 So, we are metabolism of cities and what I'll do is in this presentation I'll go over the organization a little bit and what urban metabolism is and then I'll dive in more detail into the course that we are preparing. So metabolism of cities is currently expressed best through our own website where you can see that we are basically a network of people running a network of websites and a set of many different projects that all happen at the same time at different places, different scales and with different focus points and all of these do come together because they are linked to the topic of urban metabolism and what that is very much links to the idea of urban sustainability through the measurement of physical materials and energy that move through cities. That is very much at the core of what we do and what we can see here is we've been around for a while now relatively so we started in 2014 but initially it was very much a group of people just working loosely together on some sort of collaboration to apply the things that we were working on at an academic level and to share what we were doing and we formed our organization a few years later and it's now set up as a non-profit organization but it's very much an international network of people so we don't have any physical offices anywhere instead we are simply all working from our own place and we have members in many different countries just coming together and trying to assess here our mission is to facilitate collaborations that create and share urban metabolism knowledge and accelerate its implementation in policy and practice and so we've done that through many different projects that could be very applied or more theoretical and that could have been events or other happenings and get-togethers and that were also a number of times in development of different websites and tools that are then shared with people and lots of that as you can see here is an online urban metabolism information hub that's very much at the core of it and we are very much around build around open access and open source so everything that we do is licensed as such and we really try to not only provide information that is otherwise maybe not essentially located but also to make sure that we do that with licenses that are very permissive and allow people to do to get very easy access to these this kind of information so the member-run projects they really vary from a month long endeavor to something that runs for years and that is expressed in in many different ways but before before going to the projects let's let's look at urban metabolism so we can frame that properly so as I mentioned before it's it's very much around studying these material and energy flows that go through cities to try and better unpack the sustainability or unsustainability and if you think of it many of the environmental problems that we have they can be directly or indirectly linked to the the extraction and the transformation and the production the manufacturing the transport the consumption and the waste disposal of of materials right in the end that's what really underlies a lot of our problems and because cities are so complex and sustainability of cities is a very complex matter this discipline exists to try and better understand that it's it's never a perfect science but it's something that very much helps to get this more holistic better understanding of what is the impact of a city and where can we improve things so why do we focus on cities in the first place first of all because they with a globally urbanizing population they become more and more important and also as you see the expected growth takes a lot of it is expected to take place in cities and when looking at intervention opportunities it's a great scale it's a small it's a bigger scale than sort of neighborhood or household level so you can really make an impact there's so many millions of people living in cities but compared to countries it's sometimes easier to apply interventions at city level between a different between different cities in the same country you often see big differences so it's useful to focus at city level and also policy wise you can get more stuff done we find at city level quicker than at a at a national scale so the concept of urban metabolism is grounded the way we approach it in an industrial ecology approach which means that we look at the city as a system and we try to get that systems understanding of a city so we don't look just at one material we really try to get this complete picture of all the materials in and out and try to understand what happens in the city because it's all connected there are many different systems in the city that all come together to form this this one city but in order to understand it and the environmental impact we cannot just look at say co2 emissions because if we do that then you only look at one part of a bigger puzzle and it's all related to so many other things and if you only look at the sort of end of pipe solution for one particular industry or material then you may have unintended consequences elsewhere that you don't notice so the first step we think is to really try to put together this entire puzzle and we do that through mass balancing like that's a core concept in the end neither materials nor energy can be created or lost right it needs to come from somewhere and go to some place so by taking that holistic city-wide picture and tracking materials and energy we are able to at least see where things go or know that we don't have a full picture because we can't account for everything so at least there is some checks and balances there and the current move towards circularity urban metabolism really provides an academic discipline towards that kind of thinking that we don't just say we need circularity but we can say here's a tool that can help measure and understand what kind of implications there are for a circular kind of economy of the city so we have on our website lots of different case studies based on these accounting methods so lots of the work that we do is basically a huge material accounting exercise in which we try to fill huge spreadsheets when the academic work that show how things move through cities and are a number of different types of approaches you can see here energy assessments material flow analysis methods footprint you may have heard of ecological footprints for instance there are input output methods and lifecycle assessment methods that look further than just in what happens in the city and hybrid methods combine a number of them so in each of these in our website we have highlighted the number of the case studies that have been done and you can see here that lots of the work has been done in the industrialized north and there's still a lot lacking in the global