 Hello everyone and welcome to 2021. 2020 has been a very weird year for all of us and I'd like to share some of the progress we have made within metabolism of cities and our extended network of collaborators. So as every year we do a number of things, we try to communicate it as best as possible within social media, throughout conferences and other events, but of course because 2020 they were little to no physical events, many of our activities were shared online. And one of the biggest, well I say that almost every year, but one of the biggest advancements or progress we made was to redesign our website. And this is I think the fourth iteration we're now doing. However, there are some very exciting new features and a governance even redesigned within MOC, metabolism of cities. So let me jump in and show you our new website and how does this work. So this is our new website where you... The main idea of this new version is to go from one website that has everything and that you can see everything at the same time. Now we're thinking that metabolism of cities is more of a website that contains or that redirects to other websites. Instead of having all of the information sit in one place, what we now think is perhaps a better approach to show all of the the variety of work that we're doing is to subdivise some parts that we do into other websites. So we are now a family of websites instead of having one only website that hosts everything. In practice, what does that look like? So if you go to metabolism of cities, you will now see our main mission and you'll see some featured projects. And within that, so if you click on view all projects, you'll have all of the projects that we that we have carried out or we are carrying out right now. And then you can click on each one of them to go to that specific website. So that is quite new that we have done. We have also now tried to become as public as possible in our communications and in our tasks. So you now have a forum where you can see the discussion through all of our members of our community. This is now open to anyone who creates an account within metabolism of cities and you see long threads of discussion over the years. And also what's something new that we have added is these tasks. So we have many tasks within the metabolism of cities that we do, for instance, in curating data, creating educational content, creating while we need some programming work to make all of this happen. And all of this is now open. Any one of you can click on any of the tasks to actually do it yourself. You gain points by doing a task and you can add new tasks. And by adding a new task, it helps us know where to focus what to do next. So that is something that we wanted to add to to make it much more transparent and more direct the communication from you to us and build a sense of bigger community. Something else, the events you you already probably had seen this in the previous website. So this is nothing new, but we're trying to also be as open as possible. Now, what's something else that you will see down here is that all of the projects are available down here. So you can also access them from here below. And you have our sister website, our tween site, which is Metabolism of Islands down here. Now, I won't go in the details of everything we have done within this new website, but there are some parts that are more worth mentioning, sorry. And one of the most important ones is our data hub. So previous year we were calling that multiplicity. Now we have more or less overhauled this whole process and we now have the Metabolism of Cities data hub, which has expanded and has new features. And what's important here is to say that we have three main phases within our data hub. One, which is focusing on data collection. So referencing data from out there, data sets, but also publications, etc, etc. The second one is the data processing, which is to get all of the data that we find online and push it within a certain format so the machine can read it and you can visualize it. So let me give you an example. Here we have now more than 90 cities present in our in our data hub. And if we click on all of the cities, you can have a look at them. Some are more complete than others. So of course some cities are more relevant than others to have a look. So let me just go for instance in Geneva, which is a quite complete city. Over here now you see that information is well is now present within four main layers, context by a physical layer, infrastructure and stocks and flows. And you can start looking within data sets or maps, all of the information that we have included within our website. So you also see that there are data sets with visualizations. And you can see for instance here one of the data sets that have been added by volunteers and here you see different ways to visualize this data set. And then you can download of course this data set, this visualization as an image or as a PDF as you see fit to use it in one of your reports. So this has taken a lot of energy but we're very excited about how this is going and where this is going. And most importantly as well that now we have these 90 cities, we're working on the data analysis part. So the data analysis part will have online articles that will be that you can write. And you can write them also by including some of the visualizations, some of the data sets, referencing to our metabolism of cities library for instance. So there are many interesting ways to write a data article. Now as before, now there is a community hub that is related to the metabolism of city data hub. And over there people ask questions about how do I upload some data, what should I do with this type of layer etc etc. So all of this is centrally grouped in this and then we have, we try to answer the forum as much as possible. Now you see 93 cities and many of them actually, approximately 40 of them come from Latin America. And this is because we have also done a number of courses during this last year, a number of online free open courses for everyone out there. And these explain how to collect urban metabolism data throughout the world but also how to process it within our platform in order to get these nice visualizations. And we did one version in English and another one in Spanish. And in the Spanish one we had a very wide spectrum of students coming from a bit everywhere in Latin America. A lot of people from Peru as well were very excited to add many platforms and it was very nice to see all of these people being interested into adding data in our platform. So this is definitely something that we want to continue in 2021 by doing another course, for instance in the African context, and we would like perhaps to translate these courses in French as well. And this way we have a community growing and growing of users but also of people that, so users as the one who use the platform but also of contributors that add data to the platform. And today we have managed, thanks to all of this input of people, to get to a very, I think the amount of data sets we have is approximately 700. So we have no 800 data sets as of today. And then we have also a big variety of maps as well. So all of this is only possible because of our contributors, because of our volunteers, because of students. So we have also approximately 800 maps that exist. So it's safe to say that we're probably now the biggest crowdsourced urban metabolism data sets or database that exists in the world. And this has only been possible thanks to you, thanks to your help. Of course thanks to many volunteers within the Metabolism Cities group as well that work night and day on doing this possible on their free time. Something else that is perhaps exciting to share over here is we have a sister platform as well for our City Loops project, which is a European H2020 project. Over there we're doing more circular economy stuff related, well circular economy activities for cities. And more specifically we're looking at how to make sectors, the construction sector, the biomass sectors more circular and later on how to make the city more circular. So we have now with us seven cities that are uploading data in their in their dashboards. And we have created also courses on how to do this a bit similar to the courses we have done, but this time is specifically for circularity assessment. We also have some flow diagrams that have been built by a number of of the cities that exist, so we can have a look at cereals for instance, so we can build these flow diagrams. Then we have circularity assessment, so this is happening as we speak, and we will share all of that in the future as we progress. Something else that is extremely exciting is that last year we had started the ASCAS conference, which is an unconference, meaning that is designed by by users and by participants. And this year we reorganized it because last year it was a clear success. We are very happy to to help organize this conference and we would like to invite you to participate and also submit something if you're interested in one of these topics over here. Another topic that perhaps we would like to share is that now we have our own podcasts. Before we were hosting this podcast in the chair of circular economy and urban metabolism in Brussels, but now it's it's taken over by by metabolism of cities. So you can see here a number of podcast episodes that you will be that it will be possible for you to listen on the topics of urban metabolism and how to make our cities more circular and more resilient. We have plenty of things we would like to do for 2021. We want to continue on giving courses. We want to collaborate with more and more universities in order to integrate also our platforms in their courses. We also want to go forward with our data hub in order to create much more analytical tools and we want to connect with more and more of you. So please use the forum if you have any questions. Please follow us on social media as well. We have a presence in Twitter. We have a presence on YouTube with many videos that we upload weekly more or less. And we try to collaborate with bigger and more complex projects the more we go forward. So I hope that you enjoyed this 2020 year in review. Please if you'd like to participate and contribute just open just create your profile on metabolismofcities.org and then we will see you in the forum or in the tasks. Thanks a lot and I wish you a best best year for 2021. Cheers!