 Hello and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast. This podcast is hosted by the Chair of Circular Economy and Urban Metabolism held by Aristide de Tannassiades and Stefan Kanperman at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In this podcast, we talk with researchers, policymakers and different practitioners to unravel the complex aspects of what makes urban metabolism and economies more circular. On this episode of the Circular Metabolism Podcast, we're very excited to catch up with David Waxmuth during the conference Brussels Ecosystem. David is the candidate for the chair of Circular Metabolism at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, which is held by Aristide de Tannassiades and Stefan Kanperman. In this podcast, we discuss with researchers, administrators and practitioners to clarify the different aspects that make the economy and metabolism of our cities more circular. David is the Canada Research Chair in Urban Governance at McGill University, where he is also an assistant professor in the School of Urban Planning and an associate member in the Department of Geography. He is an urban political economist whose research interests include city and regional governance, urban sustainability, housing policy, social theory and the politics of the urban public space. In 2012, David wrote an influential paper in the Urban Metabolism realm entitled Three Ecologies, Urban Metabolism and the Society-Nature Opposition. During this episode, we discuss how the urban metabolism metaphor was used over the years and how it is not necessarily a fleshed out method but a working metaphor to describe the relationships between urban areas and their environments. We take a closer look at how urban political ecology helps us understand what happens when flows enter and exit cities and who benefits from them. For instance, in the case of water supply, you take a river and follow it to understand who uses it and how. In the case of New York City, it historically covered its water needs through the Hudson River and in order to secure its supply, it ended up buying all upstream lands and shutting off all polluting industries. We can imagine that while this was possible some centuries ago, today with the globalization of our supply chains, this is unthinkable but puts forward a number of governance questions between cities and their headlands which are not yet in place. In the future, urban metabolism will have to focus on the interfaces and boundaries between urban areas and their hinterland as well as their transitions and transformations. It will have to integrate the quantitative part of industrial ecology and the political focus of urban political ecology. Enjoy this episode and don't forget to visit our website circularmetabolism.com to find all of our productions and activities. Also make sure to subscribe to your favorite app including YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and Stitcher to avoid missing any new episodes. Finally, leave us a comment or a review to help us improve our broadcast. David, it's nice to meet you here in Brussels. We're now in the Brussels Ecosystems conference. You get your great talk about kind of the history of the urban metabolism, the concept and kind of the three tenets of it historically. You mentioned human ecology or social ecology and industrial ecology and political ecology. And now we're trying to figure out the mix of them and what you mentioned this, how each of these have considered the participant and consider nature and city. Could you say perhaps in your mind, what's kind of the future of this interrelationship? We kind of see human ecology dying off, but perhaps there is urban ecology coming in, but how do you see this metaphor or how do you use urban metabolism in your work in general? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, for me urban metabolism is just this very, very fruitful and helpful metaphor for thinking about how humans and the natural world relate in cities. And the thing that got me interested in it is realizing how much has changed over time. So if we go back a hundred years to the Chicago School of Sociology, they're talking about urban metabolism, but they're not considering the natural world at all. For them it's really a metaphor. They say we see a biological system and it works in a certain way. Can we apply that to a human system, like a neighborhood or a city? And fifty years later we see the same metaphor being asked to do very different work with industrial ecologists, where for them they're thinking of cities as the kind of factories for converting the natural world into society. And so they're understanding urban metabolism as this process of taking nature, turning it into cities, turning it into human environments, and then kind of producing waste at the other end. So it's, you know, the same idea, metabolism, change, transformation, applying it to cities, but with very, very different ideas of who's involved, of how the natural world and the human world relate to each other. And then we see the same thing when we take it into the present, where political ecologists, urban ecologists, urban political ecologists are trying to understand how nature and society kind of intermix and are kind of transformed together in the context of cities with a lot more attention now to politics, so who wins, who loses, kind of uneven distributions. But again, that there's, so there are some kind of through lines where