 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 Kanpermann 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. This podcast is produced by the Chair of Circular Economy and Urban Metabolism at the Université Libre de Bruxelles held by Aristide de Tannassiades and Stefan Kanpermann. 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. On the fifth episode of the Circular Metabolism Podcast, we had the opportunity to chat with Matthew Gendi, one of the pioneers of urban political ecology. Matthew is professor of cultural and historical geography and fellow of Kings College at the University of Cambridge. He was founder and director of the UCL Urban Laboratory and also has been a visiting scholar amongst others at Columbia University, the University of California and the Humboldt University in Berlin. Matthew's research topics range from environmental history, urban political ecology, urban water infrastructure, epidemiology, as well as rethinking existing understandings of urban nature. He is indeed an eclectic researcher led by curiosity, attentive observation and sometimes by serendipity. His work is sometimes inspired through art exhibitions, asking unusual and unpredictable questions which social sciences tend to overlook or not address. His article, Rethinking Urban Metabolism, Water, Space and the Modern City and his book Concrete and Clay, Reworking Nature in New York City published at the MIT Press really helped me broaden my urban metabolism horizons by adding some social, geographical, historical and political layers. In this episode we discussed how our choice of words and metaphors is extremely important to describe complex social and environmental challenges. For instance, Matthew used the Urban Metabolism metaphor to describe for the double circulation in water infrastructure, meaning the circulation of water and capital, as well as the interlinks between the material and immaterial flows. However, the use of this metaphor has been highly controversial and almost divisive between critical geographers and industrial ecologists. Matthew also mentions how he actively changes the focus of urban political ecology by bringing different actors and protagonists at the forefront of research such as flies and over-matured trees to question our current discourses on biodiversity in the urban context. He argues that one of the weaknesses of urban political ecology is the lack of direct engagement with the ecological sciences. In the future, a more radical interdisciplinarity is necessary to tackle wicked urban problems. He believes that grounded theory and the use of a practical case could enable us to explore the combination between social, historical and ecological sciences. 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 podcast. Yeah, it was really a pleasure to have your insights and your advancement of this urban political ecology because you talked about fields that I think are new to me and for a lot of people. When I did my master thesis on urban metabolism, I typed urban metabolism to find out what it was. The first things I figured out was a quantitative aspect and then there was your paper about rethinking urban metabolism and it was a completely different one and I didn't understand, oh urban metabolism is not what I thought at the first place and you continue to have some interesting insights such as the re-nature re-natering New York and with a concrete and clay book and for me you opened up some pathways I didn't know before and I guess this is urban political ecology but could you please explain us a bit what's urban why do you use urban metabolism or what is urban metabolism to you in your work? Sure, I mean I think that the term metabolism which obviously has a scientific origin has subsequently been applied in different ways so you have this circularity of metabolism which has been picked up particularly within fields such as industrial ecology and some of these systematic models of raw materials and energy and so on moving through urban space so a kind of technical quantitative or model-oriented approach but then there's another strand which links back to Marx's original reworking of the idea of metabolism which really picks up on this notion of the transformation of the raw materials of nature through human labour but also and perhaps more significantly this circularity of the flow of capital through urban space and what really struck me in some of these attempts to work with the neo-Marxian concepts was the first attempt of people like Eric Swingerdale to look at this very interesting constellation of ideas so I guess that it's really via some of the Marxist ideas and their reformulation through the worker Swingerdale and others that I arrived at a particular conceptualisation of urban metabolism looking particularly at water infrastructure because that's a field that I've looked at for a number of years. Curiously though the article Rethinking Urban Metabolism I wrote rather quickly and didn't pay much attention to and one of the strange aspects of academic life is that individual essays suddenly get picked up in unexpected ways but so I think what's interesting as well with this neo-Marxist strand is that for instance David Harvey talks about you know the capital fix and I think it's very much actually an urban metabolism idea as well I mean the stock you know is a capital fix and he never or I didn't read too much after a moment but I've never seen him use this metaphor I mean the metabolic metaphor too much so it's interesting to see why for a certain individual this metaphor sticks even if you're in the same discipline or background and for others it does not do you know why I mean some of your critical geographer colleagues might use it some others might criticize it because it was heavily criticised as well as a metaphor I guess from an industrial ecology point of view. Yes I mean I think for me what I found rather interesting was this sense of a double circulation so the in relation to water infrastructure so the circulation of water and then the circulation of capital and this very interesting combination of the if you like the material the metaphorical and in terms of political economy of course the way in which capital flows are linked to global markets and perturbations within investment stocks and flows and financial capital so this in a way this tension between the material and the immaterial I think is captured in an interesting way through this application of