 So thank you to all of you for being here today, and thanks for people who are attending the seminar online, thanks for the livestream. This is the first session of a seminar series on the concept of urban metabolism, and it will be an opportunity for me to share with you part of the research work that I'm doing as a member of the Urban Metabolism Lab at the Luvan Research Institute for Landscape, Architecture and Built Environment under the supervision of Professor Daniela Perotti, who is here with us today. And there's one of my colleagues from the Urban Metabolism Lab who is working with me on the conceptual aspect of the project, so the aspects of the project are more directly related to the concept of urban metabolism. Isabetta Rosa is also here with us, so we might have a more interactive discussion than just listening to me blubbering about urban metabolism. So the talk that I'm going to give today deals with the concept of urban metabolism as a tool for understanding and influences our cities and more broadly human societies interact with nature against the backdrop of growing concerns related to climate change and urban sustainability in times of global and ecological changes. And one major issue that is related to such concerns and which is tied to the concept of urban metabolism is the question of how and to what extent this concept could be used to understand how the agency exerted by humanity, by humankind on ecological, social ecological systems at different levels and how and to what extent this concept, the concept of urban metabolism, can allow understanding and making sense of humanity's agency over a social ecological system at various levels and time and temporal and spatial scales. So, as highlighted by the IPCC's sixth assessment report, urban areas have become crucial drivers of climate change but also crucial levers for climate change mitigations. Those considerations dovetail with the notion developed by geographer, ecologists and biologists that rapid organization is contributing to the emergence of a new Pangea and increasingly inter-creative global space in which the intersection of ecological, social and ecological processes affects human-environment relations or more general human-nature relations. Hence, the growing attention revealed by a quick scope search that the concept of urban metabolism has garnered precisely as a tool for studying human-nature relations from researchers interested in sustainability during the last 15 years. However, what kind of metabolism is the urban metabolism? More specifically, what kind of hybrid social-neutral systems does the expression urban metabolism refer to? Moreover, under which conditions and to what extent does the urban metabolism concept foster a better understanding of the impact of entropic activities on the stability of ecosystems at different levels? This talk explores such questions based on insights from the FNRS-funded IST NEXOS project, currently pursued at the urban metabolism lab under the supervision of professor Perotti, which aims to illuminate how the concept of agency alongside those of information at space-time, so agency is the A, information is the I and space-time is the ST in the title of the project, contributes to shaping the conceptualization and modeling of the urban metabolism as an urban social-ecological system. Maybe we might go back to the project and its goals later in the presentation, thanks also to the present of Daniel and Elizabeth. So here I'm going to my talk, unfortunately I prepared, I thought it was way too long, so in this I'm going to proceed in two steps. I'm going to give this presentation, I'm trying to skip over parts if time doesn't allow for completion of the presentation, and I'm going to relay the groundwork about the concept of urban metabolism and its relation to the concept of agency. Then I will give some primary conclusions and problems related that arise from this cursory survey of the relations between those concepts of urban metabolism and agency, and then I will present some insights from a manuscript that I have been co-authoring with Daniela, which is based on computational analysis of a body of research research on urban metabolism. So what is metabolism in general and how does the concept of agency apply to it? To start from the beginning, to give a general definition, per biochemist Albert Leninger, who is the author of a well-known textbook on biochemistry, the most basic form of biological metabolism, i.e. cellular metabolism, is a highly integrated purposeful activity in which many sets of multi-enzyme systems participate for the purpose of exchanging matter and energy between the cell and the environment. This activity is carried out through the coupling of two different kinds of pathways, into different series of biochemical reactions through which flows of matter and energy are exchanged between the cell and the environment, and which can be described by corresponding series of balancing equations. First, catabolic pathways whose function is to degrade polymers, such as polysaccharides or lipids, into complex biological macromolecules, such as sugars or fatty acids, and those same complex macromolecules into simpler ones, such as carbon dioxide or water, thereby releasing energy. The second series of chemical reactions constitutes what are known as anabolic pathways, whose function is to synthesize complex macromolecules from simpler ones and polymers from complex macromolecules, notably by consuming the energy provided by the dephosphorylation of adenosine triphosphate, so ATP that is transformed into ADP, and this chemical reaction provides the energy necessary for the synthesis of macromolecules and polymers. Consequently, cell metabolism can be regarded as a highly integrated system of material and energy flows. Such flows underpin all the activities unfolding within several boundaries, connect cells with their external environment, are quantifiable, and aim to sustain several structures and processes by fulfilling two fundamental functions. The first function is an auto-poietic one, which consists in providing the cell with the resources needed to constitute the cells on a building block. The second function is a physiological one, i.e. the physiological function of synthesizing and then removing the biomolecules that are essential to specialize cell activities such as movement conductivity