we see this consistent metaphor deployed, but also the way that that metaphor changes, I think tells us a lot about our changing relationship with the natural world. And do you think because there has been a lot of criticism about urban metabolism as being a sterile metaphor or not being complex enough or being too simplistic, do you think that, I mean, you said that it's evolving, the use of this metaphor is evolving, but do you reckon that it's sufficient or do we need more tools to integrate all of this complexity? And how do we integrate all of this complexity? Because let's say industrial ecology is engineers, more this type of word and then urban political ecology is more geographists or urban scientists. And you know, both use it in a different way, but is there something more that we can use in order to make them work together? Well, one of the reasons why I stress that urban metabolism is a metaphor is because I think it's most helpful if we treat it as that, which is to say it's not a system, it's not a fleshed out method. It's something that kind of provokes us and can hopefully kind of guide our thinking in productive directions. So for me, that means a real focus on transformation, on change, those are kind of positive things to be thinking about, but also a real focus on kind of interfaces and boundaries. And, you know, that kind of system thinking will ask us where the system ends, what's on the other side of that. And I think what we see historically is that metabolism is a very helpful metaphor for kind of pushing thinking about cities to kind of interrogate its own idea of boundaries and what lies beyond those boundaries. So in that sense, you know, I wouldn't want to get too kind of closed into, you know, a very kind of narrow idea of metabolism studies. We're going to measure all the inputs and measure all the outputs, but rather treat it as a kind of invitation to be thinking about how urban systems change. And I think we've discussed this about how also the actors are present or absent in this story. And I think it's really urban political ecology that succeeds most into at least putting actors inside of the system and saying, you know, the flows are actually, you know, circulated by people. The infrastructures are also networks and these are companies or people who are behind all of this. And could you tell us how urban political ecology could help us not only just circulate flows, but also pinpoint perhaps, you know, the pressure points, which could be pressure actors or pressure, you know, infrastructures or something like that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a really helpful way to think about this would be if we think about a really classic industrial ecology metabolism study where it says we've got a city and we understand, we try to kind of catalog all the different resources that are necessary to build that city and to keep it running. And then we look at the outputs. We see the waste products as well as the kind of positive outputs, the society that we get in the city. And, you know, that can be a very insightful way to understand how cities kind of relate in environmental terms to the non-city to the natural world outside them. But it tells us very little about once those materials enter the city, in whose particular benefits are they transformed and built and constructed. And so, you know, one easy way to think about this is that, you know, when we think about how nature enters cities, there are a bunch of good ways it does. We have parks, we have, you know, kind of natural amenities that are very productive. We also have all the kind of products of society, you know, the buildings that are built out of natural materials, all the good stuff. But we also have a lot of bads. We have pollution and we have kind of people who don't, they don't get to go to the park. Instead, they are, you know, they're dealing with polluted water that they would rely on for drinking water. So those kinds of questions about once nature arrives in the city, who has access to it in its different forms, those are kind of the kinds of questions that urban political ecology asks. And so I think, you know, kind of really helps us to take the city and kind of open it up, not just as the site for the transformation of nature, but rather as a kind of, you know, itself a kind of a system with a lot of inequality and kind of different actors able to benefit in different ways and try to understand that. In terms of, if you want to follow through on that idea and then do a study or do this analysis in terms of methods or previous collaborations, like do you have in mind some examples of where this has been done previously and produced interesting results? Yeah, so I would say that a lot, particularly in the early days of urban political ecology, in the kind of late 1990s and early 2000s, something that you see a lot of is you take a city that has a river in it and you kind of follow that river in a political and kind of social way. So, you know, you understand that the river has various functions that it performs for the city, but you look at the different actors who, what they do with that river and that also how that river is kind of used politically. So, you know, when city council debates, are we going to, we're going to develop the waterfront? You know, what kinds of plans do they consider there? So, you know, it's kind of like an ethnographic method. I think it's quite common. It's the actual flow of the