urban metabolism but some of the other if you like rival formulations around industrial ecology and some of the engineering approaches are really utterly different if we trace that back particularly to Abel Wollman's essay 1965 and its subsequent reformulation I think these approaches have certain weaknesses which a number of people point and pointed to a particular focus on the measurable sort of the quantifiable aspects of urban space exactly and also if you like the simplification of urban space into these administrative units so in a way that the the idea of the city is never critically interrogated in relation to other spaces and sort of constitutive elements and there's also this sense of an ideological continuity I think with the 19th century sense of the of the organic city precisely and trying to reconceptualize urban space as a set of organs and the use of medical metaphors such as and disease or dysfunctional limbs or organs and so on and somehow there was this for me at least there was an odd combination almost of this emphasis on quantitative model building linked with this ideological continuity with 19th century conceptions of the city so very husband and very cleaning the the poor and cleaning the yes this this sense of kind of enabling the flow of space to work more effectively as a as a modern capitalist city so I think in a way in terms of articulating an alternative conception of metabolism it works at different levels it's not just a material level but it also links with an ideological and even the philosophical realm as well but it's interesting because he's a sensational engineer right yeah and you know us men and all of all of the likes in Brussels as well so we had the river that was crossing just around here that the Zener river and again it was an infrastructure challenge so in both challenges it was actually a re infrastructuring the entire city by using this metabolism term is like exactly as you say the arteries and you know the the clogs and yeah so and but you don't only use urban metabolism as a metaphor you use many others from cyber urbanization to aliens yes the couple of days ago so what's the power in this complex reality of you know urban economy and urban flows and urban and also global you know challenges how do these metaphor help us to understand these challenges or how do you go from one to the other I mean I think that our choice of words and concepts is extremely important so I'm very interested in the use and application of language and I think that theory and language go together and I think it worries me when terms are used indiscriminately or without enough careful attention to their cultural historical specificity I think one enduring theme in my in my work is the connection between the body in the city and in this sense there's a connection between discussions around metabolism and various difficulties with organist analogies and then what you might turn the neo-organist city and the digital space or thinking space of the city algorithmic space I think this is perhaps where the cyborg metaphor becomes quite interesting in terms of for me that the whole cyborg question is really conceptualizing what paraphernalia of modern infrastructure systems enable the human body to flourish in an urban environment and it's a complex set of sequences within the modern city in that sense I quite like this analogy with the Cold War astronaut and enabling if you like the fragile human body to survive in a hostile environment and then thinking through these complicated relationships between the body and infrastructure within the modern city but at the same time expanding our conception of what infrastructure really is and thinking about the the historicity of infrastructure and state formation its fundamental role if you like in the ideologies of modernity and really the possibilities for life and in that sense I think questions around a cyborg urbanization and these flows within space they link with different kinds of ideological conceptions of the possibilities for life and also perhaps biopolitical discourses as well when we think about the body and health and human well-being you know it's really interesting to know because I think your presentation on Thursday was challenging for a lot of people because they didn't have this evolution of urban political ecology and how it's actually can and it went from putting the actor in the flows or in the urban metabolism let's say discourse to to rethinking nature to questioning you know you question how this specific fly is an actor or is not in this discourse of biodiversity so you're really kind of changing scales and changing actors in this discourse as being the protagonist and I feel for us we had we didn't have time to digest your you know your your thoughts because you have been going from one strand of urban political ecology to another one I guess but could you tell us a bit or is there a logical evolution in urban political ecology did it start by branding itself like this one day and then we said okay we're gonna continue from then onwards I mean by way of context I mean the the presentation I gave here in Brussels relates relates to this larger project this European Research Council funded project Rethinking Urban Nature and it has a series of thematic or conceptual strands to the project one of which is to critically reconceptualize aspects of urban political ecology and in particular look at urban biodiversity because in terms of my previous work has tended to be focused around questions of landscape and infrastructure but in the last few years I've become increasingly interested in biodiversity and especially in an urban context so the the presentation here in Brussels concerned this accidental chance discovery of a rare invertebrate a rare fly and then thinking through all of the curious kind of philosophical and political questions that arise from this small discovery in north London and one of the things that I was particularly interested in is trying to think through what kind of arguments can be used to protect vulnerable aspects of urban diversity in a highly contested complicated and fast-changing urban arena and trying to think through some of these discourses about biodiversity in relation to urban political ecology because for me one of the the weaknesses within urban political ecology as it's been constituted is actually a lack of direct engagement with ecological science or specific fields such as entomology