or photosynthesis. However, the material energy flows that constitutes the metabolism of a cell are embedded in broader biogeochemical cycles, i.e. cyclical exchanges of chemical substances and compounds, involving living organisms, the atmosphere, and the Earth's surface. An example of biogeochemical cycles in which cell metabolic pathways are embedded is the complex loop through which inert atmospheric... Inert atmospheric, the nitrogen, which cannot be used by organisms to carry out metabolic function, is converted into compounds that can be assimilated by organisms, such as nitrates or ammonia, then returned to its original inert form in the atmosphere. Moreover, cell metabolic pathways are also integrated into broader metabolic networks that spend different levels of biogeochemicalization. For instance, cell metabolic networks are integrated into the broader metabolic networks that sustain the organism that comprises said cells. However, there is still a higher level of biogeochemicalization, which is the ecosystemic one. Indeed, the metabolic activities of organisms that carry out photosynthesis and aerobic respiration contribute to a wider ecosystemic metabolism to the extent to which they participate in measurable ecosystem-wide processes identified through metrics, such as gross primary production, which is the sum of organic matter produced through photosynthesis in the whole ecosystem. Ecosystem respiration, i.e. the total amount of organic matter consumed in the ecosystem via aerobic respiration, and net ecosystem production, which is the balance between gross primary production and ecosystem respiration. For instance, this diagram from H.T. Odom's Seminal 1956 paper on primary production in flowing waters depicts how matter and energy flow through an aquatic ecosystem and are processed by a trophic network consisting of five levels. Plants, decomposers, such as fungi, herbivores, carnivores, and top carnivores. In this diagram, P corresponds to gross primary production, whereas R corresponds to ecosystem respiration. So, therefore, what is a metabolism? First, the concept of metabolism identifies a quantifiable flow of matter and energy. Second, this concept can be used to think about integrated systems characterized by some teleological orientation, in particular, a teleological orientation towards the maintenance growth and development of a particular biological system, be it a cell, an organism, or a whole ecosystem. Third, the concept of metabolism conveys the notion of a hierarchy of interlocking systems that spans across various spatial and temporal space. So, based on a purely biological definition of what a metabolism is, it is possible to identify those three aspects that make the concept of metabolism appealing for those that are interested in studying how cities and societies interact with it. Moreover, this biological definition of metabolism allows establishing a first connection between the concept of metabolism and the concept of agency. To highlight this connection, it is helpful to sketch a paradigmatic view, to be nuanced afterwards, with the main features that characterize the concept of agency from a philosophical standpoint, in particular from the same point of discussion about agency that have taken place in the analytic tradition. This sketch is based on Luca Ferrero's introduction to the Outlet and Book of the Philosophy of Agency. The concept of agency comes into play when one asks what distinguished events that merely happen, for instance the interaction between subatomic particles, from events that appear to be the outcome of actions undertaken by some agent or actor, for instance a predator chasing their prey. More specifically, the concept of agency can be used to spell out the attributes that characterize this actor's capacity to cause such an outcome. For instance, goal directness, productivity, by the capacity to make a difference in the world, to change a particular existing state of affairs. A particular temporal profile that depends on the action's goal, for instance some actions aimed to produce new states of affairs, whereas other actions are geared toward maintaining what exists. Both actions can be viewed as the expression of an agentic capacity but they are characterized, they are distinguished by different properties, in particular properties related to the way in which they unfold in time. Actions that aim to produce new states precede the outcome, whereas action geared toward maintaining what exists can be simultaneous to their outcome, to the expected outcome. The fourth element, the fourth aspect is embodiment. Although the question stands whether forms of absurd agency can exist, for instance epistemic agency, and fourth, fifth intentionality, either in a weak sense, i.e. as a generic kind of proposiveness or in a strong sense, as the kind of intentionality that characterizes human beings and therefore implies the fact of being conscious of a goal as a goal that an agent sets to themselves. The capacity to give reasons for acting in such and such a way provides an example of biological agency to the extent to which it can be understood as the outcome of causal capacities that are exerted by biological entities or metabolic actors and display the following characteristics. First, goal directness toward the sustainment of a cell, an organism, an ecosystem, productivity, especially with respect to anabolic pathways, a particular temporal profile that is adjusted to a cell's and organism's or an ecosystem's needs, embodiment in particular biological structures and processes, and finally intentionality could also be ascribed to metabolic actors but only in extremely weak sense, which basically reduces to goal directness. However, in what sense can one speak of the metabolism of cities? Under which conditions do the agentic qualities of biological metabolism transposed to this other form of metabolism? And here's the second part of this presentation on a genealogy of the concept of urban metabolism focusing particularly on the way in which this concept has been developed in the field of industrial ecology. So what is the urban metabolism? To give a synthetic definition, the urban metabolism as a concept can be described as an interdisciplinary concept that studies how cities interact with the environment and more specifically how they use resources and meet pollution flows as well as the