water. I mean, they have the data, I suppose, for whatever the river is. I think that generally speaking, urban political ecologists, they've mostly been kind of, you know, humanists, you know, people coming from the humanities and the social sciences, where they're playing a little less attention to the kind of the materials per se, and more about the kind of social life of those materials. But certainly, I think that the, you know, the kind of frontier would be to try to integrate these things. So, you understand the river in its kind of very directly material terms. In physical dimensions. Exactly, as well as in the kind of political dimensions. Has that been done somewhere, like, you know, this sort of integration? Yeah, well, I think it's still the frontier to a large extent, but I think that there have, you know, there have been some some pretty interesting attempts to push on that. I mean, the work of Eric Swingadal on water, you know, he's very directly tried to particularly connect the infrastructures that we build to channel water, to control water, to drink water, to, you know, clean water with social power and kind of power relations. And so, I think that's a pretty interesting way forward. Okay, also, like maybe related to that is, I have the impression, if you say like, you know, there's nature coming into the city, it's looking at the urban, like the urban metabolism pretty much from the perspective of the urbanites. Like, you know, it's us looking around and like asking where the stuff comes from. And then we say it comes from nature. But like, maybe you could also look about the urban metabolism from the perspective of the countryside of the actual producers of resources that we use. And I was just wondering, in terms of governance mechanisms, like, is there innovation? So, is there like, you know, innovative thinking about how this governance between these two spheres could be, you know, maybe organized more efficiently or like more equally? Yeah, well, I think actually a very interesting historical example of this is, in New York City, New York City is on a river, the Hudson River, and historically it got its water from that river. And one of the things that happened as New York City was growing, not the city itself, but the hinterland that up the area up river was also growing and industrializing. And the result was that New York's water source was becoming polluted. And this was an issue that lay outside of New York City's jurisdiction, right? This was kind of a few hundred kilometers up the river, but it very clearly affected what was happening in the city. And there wasn't really a governance model for dealing with that at the time. So the solution that New York City adopted was just to go up river and buy all the land. So the city of New York just purchased all the land. Yeah, exactly. And then they shut down all the factories. So they were able to preserve that water source. Now that worked for New York City. Because at that time it was also sufficiently close to be able to go there and buy it. Exactly. Now in China. Right, yeah, where cities get their electricity from, their oil, their water, these can be very, very distant. So I think it's, you know, for me personally, thinking about these connections between what happens in cities and the kind of material preconditions for life in cities really draws attention to the fact that we just actually don't have these governance mechanisms kind of adequately in place. And where we do, we see it as quite uneven. You know, some areas have pretty good collaboration, at least at a regional scale. Others, you look at the United States, that's basically a four-letter word. You don't see any of that. And it's a real challenge, I think. Do you see interesting experimentations with these kind of mechanisms or is it still in theory? I mean, I think that if you look, you know, there's scholarship that is trying to draw our attention to these issues. And, you know, I think that there are some of the people who would use the idea of metabolism to kind of try to make something visible that's not so visible. I think as far as kind of good models on the ground, you know, I think there's a long history to particularly kind of attempts to kind of regional restructuring attempts to look at energy. In terms of regional planning. Exactly, regional planning. Yeah, so I think that there's certainly a history of that. From my perspective, the challenge is not that we don't have some good examples of how that works, but about what would let some of these kind of relatively exceptional examples become more widespread. So, again, you know, I work in North American, you know, the Tennessee Valley Authority that Roosevelt created is this amazing model for regional energy in a lot of respects. And, but it's not... Lots of dams and... Yeah, yeah. And, but yeah, so that with some infrastructure, but also governance. And, but, you know, the challenge is not, you know, we can learn from that, but then we want to say kind of be done. Yeah, exactly. I think we've got less to say about that. Okay. Yeah, I'm really, you know, you're talking about this frontier and this use of data and kind of ideas and kind of governance. And I think it was you that during the presentation said, what we can do is understand as much as we want the system, but, you know, there is political will and political decisions that actually change everything. And I'm really trying to figure out, is there, of course, we