 My name is Ian Kruppens. I'm a collaborator at 10.10. I studied, well, I'm working here now almost two years, so no in the game, let's say. I studied at the University in Ghent, where I also did my thesis a bit on the subject of circular economy and the reproductive city, starting from looking at production in the city, specifically for Brussels. And I also did a few projects of which M4H, in Rotterdam, dealing with flows, metabolism and circular economy. And circular city ports. Not to forget, still going on. Yes, and then I'm in Aria Casabela, a principal at 10.10. I'm an assistant professor at the ULB Faculty of Architecture at Cameroon. I started using, I heard it for the first time in a lecture. It was a lecture given at the university by, I think, Eric from Metabolic. He was then doing research on Rotterdam in the framework of the IABIR, Productive Cities. And that's how I kind of came into the subject and also later on wanted to do my thesis about this subject. We also had to do a kind of critical paper of this topic series. And what struck me when I dive into the lecture is that this concept has been there for a long time, like Metabolic Rifts, this kind of concept. But on the other hand it was very eye-opening. And for me it was a kind of, it showed a bit, it pinpointed a bit more, looked more at kind of making the subject of urbanism more relevant again where it started, I think. On the other hand, the study was place-based but not with actors. And I think hearing the process of the long year of thesis for me was very enriching in that fact to look at the kind of who is going to do it in the end. And I think that's also something that Tenten emphasizes in its practice to look at these actors who are busy with it in their daily life but also who are busy with it to plan it, to institutions that could carry out policies to look at what their role could be. So to design a bit the agency, the capability of acting upon these flows. So the first time I heard of Metabolism, I think it was in the Netherlands. I've been working there for a long time in different periods along my life, across my life. And I think it was through high-endness, the work of high-endness and the Xymons in particular, he was mentioning about this aura metabolism and this brought me to this Marxist theory of the metabolic rift, of course. And then it stayed a bit there, kind of in the background without gaining any kind of importance or being a guiding topic in the way I was working. Until we started at the Faculty of Architecture of La Cambre Urta, we started organizing different masterclasses and also refining the objectives of the new research centre of Louis. We were discussing what this research centre should be about and then in the beginning it was about infrastructures. Logically, so, because we had been working around not only railway infrastructures and I had also passed in fundamental research around transit oriented development but then at that moment I started to feel that maybe the introduction of the ecology in the research centre, the ecological part, was very important. That we were busy with the kind of realisation and programming of all these infrastructures but we did not pay attention to the environmental impact. Not from a technical point of view but from a holistic understanding of the environment where you are acting upon. And I thought, yeah, maybe it's an opportunity to start talking about these issues and then these brought us to certain people, not only you later on who was doing doctoral research, doctoral dissertation around urban metabolism but of course at the same time as we introduced this issue in the research centre of course Dubigno and all the kind of theory that had been built around urban ecology in Brussels became very important kind of a reference in everything we were thinking at that point. And then of course 2014 the Rotterdam Biennial was a very important leverage point I mean the work of Faric that was exhibited there displayed, demonstrated with a lot of consistency that it was possible to use that to kind of define a new way of doing urban design that it could again make your role or become the main character in your practice beyond being kind of a knowledge data that would inform the things you were doing that could become as I said the real protagonist of your work the centre point, not just informing but kind of manipulating trying to intervene upon the metabolic flows. So that was 2014 the Biennial was a very important shifting point for us. I mean of course we had already started working on different projects trying to introduce this understanding but rather as I said it was rather understanding about ecological dynamics so it was I mean from 2011 the master plan of a parking in Albert of course the question of water is very present there but also a question of wood which kind of species, how do they grow the question of actors because there were a lot of conflicts about how much space can I use and what for and all these you start seeing that there is a kind of a conflict field where water is always pushed on the background because the football field needs a lot of space and that the football field is not really busy with the kind of pollution they are kind of bringing or causing in the water courses of the park you start seeing that all these factors are very much interacting and that they result in a specific environment and that you as a designer can intervene upon all these things and try to create bridges but also in a way raise awareness about the situated or the embeddedness of the things you do and the impact they have on the organisation of the environment but again so I think 2014 I think it was really very important for us as again also confirmation that it made sense I think there are a few which we had starting from the economic point of view where well there are three projects of which one M4H also in the framework of IABIR starting from this kind of question about support economics as a kind of gateway being urbanised but yet searching for new economies and then the question was kind of very broad kind of pilot project what is this economy about and who are these people that are busy with it because the area which had been kind of not neglected but being kind of transforming and being kind of left behind by big economies moving to