or evolutionary biology so in a way it's an attempt to bring some rigorous aspects of scientific discourse into the frame of urban political ecology but that's then super interesting because there are these ecologies that we keep talking about and urban political ecology is one of them industrial ecology is the other one the urban ecology is another one but so is that the way to go forward by integrating or finding you know the intersections and working on these intersections and make them more more logical and use the same kind of discourse do you feel that you had to relearn I guess all of the discourse of an urban ecologist to be able to carry out a good research and now you're trying to bring it back to urban political ecology to repopulate this field I mean in a way thinking about my own work I've kind of had a double life as a geographer and an entomologist oh you were okay I'm very interested in this field so it's really a way of bringing together these disparate elements in terms of creating a new kind of conceptual synthesis but I think that the implications for urban political ecology are I think a need to be more radical in terms of its interdisciplinarity because the term interdisciplinarity or multi-disciplinarity is talked about by everybody including funding agencies but what does that actually mean in practice and I think for me it's really with the urban political ecology and urban biodiversity and what I'm really trying to do here is to think through a kind of radical interdisciplinarity that really engages very directly with the sciences aspects of the social sciences the historical sciences but also the humanities as well because if we're talking about phenomenology not just the human sensorium but other than human nature then really there are many different strands that we need to try and bring together within a conceptual synthesis that works effectively yeah yeah of course I mean you you put it right that well biodiversity is a human a man-made concept and we want this type of biodiversity and we exclude the the most logical biodiversity I mean this bumblebee oh no well no this fly that resembles like a bumblebee yes is a very fantastic opportunity in terms of biodiversity and of terms of something that we will lose and it will not be endogenous and all of this so but we keep the trees are not to our liking so you know we want the I don't remember the expression in English but we want to eat the pie and have the pie whole or something like this yes yes but you know it I don't know how we will be able to bridge you know our our lifestyles but also our philosophical aspirations because right now they're they're going into two separate paths and I don't know if you did you find in your exploration ways to bridge them but you said that local people or we're involved into this project are they the vehicle for bridging this yes and I think it's um if um nature conservation or the protection of biodiversity is to have any prospect of success it has to involve um a profound engagement with grass grassroots ecology public culture and so on I think that the the protection of nature can't be a purely abstract realm of discourse so that direct contact with nature especially in an urban context I think is extremely important for mobilizing people's interest um in terms of the particular study that I did in north London I was interested in especially vulnerable habitat types what I refer to saproxilic geographies which in particular refers to um very old or over mature trees as expression used because they have an extremely complicated topographic structure that supports um hundreds if not thousands of different species of invertebrates but these very old trees are a source of anxiety because if it's windy there's a possibility that part or even the whole tree might collapse they're very complex and difficult to look after there's often a lack of expertise in municipal governments to really know how to handle these kind of trees so we're talking about a vulnerable species related to a vulnerable habitat in some ways in an anomalous urban context so all of these things really came together in terms of looking at this particular study and how did you go from let's say looking at landscapes which are always a bit more far away and right now you're focusing on a specific case study which is let's say in London so before in the case of Lagos or New York or you know many of your case studies you looked or Paris you looked a bit at the hinterland or you know all of the supply area and now you're really looking at a specific case study is there um you know comparable findings that you can find from you know very local to very wide studies or does the one inform separate things than the other right i mean i would say that um my research agenda is fundamentally curiosity driven um if it's useful or interesting for other people that's great but that's but i'm not trying to prefigure that um in the case of abby park cemetery in north London is actually located very near to where i where i've lived for many years um and initially my engagement with the site was simply as a effectively an ecological volunteer helping to collect data meeting people giving occasional public talks so local involvement but then i began to realise actually there's a lot of very interesting things going on in relation to this site so it sort of gradually became part of these these large intellectual questions that i've been looking at in terms of the the broader structure of my research certainly i have looked at a variety of different locations and sometimes the reason for looking in greater detail at a particular location or engaging with the topic can be really through serendipity for example art exhibitions have often been a sort of great inspiration for me in the sense that um artists often ask those um unusual or unpredictable questions which if you like routine social science or particularly um social science is concerned with the measurable or quantifiable simply overlook or tend not to address so the work that i started to do in the history of urban infrastructure particularly water infrastructure in paris when that was inspired by an exhibition of the photographs of nadar but i happened to see in in new york on working on a very different project but having thought about it taken notes and looked in more detail i suddenly realised that this was a kind of a portal into a whole series of interesting questions so i think in terms of