scientists could go out there, collaborate with, you know, NGOs and grassroots and try to infiltrate administrations and have, you know, a policy, science, practice, interface and all of this. But at the end of the day is always the political sphere that decides, right? Yeah. So what do we do? How do we, is it a language barrier or, you know, once we have this great model that really pinpoints all of the challenges of the metabolism of the city with a global hinterland, let's say. And we expose some choices. You can do that. And that's the, these are the consequences of your choice. And you can do that. And these are the consequences of the choice. It doesn't, you know, a logical choice is not always taken by politicians, right? How can we, do you have any ideas of how do we go the extra mile? It's also about this discussion about policy evidence, not like this, that evidence-based policy, you know, there's a kind of thinking now at the European Commission that once you have the evidence, all people will act upon it. Right, that's not bad. But nobody ever showed the evidence base for urban sprawl or how this is good, you know, it's still happening, so, how to penetrate the decision-making process other than just showing up with the data and, you know, engage with them a bit more. Well, you know, this is one of the reasons why I think actually metaphors can be so powerful, right? Because, you know, because you're right, there's no question that it's not simply, there's not a threshold of evidence. And if we hit that threshold, now the policies all change, right? Instead, what happens is that political actors mobilize over issues that are important to them and they come with different capacities and it's, you know, and then we find out what happens. And so I think, so, you know, for example, the idea of the circular economy or, you know, I think that that is, that's a metaphor that is, I think, intuitive and powerful. You know, you've got a linear metabolism, versus a circular one, you can kind of understand that and that can help with communication. One example from Canada where I'm based that I find very inspiring is that there's been a lot of public debate about pipeline development in the oil sector, right? Canada's a real oil-based economy right now. And, you know, there's real physical infrastructure necessary to exploit the oil resources in Canada. And it's located in very, like generally speaking, the north of the country, which doesn't have a lot of cities, it has a large indigenous population, but not, you know, but a very small amount of the whole country's population is located there. So it's a very kind of geographically distant issue, but it's actually central to the whole country's economy, including to the urban economy. And what we've seen in the last several years is an increasing recognition of the kind of common interests of, you know, basically environmentalists living in cities and indigenous people whose way of life is being threatened by these pipeline developments. And you're seeing actual human beings kind of moving across that interface, where pipeline protests at these distant locations are having people from the cities come and show up. Indigenous groups are coming from these territories to the cities to, you know, lend their voice. And, you know, that that's kind of direct, you know, political mobilization. But I think it's one where it's, to me, it's quite clear that the presence of the kind of imagination of the kind of the hinterland and the cities being actually intimately connected. It's a matter of understanding the system connections. Yeah, that actually is productive in political terms. And I think, you know, it's a fight we're still fighting. I don't know, you know, what the outcome will be, but those are the kinds of things that give me hope. And again, it's why I think the importance of imaginaries of these kind of ways that we have of kind of boiling down very complex social situations into intuitive terms are so important. Well, I guess, you know, Canada is Canada, Australia, I guess, are two countries where you can have this type of, you know, production versus consumption kind of discussion. Virtually close to the sort of Enferp. And that's it. And you see the big ships. But that's the issue, right? I mean, that's the whole global slash local global challenges, we have problems that we have is how me from Brussels can communicate with a person, I don't know, Southeast Asia, that they are taking all of the pollution that we're kind of, you know, pushing towards their throats. So, you know, for me, that's, and you talked about it, you know, it's this multi-level layered governance, but I still don't, I mean, yeah, it's Well, we don't have the governance tools to do it, right? I mean, I think that that's just the reality. There are, you know, there are also a big trend that I think we're all aware of in urban environmental governance is the interlocal networks where cities are trying to cooperate kind of horizontally. And, you know, they're, it's one of the things that I'm doing some research on right now. And I think that, you know, that even with these global networks, the actual kind of extent of practical collaboration in these networks can be more limited. But it's still, these are, you know, these are efforts to try to kind of build some new governance geographies that do a better job of kind of mapping on to the kind of real scale of environmental issues. It's bypassing the nation-states. No, as