 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. On this episode, we talk with our friend Paul Curry, who is a senior officer in Niclea, Africa, and a researcher at Stelibos University, about what the African context can teach us on urban metabolism. In fact, as environmental challenges are so manifest, African cities can be an ideal place to learn about urban metabolism and test systemic solutions. Paul shares his experience about applying urban metabolism in the African context, but also about spatializing it at smaller scales in order to bring out different consumption patterns. We discuss why urban metabolism is especially relevant in Africa, which is rapidly urbanizing, and the choices of today will have profound future effects on resource use and pollution emissions. However, in the African context, urban metabolism should focus about equity rather than efficiency, as it has usually done in European and American contexts. Finally, we discuss about how African cities can reconciliate, experimenting fast and failing, but still providing essential services to its citizens. Enjoy this episode and don't forget to visit our website www.circularmetabolism.com for the rest of our productions. Please help us improve our podcast by subscribing to your favorite app, including YouTube, iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher, and leave us a comment with your thoughts. Okay, so we start with... Hello. Hello. Paul, how are you doing? All right. It's very nice to be again with you. Two years ago, it was back in Chicago, and now it's in Cape Town, but I feel we know each other, right? I mean, we've discussed about urban metabolism in intimate ways. Absolutely. And I hope that you're going to share a bit your insights about urban metabolism in another context that I'm not really familiar with, but I think that the fields can progress very much in this context, the African context, because there is this myth that urban metabolism necessarily needs data, for instance, and a wealth of data to exist. Yesterday, you mentioned it's not necessarily true, but I wanted to have your perspective, like, what can the African context teach us about urban metabolism? Sure. Easy question to start with, yeah? So I mean, you've jumped in straight, I mean, I suppose I'm coming in with a sort of, well, how do we think about urban metabolism in African context? Yes. No, it's certainly true, I mean, if you, suddenly there's a camera. It's not there. Certainly not. The inroads for linking about cities in Africa is very different. We are a last frontier of urban development. We don't have the same contextual considerations for the way that cities are growing here. It is no longer, we no longer have the opportunity to extract from hinterlands across the oceans or to send our waste away for treatment in other places. Because that's the place where it's happening. This is, has a long history of being the space in which extractivism has occurred and now where a lot of the world's wastes are ending up for treatment and beneficiation in many respects. And so there is a lot to be learned about how wastes are managed here, but also what the social component can offer to that waste beneficiation. And in a way, this is a very interesting space for understanding the positives and negatives of a decentralized, self-organizing metabolic system. That's what you mean by social aspects? Well, I mean, there are multiple dimensions. So in urban metabolism, the discourse is talking about industrial ecology, political ecology and urban ecology. And here... Or social ecology, depending on who does their... So here the inroads to thinking about resources has to start with the question of equity. And the global discourse is about efficiency. And so this is the other contextual constraint that we have is the world has decided, well now we need to be sustainable, including African contributions to that goal. But what does that mean for how we can now urbanize? I mean, suddenly you have these constraints which never existed for industrial, for the industrial era, and now you have to be cognizant of what does our development mean for larger sustainability questions. So your inroad here, in South Africa particularly, is very much around a constitutional right to services, but we know that providing access to resources will necessarily increase their consumption. That's already in the constitution. Or that's... Yes, it's... Yeah, there are constitutional rights to water, energy, food, basic services. It's a really nice sense to hear. How literally people make use of those rights is an intriguing thought experiment. Could someone sue the national government for not having food? Then that's the question of what is the government's role in providing these services as the service rider or as the facilitator? So I mean, South Africa is a unique case in Africa because it's got a very robust networked infrastructure. And it also shows a lot of informal systems. So it's a space where you can start to understand the interface between those. As you move further up into the continent, you are engaging with many more self-organising systems which have their own form of regulation, own form, economic form. So understanding how flows are conducted through those systems is a contribution from Africa. I think I'll come back to your point. Yeah. I