south but at least we have studies being done all across the world not equally in every country and region but there have been studies done in many different countries and cities and for us there is very much a push where we try to include people from across the world because we of course lots of the growth is happening in many of the global south countries and also simply so many people live in the global south and we need to get a better understanding across the board and as less industrialized cities become industrialized we can also see what that what could that mean for the metabolism of the city for the sustainability of the city and let's try to not make the same mistakes that other countries made and hopefully learn from other places but for that we need to get a better understanding of what's happening at the moment and what kind of trends do we pick up so when we do our work and we try to get our data there are a variety of challenges and some of the key challenges here are that it's an extremely time-consuming activity so we generally try to get data on an economy-wide level and that means we try to get data on on food on fossil fuels on construction materials on metals and other minerals and all these things on water on energy there is generally not a single agency or place that has that information but instead it is spread across many different government agencies institutions studies reports it sits everywhere from websites to PDF documents to spreadsheets and it's a huge challenge to just try and get to the right source to to download or to obtain that kind of data and it's sometimes also difficult to actually access it for some you need to contact people and see if they're willing to share it as I said it's so scattered around and also the data format in which it comes is very diverse we are looking at in order to do this kind of work you need to get data in basically in weight in mass right and sometimes data is reported instead in monetary terms for instance or in say agriculture you look at a total hectares planted or something like that of a crop so all of that requires then some processing before it becomes available in the right format but if everybody wants to get access to this data has to go through this process it becomes a huge hurdle for people to start using this kind of method and this approach because it's so time-consuming so since a couple years we've been working on a system that tries to provide a tool that makes life easier for researchers but also for policymakers and for local residents and for anybody who would like to get these kinds of insights and work with data on material stocks and flows and energy flows in the city so this system which we initially called multiplicity but it's now the metabolism city's data hub the couple core features are listed here so first of all we really wanted to make sure it's a user-friendly platform that is the one place that people can go to so they don't have to hop around so it really is a single central platform that should be usable by anybody so user-friendly as in it's not just an academic angle people can go there and browse browse maps and browse graphs and download with a single click and you don't need to have advanced knowledge of how these things work to use them and then of course we embrace open source and open access or the same with the platform but we still want to make sure we keep an academic rigor to the work that we do so that means that data that is uploaded needs to have a clear audit so that we know where does it come from what are the shortcomings of the data and it doesn't need to be perfect because that's not always possible but we need to have an understanding of what you can use it for or what the features are of the data and as long as we tell people how it was obtained you can really decide for yourself what to do with it and another approach that also very much is aligned with what we do at metabolism cities is around community building so we also want the data hub to be community driven and the concept of crowdsourcing really comes into into play here because it's such a time consuming effort to do it by yourself i've done something called an mfa material flow analysis myself and i spent hundreds and hundreds of hours doing fieldwork to try and get all these data points but actually it's something that if you get a little bit of training basically anybody can do this it's not rocket science it's knowing what to look for and going and browsing different options to find what you're looking for so the idea of our platform is that we can actually break up this very comprehensive city-wide data picture that we're looking for into smaller pieces and by doing that we allow anybody to contribute a small part of it and making it all come together in a big comprehensive system without the need of spending everybody so much time and having all the knowledge of all the different sectors and flows so lastly replicable and scalable so we don't want to build one platform for one city we want to have a platform that can be used across the board and if we make a tool for one city it means the same tool becomes available to the other cities so we started setting this up and last year we launched this in which we've set up the system to be to be driven by what we call data layers and these different data layers show to people what kind of information we're looking for and you can see here are currently four layers and in each of the layers we have specified what and we we have provided instructions around what we hope to get for each city and then there is a system that allows anybody who's basically signed up and who's gone through the the motions of understanding how it works to contribute data and data and documents so it's not just data points it's also it's also photos it's also bigger reports even videos shape files all kinds of types of data information and in here it's very easy to see what's already there and to track progress and we have a you know we we have a point system so people can get points as they upload we gamified a little bit to make sure that well it's it's it's also a bit of a you know a challenge and you see how you progress in that challenge that also provides some motivation so as people upload it we we really try to build tools that make it easy so even if there is all this data that's locked into a PDF document we show to people once it's in the system it can then be processed and people just take it and format it in a certain way and then just paste it into the system but once the data the actual individual data points are sort of in this way unlocked and taken out of their their PDFs and their spreadsheets then the system can detect them and we have quite a simple interface that allows people to to do that to take data