societal, economic and environmental challenges that are associated to these flows. Therefore, from the start we can identify two aspects to the concept of urban metabolism. There is an aspect that is related to the description analysis and to the definition of description analysis of a particular system that is an ecological and social system structure around flows of energy and matter, materials or substance. And the second aspect is the aspect related to the challenges that arise from the activities that arise from the activity necessary to maintain the system which are social, economic and environmental. This double nature of the concept of urban metabolism is tightly related to the emergence of this concept whose intellectual underpinnings date back to the late 19th century in particular to the development of agronomy and organic chemistry in late 19th century Germany and the way in which for instance Karl Marx drew on this development to use the concept of exchange of substances, of exchange of matter, Stoffbexel, to describe the way in which early urbanization impacted the development of rural areas by modifying not only the social organization of rural areas but also the biological and physical qualities of the soils. However, the concept of urban metabolism emerged as a concept that was ready to be operationalized between the mid-60s and the early 80s. In particular, the roots of the concept of urban metabolism lie for instance in a particular project that was developed in the United States to establish an experimental green city in a rural county in Minnesota. This project was spearheaded by Atherton Spielhaus, a geologist and oceanographer and Otto Silla, a press magnate. And in particular Silla, I was looking at the following slide. In particular Spielhaus was very adamant about the city, the need to develop a city that was based on the use of technology to build sustainable infrastructures, modular infrastructures to rationalize the transportation and the transportation system and how pollution was dealt within the city. However, he was also very keen on designing a city that relied on a form of symbiosis between wastes and the production of the materials needed to sustain the life of the population within the city in the form of built environment but also in the form of commodities necessary to sustain life. This project was both a technical project and a political project that was rooted into major social changes taking place in the United States in the mid-60s. In particular, Spielhaus had been concerned with the problem of pollution and how pollution affected cities. He chaired the Federal Commission on Pollution established in 1963 and the project of building this experimental city in Nitkin County was standing continuously with this previous engagement. Finally, the project was ended abruptly between 1972 and 1973 despite the political connection established by Silla who was a well-connected and powerful press magnate. The problem was once again the reasons for the project demise were technical but principally chiefly political related to Spielhaus' technocratic approach to the development of this city and the failure to establish a bridge between the experts that were working on the project and other local population and more globally what we might call the stakeholders associated with the project. Another source of the conceptual metabolism is located near to us in particular in Brussels and in Poland doing new engagement in various projects related to urban and landscape planning that took place during the development of the Brussels agglomeration between the mid-1970s and late-80s. So Dvignu was a botanist that became interested in the study of ecosystems first the study of forests as ecosystems and later the study of cities as ecosystems. In particular he drew a distinction between ecosystem silver and the forests as ecosystems and ecosystem herbs, i.e. the cities as ecosystems. This distinction proved cardinal to establish and promoting an ecological approach to landscape architecture and urban planning in which the cities were seen as constituting itself an ecosystem. This approach was first spelled out in an agenda article published in 1974 and this article presented an ecological study of the urban ecosystem constituted by the city of Brussels. So Dvignu's approach was rooted in Eugene P. Odum's holistic approach to ecology and it's precisely this inspiration that oriented Dvignu towards an ecological approach to the city as an integrated system and however it was also it was also based, sorry, it was also nourished by Dvignu's political engagement in particular he was a member of a pro francophone speaking political party active in Brussels and Wallonia which was keen on establishing ties between Brussels and Wallonia and Dvignu's work was also aimed at proving from a scientific political standpoint the links existing between Brussels, the city of Brussels as an ecosystem and the larger ecosystem constituted by Wallonia. I have the impression that some slides are not appearing. What can you see on your screen? I can see them when I'm not in the panoramic mode of the strange. That's really weird. Maybe you hide them? Okay, I think I saw the problem. This concept was further developed and applied in studies on the metabolism of cities of different cities and urban areas that were carried on between 1965 and 1981 in different geographical areas in particular there is this 1965 article this is a seminal 1965 article by Abel Wohlmann who was an engineer and which dealt with the which was entitled metabolism of a city and whose main objective was was providing or estimating the metabolism of an hypothetical American city of one million inhabitants and in this first sketch the metabolism of the city was represented as the coupling of different input and output in particular Wohlmann was interested in solving problems that were related to the sustainment and development of the city problem related to pollution, water pollution, but also air pollution and the depletion of food resources therefore he adopted a balanced approach and tried to draw the connection between the volume of water necessary to sustain the city and how this volume of water translated into water waste that had to be removed by the sewage system and Wohlmann's studies was also inspired by Attenstans project in particular Wohlmann had been a member of