kind of feel that... And yesterday was also a good experience for me is that, okay, we're talking about cities that face multiple problems and that are really manifest, right? I mean, we can see them. We talked about the drought, we talked about the landfills that in four years and five years is going to shut down and there's no other alternative. So I feel that here the pressures are real, even if in Europe they are as well. But here we can see them and in a way it's a dream scenario for an urban metabolist because the flows are kind of pushing to a limit and therefore you have to act. But at the same time, I mean... Where do you begin? Absolutely. But I mean, this is the point, this is where you have to tailor your argument to the context. So, you know, this is why the statement of resource equity as your first priority is important. Because especially if you want to promote an urban metabolisms perspective, you have to say, well, what is that going to do for social well-being, you know? So our refrain in thinking about urban metabolisms of Cape Town, of South African cities, of African cities is you must work out how to improve resource equity, how to get the services to people in appropriate manners, in the most resource-efficient manner. So in a way if you come and you say, well, they're not trade-offs, you're not talking about trading off the environment for social well-being, you're saying, how do we improve quality of life while taking cognizance of environmental risk? Yeah, look, I mean the question of where you start addressing sustainability in many African cities which are rapidly growing, they're sprawling, there's a refrain that planning follows development. So it's a question of who owns the land, who is dispensing it to developers, who's providing those rights or the land. You've got informal systems which, as we said, have their own rationality and reason. We often go into those spaces looking for capacities which we expect in our institutionalized systems and when we don't find them we say, oh well, you're not working. And so what we need to do is go in and say, well, what capabilities exist in here, how do we help you accentuate them and how do we help you achieve your goals? Julian Baskin of Cities Alliance had a really nice provocation which is we try the same line which is, well, we don't tax them, we don't regulate them. But why are we trying to tax the poorest and the most vulnerable of our people? Instead we should be investing in them and allowing them to develop skills, allowing them to develop an offering which can contribute to our economy in multiple ways. Yeah. And I mean, you talk about South Africa which is kind of the midway between, I mean, you know, it's kind of the richest parts or richest parts of Africa and I'm wondering what urban metabolism can also learn in Sub-Saharan Africa where they're, you know, as you said, everything is evolving every day, right? So I kind of feel that for us is a very good challenge to take a step back and observe much more than in the other cases. In other contexts we kind of feel because there are infrastructures and, I mean, infrastructures, political infrastructures, resource infrastructures and so many other infrastructures are thinking also gets crystallized and they monopolize our way of thinking of urban metabolism, right? Over here it's so loose that, you know, I mean, we have to think of urban metabolism also talks about governance, also talks about equity, also talks about all of these other things where, in other contexts, we kind of forget as industrial ecologists. I think for industrial ecologists perhaps it's the good testing ground to kind of open their minds. Absolutely, yeah. And that comes to, well, what is the appropriateness of the types of infrastructures that you're looking to invest in, in these spaces? To the end goal, which is social well-being and social cohesion, economic growth, economic participation, but also environmental well-being and embedding environmental systems into our urban systems. There's a huge opportunity to reshape the types of infrastructures which we consider normal. But that is determined heavily by who's setting the agenda, who's providing the funding for these, and quite a degree the amount of creativity which funders and which financial institutions are willing to risk. So if you're talking about innovation and creating environments in which new ideas can emerge, there's a huge amount of risk involved in that, which is a bit opposed to our discourse of rush, and we must act now to avoid climate disaster. We must act now to avoid crossing planetary boundaries. We must act now because our cities are rapidly growing and we can't even service the people who are currently here. So how do you combine these two types of discourse which says, well, experiment, fail, learn, but also give us services, make sure that the cities are sustainable with all of those definitions, all 17 goals, all at once, by 2030. So there's a huge role for aspiration, which is important, but you've got a temper aspiration with some realism as well. So in 11 years, are we going to end poverty in African cities? Those are really real questions, and how do we do that? Without locking us in to what are considered European and American aspirational norms. So what have you learned, or what was your experience