out and put it in the system with the benefit that we can then present to the visitors all these data points in whatever shape or form they desire so in this case there is some data on different so this is dam level capacity in Cape Town different dams in Cape Town and you can see this is a much more user-friendly interface than having to download the PDF and go to page what not to look at the table with numbers now it becomes visualized and people can pull up different visualizations we can show the either for the entire set of different dams in this case or you can show it on a map view you can see it here is an entire map view that displays it geographically and you can see what's happening in your city what kind of infrastructure do you have and then you can open any one of these you can overlay them you can see photos we then create different profiles by type of sector water waste energy there's all these different sectors that have a very important material impact transport so you can then see the different types of infrastructure a satellite photo some details about it and we really try to emphasize towards people that this is the kind of infrastructure that every city has but that is actually to so many of its residents completely hidden we depend on it and we don't even notice it's there so we have for instance wastewater treatment works water treatment works landfill sites power plants we've got all these all kinds of things happen under the ground cables and pipes and the thing is we set up our cities these days in a way that we've completely removed from everything that in which we engage with resources right and that's really we find not great and we try to unlock a lot of the information and insight on our website so that people can better connect and navigate and be hopefully be be intrigued by all that infrastructure that's there and the people that help put this together we really also send them out on missions you know sometimes online missions of browsing browsing the web and reading documents but also going out and taking a photo of your local you know landfill site or water treatment works it's I've done it myself it's fascinating work you see so many parts of the city that you normally don't don't get to these are generally tapped away in the outskirts of the city and it's like I said it's so important for us for our everyday life and we don't even know about it so people can then also see for each of the infrastructure profiles what's what are the data that are available and then every one of the data points can be downloaded and people can do with it what they want as they please so all of that is is set up in this data hub and in the data hub we have these three different phases so data collection data processing and data analysis in which we take people through the entirety of the the entire workflow of getting data in the system and doing something with it and we're rolling it out step by step and we've set out systems of showing people how that works starting with data collection and also in data processing but very shortly data collection means getting the numbers and the well yeah getting the documents indexed and into our system so getting all your bars in green that all the documents are there for all your different sectors and once you've got that you can then work towards the processing of it but we separate it out so data collection is for anybody who would just like to help find pieces of information and put it in the system and data processing means someone needs to it's a bit more analytical needs to go through documents and try and extract the data and format it in the right way so that it can be read by the by the machine by the computer so once that is done data analysis that is the really the most analytical part which is when you really need to sit down and say okay now what does that mean what does it mean for my city can i put together different data sets to form an entire subsystem and and balance the mass or the energy that that flows through this or can i say something about how this compares to other cities in my country or out of my country or can i run some models using the data that i have so those are the three different phases in which we're rolling this out and through our education hub we have set up a number of the different courses so again all these courses are also open access free for people to do and these courses tell people what what we are doing and how we're doing it and we really go through how the system works and we focused initially on first steps of data collection so there we also explain how can data be collected what do you need to look for where do you normally go to what are what are things to keep in mind and also how do the different sectors and material flows how do they generally work in a city so that you can try to apply it to your city and the way we run the course is that it's a course in which you learn by doing so you get new skills around data management around understanding different sectors and materials and urban metabolism principles but you learn that while you collect data and as you collect that you upload that to our system you are actually contributing to making more data available for your city so we have done that so here you can see a little bit of the interface so it's like like any other MOOC in any other online course in which you have an online syllabus and different modules and week by week you go through that and we've done it in English and in Spanish so far and in the Spanish course we had it open the English one was more limited we had it open to wider public and we had a lot of people participating many of them from Latin America also some cities in in Spain and in there people then went through the so you can see here when you when you go through a module you have a number of videos and some exercises and the way we've run the course you can do this at your own leisure you can look at the videos and you can read through the text at your own leisure but what we've done when we've organized events around the course when we really had a cohort of students especially with the Spanish cohort we had sessions every week in which we got together and in those sessions we don't teach new material so I've been the instructor for the Spanish course and we I don't teach new material necessarily in the sessions but we simply have a get-together with all the students in which I go through the homework exercises before the session and then highlight things that have been going well and things that haven't been going well and then discuss that with the students and there's an open Q&A and there's some you know getting to know each other and understanding what's what are specific challenges for the cities that students are working in so it's really