the main port leaving space behind space to test space for companies to start doing things and I think the first thing that we start was exploring talking to the people and this was kind of for everybody and also for the commissioner a kind of surprise on how and what they are busy with the companies and from there we detected three flows or like building materials agri-food and textile that for us kind of were an argument to look at to make coalitions to start thinking about certain collaborations because on the one hand on the bigger scale because these flows were passing by you have to be close to the city to gather and collect agricultural monostreams or agri-food monostreams for the textile we saw that actually the port was a kind of major knot in this more European but even global chain where there is an argument to start working also because the actors were there so I think this is the most clear starting from the point of view of economies how we could foster new economies that we started to document these flows in how they are being used already or how they could make new projects by and I think the main outcome on the one hand indeed is kind of no imaginaries of people that are busy with it actually it was a major kind of step forward to a project but also getting these people, different people, the companies but also authorities like sectoral organisations or more socio-economic associations around the table that they get to know each other so maybe there wasn't a clear kind of project in the end but there was a conversation and a kind of exchange that went different directions not only the public authority followed it up but also the private companies they started working with it but I think what is important is that we don't have a single way of working or using or there is no single way in which our metabolism forms or directs our work so I think what Ian is explaining is that for instance the project of Matterfield Heavens was probably together with the circular city ports the two projects that are most directly related to I mean we talk nowadays rather about circular economy because we look at urban metallis rather as a way to analyse to understand the flows and then we talk about circular economy in the sense of how we can intervene upon how we can guide them in order to rethink our industrial system so this is very much the case and then the question of this commission that was put on our plate was to circularise the Matterfield Heavens port area and then what we answered to this commissioner question was maybe it's not about circularise but it's asking the actors first of all what do they need in order to know whether they are circular already and in case they are not what they would need so circularisation is not something is not a normative framework you can post from the top and say and now we are all going to become circular but for the port and city authorities it was obviously an agenda point and they had to answer it in any way and then they organised this competition and we are selected because we said yeah okay but let's see what is there and let's understand better what the actors need in order to become more circular so this was a very interesting way of working because then we made interviews with companies and a lot of interviews with a lot of companies and then we were looking at the growth story so yeah how big they were and how fast their growth had happened the growth had happened but also why and then also the circular story and in the growth story one of the things we asked is what do you dream of I mean because you have to be aware companies they have their profit oriented we are talking about companies based in the port they are not there to make us happy they are there to become rich not to generate wealth that can be resistivated of course I mean it's not that they only they also look to have the ambition to generate jobs and to resistivate this wealth through the job creation but also the construction and the investment on new infrastructures but this was a very interesting first point because we understood better or we thought we understood better the kind of flows that were across the area so in the circular story of every company that was based on the port but also what they saw in circularity that was important for them and in which way they could incorporate it into their future plans and then at the same time it was very interesting because Metabolic was doing their Metabolic study for Rotterdam and they had been mapping all the flows of all the inputs and outputs of the city and by looking into their research of course we did not make these analyses at the scale of Rotterdam we could identify we can kind of compare some of the flows they identified and the analysis they made and we could compare it to what was happening locally and identify which one of these flows were relevant for this area to say okay then we came down to the question of after a lot of looking for the right flow of course we thought okay so building materials notably because there are a lot of companies busy with recycling but also re-manufacturing of building components there textile because it was a very important point of collection of textile used textile but also because we saw that there were in the surrounding neighborhoods a lot of ateliers not only women were working so it was the only possibility for immigrant women to find a job in a way were Naya ateliers so Siewin ateliers to repair, to sort out to recompose these textiles so we thought it's a very interesting mix between the big scale of these big companies linked to this global supply chain to a local economic dynamics workshops the same with the building materials by the way because there were in the surrounding neighborhoods there were also a lot of small workshops that were linked to the bigger companies based in the harbor where people were being formed in a different way of for instance dismantling or demolishing buildings or reusing booths they would kind of mine from the existing building patrimony and these people were obviously building a network to it with the companies based in the harbor so it was building companies textile and of course organic waste because also there was a very important a couple of very important companies Grun Collect and Sugu busy with these flow in different ways