a forum, many of these things would be discussed and legislation would be made. And it's more a compensation between metropolitan areas. How do you deal with it? You know, it's bypassing the nation-states somewhat, but it's also in some cases another venue for kind of exerting pressure on nation-states, right? Because the, you know, one of the things that I've argued in some of my work is that we have this new idea of cities as these kind of leading protagonists on environmental issues, particularly in climate policy. And there's a lot of wishful thinking there because cities just don't control a lot of the policy levers that are consequential. You know, cities tend to have control over land use and transportation to some extent, which are big drivers of greenhouse gas emissions, but they have usually almost nothing to say about energy policy, about industrial policy in general. And that, so cities on their own can only do a fairly limited amount. But if they work together, they can do a little bit more of it. Also importantly, they can kind of build a constituency where the national governments have to take, you know, have to kind of take notice of, and hopefully their own national policy gets shifted in a positive direction. So is it a matter of trying to work together in order to weigh more on the national policies, or is it a matter of like trying to maybe get some more competences back to metropolitan areas and away from the nation-state? I mean, there's two... Yeah, I mean, I think that there, it's contextual, you know, that in Canada there's a lot of debate about trying to strengthen the constitutional or the kind of jurisdictional powers of cities directly. And, you know, I think that that's a debate that happens in, you know, it's happening all over the world. But, you know, that their cities are never going to get industrial policy competencies, right? They're never going to, like, you know, again, to use the example of the oil economy in Canada, where I'm from, you know, that's... The national government is always going to be in charge of that policy, in particular because the oil is not located in cities, right? That they're... So the local jurisdictions are... And also in theory, the nation-state is supposed to look at the collective interest of the rule territory, like, including the rule territory. So that might be, like, in terms of a system perspective, there might even be a case for not giving in power to the cities because they might be acoustic and... But I think the real key is that all these things are happening kind of simultaneously, that, you know, that some of the, like, I think the positive ways forward are not going to be exclusive because cities are empowered or because they do more conversation with each other or because, you know, they are able to lobby national governments more. It's going to be the fact that all of these things, if they all... If they reflect kind of, you know, a building kind of popular pressure in a positive direction, that's where we're going to get. Because in the end, we are on the same boat as a civilization, no? I mean... Yeah, although it's true, although, you know, I think it does... That... It highlights some of the difficulties, right? Because, you know, this is true... This is true at many scales. If you look at a given city, environmental problems are very unevenly distributed, as well as environmental amenities. If you look at a region that continues to be the case at the nation, at the whole world, so in every one of these scales, there are these coordination problems. And that the, you know, at the global scale, I think is where we know, we have quite a good understanding of how these kind of benefits and costs are being distributed, but just... But the largest gap, clearly, in terms of the actual governance to address them. It's more of a, let's say, slum confederation that should counterbalance the top 1% or 10%. You know, something like this, like a... Well, a bottom-up initiative from the people who are more most affected from the bad. And you do see some, you know, they're the same kind of interlocal networking. You see that informal settlement. You know, some of the movements around informal settlements are also doing their own networking internationally. And I think that's a really positive development, because there are, you know, the kind of environmental issues to get mobilized around aren't simply just the ones that the C40 and 100 Resilient Cities that the elite networks are going to mobilize around. And so I think it's important that there's pressure building from below at many different sites at once. It's about pressure, but it's also like developing the actual experimentations that could lead up to new solutions. I mean, I have the impression that if the discussion only stays at national or, let's say in Brussels, we have a lot of European Union discussions that all stays very abstract. And they never like develop sufficiently concrete approaches that it can actually be implemented somewhere. And that I think has to come from territories that are, you know, at the scale of, you know, making experimentation actually going. You know, I think that there's actually, this is a case where maybe you guys can tell me what you think that there, I think that the difference between what this looks like in the EU compared to some other places can be quite strong, because my, you know, I think that in a lot of the locations that I'm familiar with, there, we