by learning Cape Towns metabolism? Well, I mean, it was fascinating. I mean, this has been a personal journey as well of understanding the different ways to perceive a city. So seeing it both in the relationships of different actors, seeing it in the relationships of different flows, having a big picture story and understanding how the 3.8 million people who live here consume vast amounts of water, vast amounts of materials, consume vast amounts of energy which is tainted as incredibly carbon-intense. You know, about in conversation with Paul Huckman, having the very clear understanding right from the beginning that obviously people across the city are going to use differently. So a person in Fresno, a person in Sea Point, a person in Lansdowne, a person in Mitchel's Plain, in Kailitsha, in Guguletu are going to have completely different resource profiles, as expected, and as is normal across many different cities. And so to understand what's... But here it's from simple to double or from simple to triple, I guess sometimes, right? So I mean, the vast inequalities you'll expect there. So trying to understand are there intervention points in those different types of metabolisms which would necessarily suggest that you must act differently or provide different mechanisms to reshape urban metabolisms? So that's targeted policies? What is it? How do you... Yeah, targeted policies, but policy maybe small p is the ways in which you interact with people. So the water crisis derailed a lot of my study which was looking at the nexus of resources. So if you're changing, if you suddenly have to reduce your water consumption from an average of 200 litres a day to 50, what does that mean for how you use energy? Your food choices, how much time you're spending cooking, your enjoyment of your recreational space at home when suddenly your garden has disappeared. So suddenly the focus shifted to water, but what was also fascinating about the crisis is it showed in two years how you could thoroughly change your metabolism. We halved the consumption of water in the city. From 1.1... I mean, mind boggling. From 1.1 billion litres a day to 500 over two years, 500 million litres. And now? So do we have an estimate just... Well, as a good researcher, I've certainly kept my eye out but right now our dam levels are filling up, not as much as we would like, but even though the restriction levels, which are the main policy mechanism to tell people what their allocation is, what types of behaviours they can use, so don't water your gardens. You can only wash your gardens on Tuesdays or Thursdays. You can't pull your swimming pool. You can only wash your car with a bucket, not the hose, those types of guidelines. So at the height of the water crisis, we were in level 6B restrictions. Level 5 and level 6 had to be invented for the depth of crisis. So we've now come down to level 3, which is a moderate use, but what's fascinating is that Capetonians are still using way less than their allocation. And so people have this... I don't know if it's a fear motivation or an embedded practice or simply the technical investments they've made in water efficiency or lasting. So now any public tap here gives a very misting or very low trickle compared to what used to happen, which is a river would rush out to the tap when you turn it on. So what's interesting to me is a lot of those technical interventions will contribute to long-lasting sustainability and slowly but surely after the shock of the crisis will the social interventions will dissipate and will start using the same quantities of water that make us comfortable. What was fascinating about that is the question of what is the sufficient amount of water? Exactly. And that's where a social component would really contribute to the field because as a person from Department of Water Services said to me, what is sufficient for an elderly woman suffering with arthritis might include a bath every evening to soothe her pain. How do you tell people what is adequate for their life enjoyment and for a good quality of life? It's a very curious route. What was interesting as well looking at who was consuming, who was reducing their consumption to merge that everyone across the city was reducing their consumption. The people who showed large conspicuous consumption to people with pools and gardens would obviously reduce much more. But it was contrary to the discourse is most people assume that the largest water impact is across the city with the rich and the poor because the poor don't have to pay for water so they'd waste it. But people living in informal settlements are using 38 liters per person per day normally. How can you legitimately ask them to reduce? When the World Health Organization has 50 liters per person per day, it's actually our responsibility to ensure that they are getting that and able to service their needs. So these two tensions that we've seen as normal in Cape Town, which has been really interesting to look at. And that's possible to do that because you use a lot of maps to help your discourse. You feel that to do those resource profiles and all of that, you kind of need to map it, right? Yeah. So visualization has always been really important to me as a way of making lots of data very accessible and to allow it to tell a story. What's interesting is how we turn