Sugu in a much more experimental way trying to develop new packaging forms textiles and new products based on organic waste and Grun Collect which is trying to kind of diversify the way of collecting organic waste in order to be able to separate already some flows that can be recuperated more easily so to keep the priority of the organic waste flow so this is what we did and it was I think very interesting also to look at the flow chart trying to make the flow chart based on the work that Metabolic had done and to identify already the companies that were busy in the area on the immediate surroundings in order to see what can we do with them in which way they could benefit from this organization and then at the end of course our question in terms of how we can answer all that as urban designers and architects is to say you need to build specific infrastructures for these things to happen you can discover all these very nice initiatives but they need an infrastructure in order to survive but it always is a question it doesn't matter if it's about mobility or organic waste it's always all these people they are very inventive and innovative but after a couple of years if you don't as public authority you don't help them to blossom they will die away so we cannot propose as it is three different infrastructures you could say pilot projects in order for these people to meet their expertise and to keep on growing so what we found through the interviews of what is your dream how do you see yourself growing in the area so that was an extremely interesting parkour for us so research why is that also meeting the people then we organize a series of workshops at the end but also in terms of identifying which kind of jobs are that I mean we think of circularity but we don't think about all these expertise that are needed in order for the circularity to exist and to be realized and this was very important in our work actually but then yeah of course here for instance the work of Innovative Estates Havens these I printed some things for instance for us in the beginning when we started the project all the other type of reflection so the fact that water contains a lot of nutrients but also sediments and that working on the A lunch area in Antwerp was a very kind of a strategic spot to think about all these flows but of course this was not taken back by the client the commissioner so it's also maybe we start from a specific point of view that might be metabolic in a way but if the commissioner does not show any interest we are also I mean we have a responsibility with them we have to provide an answer to the questions at the end so we are forced to always reorient our project so we were very interested in this kind of path but yeah this path was really not interested at all so we had even though there were a couple of companies also very closely working with companies and making interviews with them and also understanding the way they were operating and even though there were a couple of companies very much interested for instance in this sediment thing so the way they are treating the sediments and keeping the depth of the harbor today is totally responsible but also in terms of the pollutants and there was a company which had been developing alternative to that so there was a kind of a real possibility but yeah Hackebespa is not interested in that and they are really much more focusing on building materials and mobility you have to also kind of react to the way I mean to the questions at the end you are paying a service and providing a service but yeah for instance in these projects for the Kuslin in Austin and but also for instance for the strategic plan of Ville Borde which is online so I didn't print it we always started from issues like circle economy or water management or in this case coastal defense that already in the way we read the place play a very important role so for instance here the way we were reading the place and this is a scheme that for us was also very important to discover all the different families that exist in a sustainable approach to urban design so that you can be urban political ecology but you can be also an optimist technology optimist and all these things coexist at the same time but so what I wanted to show yeah for instance one of the we kind of identified for different cities for different cities based on for instance the flow of tourism we were talking about the city that accordion city that is designed in order to accommodate a big amount of tourists at certain moments throughout the year but at the same time has to live with this heritage of big infrastructure oversized infrastructures throughout the year even when all these people are not there so these kind of notions of thinking for instance all the mobility infrastructure is huge and it occupies an enormous amount of space and then thinking in a way is a metabolic thinking thinking about the flows but also in terms of the water both the fresh water in terms of the consumption demands that have peaks during the summer exactly at the moment when there is a period or moment of drought how do you live with that but also the cost of defence to think ok so this cost of defence is very much thought in the work with it in Austin what I was explaining is that this continuous flow of sun that is being brought artificially into the bridge so this replenishment of the beach with the sun coming from the offshore mine areas and then we thought yeah maybe it would make sense to start thinking about regeneration the species so that it come resilient against the the force of the sea the waves the storms so we thought we started exploring the possibilities and then we discovered that this has been done by Delta S for instance in the Netherlands to bring in nutrients to let parts of the bridge to keep the nutrients from the insects and some the composition of some of the plants so that you could create a kind of a green beach that would be more resilient against the force of the storms so that it would have the strength not to be washed out every time there is a storm and this would to a certain way to a certain extent keep the sun that is being continuously brought in and out because of the force of the sea so this is what the kind of things we were doing but also looking into the port area we discovered some sections