complementary to the online MOOC but it really helps for motivation and for dedication if you have a set time in the week in which you you have the course so to speak even though you need to spend some time outside of those sessions doing the actual work and it's great for you know for bonding and for getting to know each other and for really having this community feeling around the course so the result of that is that we now have a lot of cities on our website in which we have a lot of documents and it varies of course to the different students have different levels of ability of commitment but we really have a number of cities that are full of of documents in which all our layers are quite nicely covered and so now we have I don't recall the number at the top of my head but I think we have more than 70 80 cities as again many of them in in latin america which is really really great and in all of these cities you can see here we yeah we basically show people what's there now so how many documents we have and people can then browse the library and we've also started you can see here you can have a a portal so each of the city gets their own data dashboard and in the data dashboard we we show the entire library that we have so we show by type the data sets publications but we also have these browsable maps and ways for in which people can see what's available for the city so here you can see in the library what's there and once so you can see there's some some visualization that happens you can see some maps and things but once people started with the data processing course we really were able to convert it more and more into visual material that people can browse and here you can see the entire overview of how the cities have been how it's been going so that's a quick a quick overview of what we have so far and basically since that experience and since that first course we have been really motivated by this concept of doing a course so that we can share some skills but also work together to collect data and given the experience so far we really would like to take that now to the next level and focus on African cities where there is really huge data gaps and it's very difficult to find the information that you generally need especially if you don't already have an in-depth knowledge of the city so we really think it's it's key that we try to make these data dashboards also more available to anybody who would like to learn more about the many cities that exist and yeah that's that's why we're now trying to focus on in the coming months setting up a network of different organizations with which to collaborate so basically our current plan is that we start this course later in the year so march april it's not set in stone yet it depends a bit on our partners as well and it is a 10 week course in which we have those one hour sessions and remember students need to dedicate to more than one hour because that's just our session in which we connect so there's lots of homework and our goal is to try and find at least so we want to have 20 students per city and we're hoping to get 50 cities with 20 students signed up so aiming for a thousand students in the entire course but we cannot pull that off by ourselves so as many other projects that we do at material cities this is mostly just driven with volunteer work and we really hope to simply build a consortium if you will a group of people just working together that are interested in this topic and in collaborating around this so we can provide the system that we have we have already a lot of videos and instructions and we are dedicated to recording more for the african cities course but we need help from local partners first of all with the recruitment and to try and actually find the to identify cities and potential place to work and to then find ways in which we can work together to get these people signed up and if we want to do weekly sessions there's no way we can host these weekly sessions just by ourselves because we cannot have a thousand people in a call so we are aiming to split that up and to have people that can together with us guide the students so do we help sort of train the trainers so we we help with those that would like to give guidance so that we can show how to review homework and how to go through it and then people can organize sessions with students from their city to go through things and they can then always connect back with us if there are any questions but that way just like we crowd source the data collection we also hope to to share that that load so the we have an overview so we have an overview of tasks that we have set up so there are a number of different tasks that we hope that different partners and partners could be all kinds of organizations that are just interested in this topic and interested in making available some some resources in their organization to contribute to this project so we have a wide variety of tasks so we hope that we can really cater to a wide variety of potential partners and we don't expect any partner to just take on everything in fact it's much better if many different partners contribute the part into a bigger hold so to speak so we have a documented outlines some of these tasks and just quickly going over it that includes helping with translation and subtitling so we really think that it really helped the course if we have at a minimum English subtitles to English videos but we're already also looking at getting a french version going but there are also other languages that we would love to have and basically any language that's spoken in a city and a partner that's interested in translating at least the spoken to a subtitle version of that language that would be fantastic because that opens up the audience quite a bit our site is always going to be in English or at least for now we don't have the resources to translate the entire site but we've seen from the Spanish course that a lot can be done and people can generally follow along as long as the explanation and even the local sessions are in in their language so we need some help with the videos so we are no video experts and it would be lovely to create intro and outro videos that will be added to each of the instruction videos that's also where we show all of the partner logos and we show that this is really a group effort and then there is the the actual video editing that needs to be done for the different videos that form part of it and that just means you know cutting videos improving audio where need be and just putting it together sometimes overlaying it with some photos and that kind of work so that's really a technical yeah technical video editing kind of task and then they have guest lectures that I'll get into later guest lectures that people contribute to the course