those maps from simply an interesting thought provoking tool to something which guides action. So what would be a nice journey for me, I think, is to go into the city and to understand what types of GIS systems they're using. What, so the administrative breakdown in Cape Town goes from metro municipality to a main place to a sub place, but then there are also political divisions which are wards. So the question is if we wanted to take this in a decentralized manner, perhaps we should be visualizing not by main place, which are suburbs, which are the familiar names, like right now we're in Rose Bank, I live in Woodstock, or else, and actually make them the wards, which are the political demarcations. And you can actually go and use that information to advocate to your representative to make change. So that could be a really interesting tool for using it as a community information tool. No being or whatever you are. Or do you go directly to a central government and say, well, this is what's emerging, are you making use of disaggregated water data in your planning system when you're looking at where to build new systems? So what are those indicators that are being used? Have you tried to? I have and what always fascinates me when I go into municipal offices in Southern African cities is how well equipped they are. Really, okay. Yeah, and I think this is a fallacy that we as academics are brought up to believe through the academy is that we're the ones who hold the knowledge and must then disseminate it. And when science fails to have impact, we suggest that well, it's because we couldn't put the knowledge in the right hands or whatever it is. But there's another step which is about learning each other's languages. So my feeling, which is part of my own personal naivete, but also my sense of urban metabolism is it's at the stage where it's experimenting and failing. And that's fine as our innovation point. But it's like... For a long time has been failing. Let's explore what types of data exist and if there's anything interesting to come out of that. And so our next step is to then say, well, look, these are the things that we've been looking at. I find this interesting, but does the city find it interesting? And go to firstly technical offices to understand, oh, you're already using it, great. Or, oh, that's cool. You're going this angle or you use this indicator specifically. And then the next step to then say, well, what is the barrier between technical and political decision-making? And that's what I found to be a case in many cities is a divide between technical capacity and political interests, political motivation, the need to answer to a specific constituency which your information doesn't answer to. So bridging those divides and aligning are metabolic information with city financial cycles, political cycles. And then aligning it with the governance formation in that city, is it a very heavily centralized system? Is it one that is actively seeking citizen participation in its processes? I don't know if many of such cities exist, but anyhow, yeah. Well, so it's a question of whether they are voicing that and not able to do it effectively. Maybe they only reach a level of consultation but not participation. So if they're open to it, then well, maybe we need to come up with tools to help facilitate those. There's a really great organization here which prides itself of being an intermediary, of being the person, to gather the, it's always interesting who decides who they're relevant, but to gather the stakeholders together to have engagements and to have discourse about what's going on. And it's incredibly time consuming. If you want to add another latency to building new systems, actually having adequate citizens. Well, users need to be in the forefront, right? And you can build these systems. Because then they'll own it and it will be theirs, absolutely. But now that's another point. So how do you then share the notion that we are attempting an experiment which has risk and may fail and not deliver what it's promised to a community who, especially in South Africa, is tied to promises? How do you do that in the context of rapid change in which things are always moving and communities are also rapidly changing? Yeah, it's a very interesting place to be. I kind of feel that what I've learned so far over the years of working in a real metabolism and interacting a lot with administrations back in Brussels, as you said, there's a language barrier and they have a lot of capacity already and they're brilliant people most of the times that actually are willing to do things. And it's always the political that kind of crushes their aspirations as well. But I've learned a lot into using the language and to understanding what their everyday challenges are, right? So I kind of feel that perhaps the next step is, as you say, that the scholar should go back to school with the people who are actually using urban metabolism. So inhabitants and administrations, right? I mean, it's such a great moment to be an urban metabolism because of all of these changes in Africa, of course, but also, I mean, in Brussels, we have this original plan of circular economy. So it's a plan that says that change is the flow, right? That's kind of the scope of it. And for me, it's kind of great to see, does it change the flow? Does