of how the docks were built and then we saw that there are the rainwater used to be collected on the sides of the dock in order to be reused for washing the fish in the past and then we kind of wanted to reuse and restore these water conducts that are now in the harbor in order to collect the rainwater and reuse it in new industrial processes, doesn't matter so this thinking is there also for mobility water again for a lot of things and a lot of but it's not equally kind of visible or it does not inform or work to the same extent it depends very much because we are and since we are service providers the point is very much whether the commissioner takes it back or embraces it and says ok Coming back to what I started explaining that indeed this lecture was by Fabric of course Erik Fletters and what stroke me then and the thing I started developing from there or looking for is that at first it was more about the kind of looking what is there like quantitatively most of all where it's going spatial bound but also in volumes and it was eye opening but it stay also very under kind of abstract and at that time the discussion was also from the critical point of view yeah but what's next how are we gonna do this how are we gonna be doing this because then everybody claims can claim to use this flows and these kind of opportunities maybe to do their own projects so who then kind of gets a position to act upon this flow is very interesting for me to look at I think to make a kind of overview or analysis of different offices I'm not really sure I could make straight away I think in a way that's also what Nadia explained is kind of yeah you can read your commission you can read the city in that way with the lenses of urban metabolism which is helpful but at the end it's about making about the commission who is making the commission and who takes, who has the ability to take it further and from that point of view I think a lot has changed also after this M4H commission looked at circular city ports we researched it the past year and still going on with ABB architecture workroom and there you see actually that throughout all delta because we did a benchmarking of 11 city ports with the knowledge we had from Ostende from Innovatives Antwerp from Rotterdam we also looked at the French ports and even to Hamburg so the Lahavre Hamburg range that actually it's quite representative I think for what's going on is that every port was busy with this taking on certain ambitions to look at it flows from the point of view of circular economy to start acting upon it with some new initiatives but that there was also kind of this knowledge was very partial that they were all doing the same but on their own well at the same kind of ambitions or not to say that everybody has to do it the same way or to do it as the other ports but it was interesting to see that that they didn't really know what was going on in the other ports that they were also very interested to learn from each other and what we emphasized there was that like Nadia also says there is not one way to do things it comes very much on the situation of the context the size of the port or the actors that are there or the socio-economic dynamics the constraints yes you can be circular in many ways for a port to define a circular agenda they can be based on profit, volume recycling re-manufacturing there is a wide very long list of priorities you can define in your circular agenda and this is very much what we discovered actually but yeah that they were nevertheless despite the fact that all these initiatives are very kind of rooted in specific places and contexts and they depend also to a certain extent on the inertia that has been created in the past that they were nevertheless very interested to know what others are doing obviously I mean it's like what we are doing but in terms of practices I think that there are many ways of kind of integrating this metabolic understanding of cities in the way you work certainly we for instance you did not take part on that research but when we were working with Fabric on the Atelier Brussels then you see that of course they have an incredible incredible knowledge of how to gather the quantitative data and how to represent that but at the end what we found it was missing is a bit this kind of attention to the local capacities of the territory so that you cannot come always with one size fits all approach that they are not replicable solutions that you can adopt everywhere like it's a checklist and now we do that and that and that and this is what we found that maybe this is what we could contribute with and already I think the discussions about the methodology and the fact that it was not just because there was a lack of time a lack of budget to do a very all-encompassing metabolic analysis of Brussels but to decide to work on specific areas that was I think already something weird to them a different approach of looking at metabolism more from the local scale what was going to be found but also in terms and this is probably what was missing at that moment in terms of the actors you could engage and involve your because at the end it's not just about descriptive or analytical tool it's about a transformation tool so you need to count on people, specific people capabilities in order to go forward I mean for us is very much that we are not of course you can say you are very much paper architects or because we draw a lot of things and very little of what we draw is actually implemented but our ambition is to go for change I mean we don't want to keep on drawing things but nonetheless this the quantities and the knowledge the data is very important to make a project if you for example with master plans as well if you know the figures of how big the building is and how many water it can collect and how big then your landscape has to absorb or be a sponge then you have the do you have a kind of tool to design you have an argument to make a project so it's important this data is the basis but it shouldn't end there it should make a project and this project is for the future indeed for change specific people and places not all places and people can reach the same level of engagement transformation they don't have the same means so this is also you have to be careful with that so that you don't also for us that you don't