landfill right across from here you can see it on the map um you can open it you can see what the volumes are that are in there oh and where you haven't shown at the same time we pull through those documents that have been uploaded that are related to waste to water to whatever it is so yeah i think this is enough to give you an idea i invite you to check out the website and see what's happening still a prototype we're still working on it but it gives you the idea of where we're going now our goal our end goal isn't to just have a place to centralize data it's useful and it's it we think it helps a lot of people and we also think it's something that will motivate others to contribute who now not contributing to contributing to this conversation to make it so much more accessible to view it or to contribute now great what do we want in the end remember we want to move ahead in policy and practice we feel that this is a useful tool for policymakers to visualize and to to see things but what we really want is that we can create tools that help decision making and if you think of this kind of data there are a number of tools that you can invent that help people and that allow for a much easier way of running a model and to give a very simple example let's say there is data on what infrastructure is available say on waste on wastewater so we have data on what the technology is at each of these wastewater treatment works we heard it earlier and we can have it in the system well if we have data on what each of the technologies implies in terms of environmental impact of course there's a different impact if you use this or that or that we put in the system what technology is being used and we have in the system what the impact is of each of them then we know what is your current impact of the technology that you have add to that a database of what other technologies are there and what could that mean add to that information about what the cost is and what you could do is you press a button and you say show me what we could do what we could upgrade or change in the city and what the impact is of that so if we swap out even say landfill if we if we talk about incineration we have examples of cities who do incineration that has a cost that has an impact that needs a certain structure but if we have tools like this then we can have those tools help us understand what options we have and how do they compare in terms of cost in terms of impact in terms of whatever we can can think of we're still very early on in that conversation but we have a colleague of ours who does work on islands who's with whom we are developing metabolism of islands who has experience engaging with government and a lot of ideas on these models and that's the kind of stuff we want to work towards it's going to take time but this is step one or step zero and we have step two to six in our head but we don't know if that really makes sense and we really hope today to also get ideas from the other side of the table so if you are a policy maker if you're a decision maker could be a city level could also be at a corporate level companies are also decision makers so we'd love to learn what are tools that could help you if you think of having data sets and infrastructure information and whatever you can envision we are keen to build but we are not sure what we should be building so you let us know you brainstorm with us and we think that's the way we can try and co-create something that helps improve our system but helps most importantly your decision making like I said it's early on in the conversation but for us that's really a key thing we hope to get out of here to at least start that kind of conversation and keep us in mind we are a collaborative platform we are we try to get funding here and there wherever we can but whenever we have the option we just do things it's not about funding it's about getting things done and the cool thing is if you do it for one city it becomes available to another city so let's push so Brussels wants lots of things and then Cape Town can get them as well yeah so I think that's an overview of the platform that we have visit it check it out give us constructive criticism and let us know what you think and what you need so and start uploading yes exactly if you have data give it to us put it in here there is there are videos that show you how to do it there's all kinds of different things you can put on there from you know even if you're not an expert on this we want to know if you see something that's interesting in terms of your metabolism just put a photo on there that's already very interesting very useful so there's lots you can do and contribute okay thank you