and that needs coordination so from our partners we hope that someone can help with that effort to coordinate among everybody who's contributing then we also hope to get some coordination going on social media so that we can provide all the partners with text and images that can be shared in social media and it's of course nice if not everybody has to do it themselves so we hope that we can have a coordinator who just helps prepare the material and disseminate it so that everybody can then help share and recruit and lastly some support with the general communication there's always lots of emails and lots of queries that will come in from students we have an online forum where we allow people to constantly check and ask questions but that just needs maintenance so those are some key tasks where partners could help by contributing some of their time if they have the skills in house that's really wonderful to help with any of these things so to then cover the guest lectures the idea is that in terms of the course at metabolism of cities we can take care of explaining the technical part of how to gather the data how to prepare it and how to upload it but we would really love to build a course together with our partners when it comes to explaining the different sort of systems and structures that exist in cities so we can't and we won't explain it for every city in which we are recruiting students but instead we hope to have one at least one and maybe a few different people from different cities that explain how things work in their city focusing on different sectors so you can see here there are a number of different sectors that are highly relevant to material and energy flows and stocks and these all of them have particular ways in which there are underlying infrastructure and systems and it's people sometimes have no idea we really want to cater to a wide audience in which people that don't know anything yet about about how to collect data or how urban metabolism works or how you know the energy system works or agriculture works in a city or wholesale and retail or food systems so what we love is that we try to get people to do five to ten minute videos people from African cities who explain in their city how does xyz work how is the the food system in Lagos for instance how does that generally come together what are the ways in which food moves through the system what are the big players and how do what kind of infrastructure do you need and what kind of additional flows and impacts do you see from the food system and that way it's an introduction to understanding the food system as a whole and that then builds on to our more technical explanation of how do you then get data and ideally we would like multiple people from different cities so that way we can show to the to our students that it's never the same in all the different cities so it's really useful to see okay it works in Cape Town like this it works in Lagos like this and then people depending on their own situation they can already start seeing okay I may have to look for both this or this because I don't know what it's going to be like so this is where we also hope that our partners can help with identifying experts that really know how any of these different systems work in their city and then we need some coordination to record a video that can then be added to the the course and form part of that introduction and then we also have a couple of options for doing some guest lectures that are more more theoretical and to provide the technical knowledge around the methods and the theory so that would be for people that really know about these topics and that can share a little bit in yeah in that so we have a syllabus that's not set in stone but that provides an overview of what we expect to go through and very briefly after a general introduction that just explains what urban metabolism is we will go then over data management and the technical part of how it works at metabolism cities and how it works when you need to manage data and what kind of data to look for so that's the technical explanation and students are expected to do both both modules in their entirety then the next modules all of them that follow module three four five and six you can see all of them have seven modules or seven components seven chapters in that module and that is because we expect people to dive deep into one of them and this way we can separate it up and different people they can just take on different different sections in that module so we have for each of them these modules context goes over just the broader context of the city around boundaries biodiversity minnow deposits etc in foundational systems we look at those key infrastructure systems that are required in any city independently from their economic profile and that have a high impact on our the the stocks and flows so from transport to energy to buildings economic sectors they will vary a bit but many cities will have some of these and then population really looks in detail about what exactly is the impact towards the behavior of the population that and what is the impact of that how exactly what is the makeup of households economic characteristics consumption behavior waste generation etc so with each of these modules we have a number of videos in each of these components so let's say we have transport there will be one or multiple introduction videos by people from african cities then the technical part from us around what data do you need to gather what do you need to take off and how do you look for that and then an exercise to get all the data and we then expect someone in the group to pick transport and that person does not need to do energy or buildings you know so that way we split it up and that way we can have in one city multiple people working on it if we get 20 people actively working on it it means you can have small groups of about three in which you work on one topic and that's so that repeats itself in module four five and six and lastly data articles is around writing up all that you have together collected into almost a journalistic article that is incredibly data rich pulling from the documents that you have just sort of collected and put into the system so that you can marry a story and share that with your with our visitors using all that you've learned and done before so that is the course the course is not anything that we expect to be accredited but we will provide people with a certificate of completion and we've seen that just the the satisfaction of learning something new learning about your own city contributing to your own city and to a bigger project those are already great motivations for people to collaborate and we hope that that is also what encourages potential partners to help us in this effort