research design for me sometimes there's a there's a kind of magic key or some entry point sometimes completely unexpected that opens up a whole series of interesting questions but do you reckon this is only possible because you had this dual background and your kind of your um stimulation your stimuli come from different directions and it's the overlap that make the you know this interesting and curious research possibly i mean i think um one term which which springs to mind is that of attentive observation and i think because of my um long-standing interest in natural history ecology and entomology um i tend to be always noticing things so if i'm walking through a city and i notice some plants growing on the pavement i'm often hesitating taking a closer look you know what what is it well how did it get there so that all of these little um clues within the the fabric of the city can become very important um points of connection with larger arguments and how do you construct them because you you're always i think what's interesting as well with your work is that and with urban political ecology is developing this narrative because you know water could be just said like abba woman it's just water and we were talking about a virtual city of one million inhabitants and we can be very dry about it yeah but you make really and i think the historical perspective really helps for that to make a narrative and to you know take the reader by the hand with and help him understand well new york was before like this and they did that for that and as soon as we do a historical perspective things become obviously clear and we don't guess them it's you know we don't go the opposite way where we try to guess things it's most the the reality instead of well the reality what what people give us as a reality and we read it as reality but uh yeah yeah i mean i think a historical perspective is absolutely fundamental um and it's extremely useful particularly in terms of trying to understand the the processes behind the production of space and the emergence of particular kinds of um cultural or political constellations or ideas equally i think the historiography of ideas and the terminology that we use is very important and is linked to material and historical and change but this question of history i've also been thinking about recently because um if you like the overwhelming focus of urban political ecology or environmental or urban historical discourse has been on on the modern era but with recent debates about the Anthropocene i'm interested in also thinking about how we might locate cities in relation to deep time and really what would a much longer historical lens and provide in terms of thinking through the contemporary politics of the biosphere and other fields so this is really at an early stage but i have begun to think about if the temporalities of urban nature at a different at a series of different scales or levels if you like but deep time you mean in the past or potentially in the future as well well i'm i'm cautious of trying to project into into the future um but i but i think that um clearly at the moment there's a lot of interest in what we understand the city or urban space to be and i think it is helpful to to take a longer view um of how how urbanization emerged um how it's uh interconnected with different um energy transitions which have been a fundamental importance um so at the moment there's a lot of interest in uh post carbon futures um different types of topographic or technological formations uh in relation to urban space and i think again i think taking a longer view can be immensely helpful um one topic i've looked at quite recently is that a light pollution which which is something that interests me partly because it relates to um invertebrates and urban ecology very very important but it also poses a very profound questions about um technological path dependencies and also um those areas of technical decision making that are effectively excluded from the public realm or democratic discourse yeah and so in this deep time i guess brodel and you know this long durée is something that you probably will take on board or something like this is that the future for you i mean it because you're you say that you are you observe and then that sparks your curiosity and that sparks your future research what's your latest uh let's say uh curiosity or have you find something that really is intriguing you and you think it's really important to continue researching i mean at the moment i'm completing a book on urban biodiversity where i want to explore these different themes um i've been very impressed for example by isle vightsman's forensic architecture um project with his colleagues and i would also like to think about the implications of this um post positivist um collaborative methodological approach and what it might mean for um urban ecology and urban biodiversity is something i'm thinking about um so i'm thinking through um also what the anthropologist tim choy refers to as ecologies of endangerment and ecologies of comparison um so i'm developing a series of conceptual themes but with particular uh empirical examples that that interest me so in a way you try to to set more in stone the theory of what's urban ecology or urban political all of this you try to actually lay out the more uh a common vocabulary or a common idea framework from which people can then collaborate yes i mean i i like the idea of um a ground of theory or exploring philosophical dilemmas through a series of um practical problems or political issues i find that very illuminating so in relation to the protection of endangered invertebrates as i mentioned in my in my lecture i've been intrigued by if you like the limits to a neo-benthemite uh deridian approach in terms of concern with the suffering of animals and affinities if you like between the human and the non-human and thinking can we articulate some kind of effective philosophical positions that maybe go beyond the limits of this uh neo-benthemite um paradigm and this is where i brought in the ideas of the the vulnerability of these so-called baitsian mimics associated with saproxilic geographies and trying to bring some of the scientific discourses uh interline with some new thinking about environmental ethics and other than human nature so these are some of the ideas that i'm currently working with yeah well thank you very much i think your guests are here so again thanks for your time okay