 Thank you very much I Think if I had had a better understanding of who was going to be here and the nature of the discussion today I might have given a different talk to give greater emphasis to my own context What I'm really going to be talking about Draws on a report that I recently co-authored with Martin Hire and others That focuses on this question of decoupling resource flows within a city context and really this flows from a wider concern in the international resource panel for which this report was written which was convened by UNEP in 2007 to deal with the question of the restructuring of the global economy and how to make it more sustainable From a resource flows perspective using material flow analysis And I think this is an important discussion because listening to the conversation today There seems to be a consensus that urban infrastructure is key for stimulus in a To get us out of a global recession. Secondly, there's a consensus that digitization and integration of value change is going to be a key part of this Transition as we go into the maturation phase of the information age Thirdly, there seems to be a consensus that urban infrastructure is key for sustainability and Finally what I would like to emphasize is that when we think about cities from the African context where there is a new optimism on the continent as we hit unprecedented growth levels We're figuring out how to replan our cities, but if we continue to copy Development models that have become outdated in other parts of the world. We're really going to leapfrog ourselves Into unsustainability rather than leapfrog ourselves into something that prepares us for the future so We this report was based on a lot of different kinds of case studies, which I don't have time to dwell on now But the core argument that we developed For the international resource panel, which applied the concept of decoupling growth rates from resource use was this how do we shift from linear circular socio metabolic flows in cities and How do we do that in a by utilizing these new investments that are flowing into urban infrastructures both in developed and developing country contexts and Many of the case studies which were drawn from developed Country cities as well as developing country cities spoke to this core challenge. I Need to emphasize that the significance of the international resource panel is that we are not focusing on outputs of Unsustainable production and consumption and their negative impacts are global warming but rather the inputs The resource inputs into the economy and how you decouple growth rates If you if you need growth from these resource inputs and this makes it possible to enter into a dialogue with economists about Sustainability which hasn't really been possible in my view and the view of the panel before What is material flow analysis and why is it significant for? Rethinking the way in which we go about the design of urban infrastructures Industrial ecologists have tended to focus on metabolic metabolic flows But completely completely leave out of their story The question of infrastructure space and governance urban sociologists focus on governance space and infrastructure, but not flows really what this report does is Integrate these two major influential bodies of literature about the nature of urbanism Just to give you a practical image of what this looks like This is Cape Town from the point of view of the flows of resources through the city So if you want a more sustainable Cape Town, it's no good just addressing the low carbon Transition end you also have to address the whole question of the resource inputs into the city Which some households need to have more of but overall you've got to do more with less But you also got to do a lot more with stuff that we're not using at the moment like solar So that just sums it up and if you put that into the context of thinking about cities This is a picture from Fernandez at MIT Who basically constructs this image that as you go through the phases of urbanization you you had investing heavily in infrastructure and construction which prepares the city for the evolution of a Of a middle class which in turn Generates the increase consumption which drives energy increases So the question is what is it are we locked into this pathway? Or is there an alternative way of thinking about it? So just just bastardizing a Fernandez's diagram What kind of infrastructures would take us through a much shallower rise and What are the implications for energy consumption? This is very interesting work from MIT, which is the first comprehensive Analysis of cities around the world from the point of view not just of co2 which is there but resource flows through those cities and each of these patterns of Consumption correspond to particular modes of production and consumption and stages in economic growth and is very useful for thinking about infrastructures in the future the key conclusions from all of this comparative research is these are the key drivers of of Differential resource flows through cities of inform efficiency of both structures all of the kind of stuff that we've been speaking about today And I don't need to need to dwell on what really matters though is The core proposition of this report which is that we can reconfigure Urban infrastructures in a way or informed by the kinds of resource flows through the cities that we would like to see So if we serious about sustainability, then it's not just about a techno fix. It's not just about Low carbon transitions. It's about configuring infrastructures in a way Which is informed by the kinds of flows that we would like to see doing more with less Doing a lot more with new stuff that we're not utilizing at the moment and doing that in both Retrofitting type context as well as the cities that I come from where we have to build a lot more new Infrastructures the problem is these infrastructures are large technical systems And as Dmitri was talking about this morning There's lock-in and we have to adopt what John Ari was referring to as a sociotechnical systems analysis Which I don't need to dwell on But there is globally an increasing Intention being paid to the to the investments in these infrastructures by the big consulting firms and some of some of you know All about this and all the big tech companies like Cisco Siemens Phillips Alstrom Viola, etc. All getting into the game of offering cities particularly in the developing developing world Turnkey solutions, which is effectively going to undermine in my view the democratic democratic governance of a lot of these cities in order to solve the financial problems of Of providing the infrastructure So these are the questions when we think about urban transitions and the building of more cities Can we really reconcile what is required to invest in these infrastructures? With deepening democracy or are we going to go through a period of undermining democracy in the name of? Building integrated infrastructures that prepare us for a sustainability transition if you like an unjust or an undemocratic transition To two more sustainable cities. What is the geography of these transitions and how does? decoupling translate in practice We utilized a framework drawing from the multi-level perspective which basically says we need to think about The capacity for managing regime transitions and this and tackling this question of of locking in a very practical way It seems to be that those systems where you can draw knowledge from the outside and build internal capacity to manage the transition Were the most successful the least successful and we have many of those on the continent in Africa. We have Weak capacity to manage a transition and a reluctance to source knowledge from outside of the outside of the system So we found it useful to then analyze these transitions and the institutional arrangements that are emerging to manage these transitions Using this particular matrix. There's a there's a con there's a continuum between new build like the Mazda's of life and Retrofitting existing cities and there is a continuum between a focus on integrated systems Versus a focus on single systems like hydrogen or so lot water heaters or whatever the case may be and you can cluster all of these examples that we know about from around the world in terms of of this matrix in order to start making sense of A very noisy space. There's a tremendous amount happening all over the world the median case is just one in one example and This just helps us. I think to understand it Mexico City the eco big key the the Lagos BRT and as we joke in Africa if you can put a BRT into the city of Lagos You could do it anywhere in the world Medellin which we've already discussed the the the highway that in Seattle that was replaced with the with the river The the the whole biogas revolution taking place in the developed in the developing world This is where I come from an eco village, which we've designed largely off-grid using local Technologies to build a mixed community that is living sustainably outside of still emboss So the key conclusion when you when you when you are talking about transition is intermediaries are absolutely key Then there needs to be capacity located outside of the regimes to facilitate the dialogue and the competing visions And you need to be able to connect niche innovations with these With with the existing infrastructure regimes in order to make these these things happen So the conclusions Were That these transitions are spreading they're taking many different forms vision building is absolutely critical But one-size-fits-all doesn't work niche innovations are pointers, but need to coalesce and regime change is possible You can shift some of these urban infrastructure regimes, but the role of intermediaries needs to be reinforced So to take this work forward, there's discussions that it could be informed the Rotterdam 2014 process We want to engage with the big tech companies like Siemens Cisco and so on some modeling work needs to be done And in South Africa, we're going to be testing this methodology in a whole range of city Strategies which for the first time in our country the question of an integrated urban policy is for the first time on The agenda and it could translate nicely into our context to test out some of these methodologies for thinking about urban infrastructure Transitions from a sustainability perspective. Thanks very much You