the policy of that magnitude really deliver us and all of these actions? So I'm wondering as well, how did your personal journey be going? I mean, because you also had different academic disciplines beforehand, right? And then you kind of put together other disciplines. We're all kind of academic renegades in urban metabolism field, I kind of feel. And you've kind of mixed that up and now you're also mixing it up with getting into policy as well. So do you feel that this is, we need that atypical? So I mean, just to go back to your comment about, well, academics going back to school. And I think, well, for that sector, going back to school means stepping out of school and having engagements. So not to suggest that I think there's a huge value in being able to theorize. If that's what we suggest will be the contribution of academia. I don't know if we have enough distance to theorize right now. I kind of feel that there is this that I know, that great, we've been analyzing it, but we've not used it yet. Well, it also depends where theory must come from. So it's the trite comparison of theory from a distance, which then gets applied and then the conclusion is, no, it doesn't work in the real world. Oh well. So instead, what my journey is on is the question of whether we can theorize from what we're seeing. So start with a practice and see what emerges and then try and express what we're seeing in more abstract terms, which can then be taken to other spaces. As a reference point, not as a starting point, as a way to validate what processes are happening in other spaces or to compare stories. But yeah, it's about putting yourself out there and learning the languages, as you say, of the actors who are influencing the metabolism, of the people who have decision-making power, be it a citizen or a decision-maker. I think when it comes down to many, sorry, so from a biologist to an ecologist to environmentalists and now a sustainability practitioner and maybe now best branded as a systems thinker, how do we, that's my train of thought. Oh, it's such a nice lead up too. You were moving at dissipation, I was like, okay, and then what? And then what? So, no, I've really lost my train of thought. It's really it, pumped again. Learning languages, policy makers, through all of these disciplines. Come on, Paul, I know it's early, but yeah. Through all of these disciplines, understanding that actually your content matter doesn't, isn't the main focus. How do you finance it and how do you govern it? So if your agenda is energy efficiency or your agenda is water access, how do you finance it and how do you govern it? And my sense is through all of these exciting disciplines, my one shortfall has been lack of financial training and now using systems thinking to think about wider governance systems, which is quite cool. So if we go in with those lenses, we can find tools to guide an urban metabolism perspective, to include those, which necessarily will have input from economists and from social scientists. Then I think we're building a wider umbrella, which can push urban metabolism to the next phase. So perhaps to end up on this, in your journey, so now you're a systems thinker. What's this you in a couple of years from now? I think I can rest here for a while, but rest is the wrong word. But having someone who can connect the dots is quite valuable. And coming from the academic space, which is trying to find the answers here, it's trying to see where answers already exist and making use of them. What I've found difficult and frustrating often is we are trying to push to have a new contribution, a new way of talking about things, a new definition, a new framework. And we haven't actually tested whether the multitude of frameworks that we were excited about last year are valuable. So let's spend the next decade getting cases. For me, urban metabolism is a multi-layered process over many years to try and get more detail and more depth. But many cities haven't even started with the first layer, which is what's coming in and what's coming out. How are different citizens using different resources? Or how are they implicated in shaping metabolism? So starting with that first question, across African cities, large and small, I think we tend to focus on our biggest cities because we have a perception of them being most dynamic. But actually, we really, really need to invest in looking at our small and medium cities because those are often the ones in which there are champions in the city who know what's going on. It's a smaller region. They actually have more information. But they're also the ones which are not ready for the number of people that they're going to have to service and are often they're not looked at for investment. So that would be an amazing service offering over the next five years, over the next decade. It's to start seeing, well, in practical terms, what can an urban metabolism perspective offer to as information tools to other African cities now? I'm really looking forward to it. Yeah, me too. Thanks, Ben. Thank you for listening or watching our podcast episode till the end. If you liked this episode, if you have unanswered questions, if you agree or disagree with what was said during this episode, please leave us a comment to spark a debate. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.