create situations that are impossible for the people to embrace and to engage with but also for instance any of them in the southern part of Brussels that was very much the case we came with a section based on the productive landscape agricultural landscape and then after many interviews and many workshops you start realizing that I mean all these actors and especially our farmers who have been signing contracts with big companies they are completely captured trapped in a situation they cannot easily escape so it's not just about coming up with a nice future this is where you should go towards but it's also about providing an action plan of how can you get rid of the system you are trapped into so I think for us this is very important maybe the only quantitative part we do not spend much time honestly analyzing that we use some numbers also for mobility now some numbers related to flows in order to have a better idea of what we can do in order to change the situation so what is the extent of the problem but our approach is very much based around actors and institutions yes what can we do change takes action plan it takes years to to realize to realize to start somewhere where you want to be or re-evaluate so it needs embeddedness kind of actors that stay that keep on making them capable of doing it but on the other hand connecting this to a more overall institutions or programs or policies that also provide this local developers or area managers or farmers for that sake with the tools and the vision also the framework in which they can do it I think what is very important is this reality check so this attachment to reality to see what is there already who is operating there and what are their capabilities also for public authorities in all levels they have very much the tendency to close or propose in the best case scenario different way of organizing territories or flows but there is very little knowledge about the kind of initiatives or the kind of actors that are already busy with that and I think the first I think very much is this kind of local situated knowledge I think it's a responsibility for everyone who is trying to intervene on the organization of a space the organization of space and flows and actors you need to know that before doing anything so I think this and then of course the second step would be to identify actors or institutions or organizations that are already more or less consolidated in these territories that can act as area managers that can further this ambition to work with flows but also change the industrial system into a more circular one from linear to a more circular one so to identify these kind of key actors that become the magnets of transformation but of course I mean this is very much local bottom up local scale what can you do when you are an oban yes I think keep on doing a lot of things because on one hand you have this task of agenda setting and raising awareness and convincing your politicians of a different way of understanding what is at stake bringing in a benchmark benchmarking analysis of what happens elsewhere so I think this is this is very important so there is a kind of educating your politicians especially in Belgium in the Netherlands it's very different because the politicians do not have such a the last voice into the matter is actually the technical body the specialist who resides at the end and then you see also the differences of course with a lot of problems because there they have a very infrastructural and you can also have second thoughts about that but ok at least but ok in the case of Belgium you have to educate your politicians you have to indeed I think agree in a white paper in order to frame the questions that are at stake and the impact these questions or these challenges the impact they can have eventually on how you think about competitions small projects so a different scale from the public procurement so that you kind of bring in these questions from very early on and these very specific methodologies but also until the small execution project of public space that you have this kind of basic knowledge to know ok it's important to think about that so for instance when we make a very even if it's this stupid square here that we think about water I mean water management rain water management there is nothing we all know for years that we cannot keep on using the sewage for the rain water doesn't make any sense it's a waste so yeah that all these things are kind of that you create a kind of a body of knowledge that is easily accessible for very different levels but they know this is the way to go so but then you were also asking about the link to the academia and I think this is extremely important I mean to form through university because you give access to the students to a different way of understanding cities and a different way of reading and measuring all these flows I think it's crucial I mean if you don't form the next generation into a different way of understanding what is at stake I mean nothing is going to move they are they are the next I mean it's fundamental and then for me is still again amazing that within the faculty that you are being criticized continuously that you are found to be relevant too specific that you are kind of put aside of the architectural faculty because you are too specific for art days we should be doing talking about buildings and composition and that's it, that's it so this is I think problematic I think we cannot go on like that and then yeah I think yeah Ova can also have a big impact in the way new doctoral dissertations are being proposed the support they get they can have integration of these more fundamental research into applied projects I think this is fundamental that Ova supports this line of research at university and that the people who are busy with that yeah they do not get this courage but rather the opportunity of going to the city of Leuven and explain what you are doing and look for ways of applying it but also together with Ova do not forget this kind of multilevel so you need to continuously work at different levels but there is no single answer but yeah at least you have the technical knowledge that is terribly missing the politicians who are completely ignorant of what is at stake and then the future and the next generations you need to involve them