are so far from the frontier of just acting on what everybody with, you know, who's well informed knows to be the case. The gap between even just kind of, you know, with no experiments, with no new knowledge being generated. Let's not start a nuclear war. Yeah, just basic facts, right? The gap between what the basic facts would tell us to do and what is happening is already profound. And then, so the, you know, I guess that means that from my perspective, I tend to think, to kind of spend my time thinking about even just mobilizing on basic facts. So the question of kind of generating new knowledge and new experimentation, I mean, I'm an academic, I want to do research, but for so many of the important issues, it's the, to me, the important questions are just kind of truly just directly political ones about how, you know, interests get mobilized and how we can win those fights. I mean, there's, I mean, sometimes easier to raise awareness and create, like, you know, like in Brussels, we had this example of a pedestrian area that everybody wants to have, because it's kind of a common sense thing not to be run over by a car. No, like it's a basic fact, but nobody wants to die out of like the carbon monoxide that comes out of the car. Everybody wants to get rid of the cars. So the, the, the, the awareness was being done. And it created a momentum in which I have to say, okay, you know, let's just do it. Yeah. But then the, there wasn't experimentation. There wasn't much thought about how to actually implement the pedestrian zone. So the planning was so bad that in the end, the result might be even worse. Yeah, it undermined, it undermined original energy. You know, it's, I think it has to be about awareness raising, but also, like, you know, so how to act up on it, you know, how to, how to do it afterwards, you know, because, yeah, as I say in Italy, the hell is, the way to hell is good intentions. Right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Yeah, I think, yeah, there's some, I think there's some reality to that. And certainly, I think that we're, you know, one of the things I think a lot about is local climate policy. And, you know, that there is, you know, these are, this is an area where I think there are, where there, there's some, you know, we know a lot about what cities could be doing better. And, but there also are, are also, you know, there's some, some big things that we don't know so much about, you know, in the context of sea level rise, like what are the appropriate, you know, ways for cities to prepare for that. I think, you know, there's still, we need, we need the experimentation to, you know, get some examples and also see how it's possible to do it, you know, yeah. We're almost reaching the end. I have a little question about French philosophy. Yeah, we mentioned in the Durkan, like sociologists, when you type in Google, the three ecologies, yes, you end up with your article. Yeah, but also you end up with Qatari. Like if you type it in French, yeah, you end up with a Felix Qatari in the three colleges of him. Yeah, like, do you get a lot of email for this? And like, you know, obviously the three, like afterwards, like, I was thinking, like, you know, when I first saw the article, I was like, is that a literature reference or not? Yeah. And then I looked at the references, like it doesn't really appear there. And then it's not the same ecologies, because in Qatari, you have the, also the mental ecology. That's right. And like putting in question, like who we are as humans and our spirituality. So how, how do you relate to that? Well, the, the honest truth is that when I was doing this three ecologies project, the ecology was, it was a coincidence in the sense of what I wanted to do was I wanted to trace the use of the term urban metabolism in social science. And what I found was these kind of three eras. And then I realized that they all, the kind of the schools are all called something ecology. So the natural idea there was, we've got three ecologies, human ecology, industrial ecology and urban political ecology. And then my very next thought was Qatari has already used that phrase. And so then I said, okay, I'm going to come up with something else. And then I just had a change of heart and said, you know what? It's, I'm saying something different. It fits. I'm going to use it. And but yeah, it's, it's, it's a totally, it's, it's a coincidence. Okay. But what about your mental ecologies? Is that, is that not related to the laws of your work? Or? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, I think that they're, you know, they're, that project in particular is maybe, you know, I think that you could actually plot out some mental ecologies that correspond with these different eras of social science in the sense of, you know, that there are a whole set of kind of shared assumptions about who we are, what the city is, you know, where that ends. So I, so I, it would be a fundamental layer. Exactly. Yeah. I think it would be an interesting way to go with that. There's a lot of ways like, you know, once you talk about behavior and I know if you ever are able to convince people to go towards more sobriety and, you know, scale down consumption and everything that you have to touch. Also, their, their perception of themselves. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it's not something I've done, but I think it would be very fruitful. Thanks, David. My pleasure. Thanks for the idea.