Attenstans federal commission on pollution and therefore his study was related to the development of the experimental city I just talked about however Wohlmann's study was followed by a more direct application of the concept of urban metabolism in particular Zucchetto undertook a study of the relation between the natural and human system in the urban region of Miami and to carry out this study you relied on some fundamental pillars of the approach to modeling systems in terms of energy flows and energy loads that had been developed by Howard T. Odom in the two fundamental pillars of this approach where first a lot casts a maximum energy principle according to which the global dynamics of an efficient system is characterized by the maximization of useful energy i.e. energy transfer in physical work and the flexible circulation of such work the second pillar was a formalism allowing to represent the extraction, consumption and circulation of energy through diagrams that were analogous to the circuit diagrams used in electronics but which purported to represent the circulation of energy and this approach was applied by Zucchetto in order to draw diagrams whose aim was to describe the circulation of energy between different constitutive elements of the human natural systems represented by Miami area and in particular those different component subsystems were represented either as sources or as sinks of energy precisely by adopting this formalism that relied on an analogy between the circulation of electricity in Zucchetto circuits and the circulation of energy since the early 90s urban metabolism research has drifted away from energy-based approaches inspired by Odom's formalism and in particular in the early to mid 90s the foundation were laid for an accounting and modelling approach known as material flow analysis which constitutes one of the pillars of modern inertial ecology and this approach was applied and modified to suit the needs of other studies that were carried out starting from the mid 90s until recent years and which constituted the establishment of industrial ecology as a discipline and also to establish urban metabolism as a fundamental concept within this discipline based on the formal foundations represented by the material flow accounting method so in a natural industrial ecology can be defined as a study of industrial systems as ecosystems to optimize the use of material and energy reduce environmental impacts and production costs and create industrial symbiosis the material flow accounting approaches are based on the underlying formalism and conceptualization that on which material flow accounting approaches are based is the use of balance models that apply the fundamental principle of the conservation of matter conservation of energy and to match inflow of inputs with outflow of inputs and those approaches constituted the way through which the concept of urban metabolism was finally subsumed under the framework of industrial ecology in which it is constituted the main field in which the concept of urban metabolism has been developed other approaches were developed in the framework of industrial ecologies during the late 80s and the early 90s on the technical foundation provided by material flow analysis in particular substance flow analysis which traces the flow of particular substances of particular chemical substances and life cycle assessment the technical foundation provided by the material flow analysis accounting models were predicated on a view of industrial systems as industrial ecosystems therefore industrial ecology was emerged as a discrete based on what some actor regarded as a biological-recogical metaphor whereas others have been described this underlying metaphor as an analogy between the concepts of industrial ecosystem and biological ecosystem this underlying analogy or metaphor is particularly apparent in definitions of the concept of urban metabolism that have been spelled out in the framework of industrial ecology in particular this definition comes from an entry on urban metabolism that is part of a necropedia of ecology whose author is Yan Zhang and in this definition spells out an underlying analogy between a dry view of the city as a super-organism whose internal mechanism interaction with the environment can be modeled by an arch with the natural ecosystem therefore there is an underlying metaphor that allows to think about cities as super-organism and which serves as the foundation for doing an arch between cities and the natural ecosystem furthermore this definition highlights a view of urban metabolism as related to the living requirement of a city and its inhabitants and the transformation and processes that allow the transformation of inputs and outputs that are necessary to meet those living requirements therefore this definition of the concept of urban metabolism allows to draw an analogy between the concept of urban metabolism and the more general concept of biological metabolism type presented at the beginning of the talk and those analogies rely upon a system-based approach to cities as an ecosystem and the urban metabolism as the metabolism of cities however within this system-based approach the agentic qualities of urban metabolic exchange have been under theorized and a framework-sponsored approach is relevant to urban metabolism which also emphasizes the systemic nature of cities as an ecosystem in particular the signature of urban metabolism while the social-ecological system has been developed in other fields that are related to industrial ecology which overlap with industrial ecology but rely on the use of models that differ from those used within industrial ecology such fields are raised on social ecology and there is a typo in the slide, urban ecology so what are the issues that can be identified at the end of this preliminary presentation the first issue is the necessity to bridge the gap between systems and actors in characterizing urban metabolic systems this problem is related precisely to the under theorization of the agentic qualities of urban metabolic exchanges that is a characteristic of system-based approaches that have been developed so far to do so it is possible to draw on conceptualization both from another field the field of urban political ecology which has been more attention to the problem of agency in particular both human and non-human agency with respect to urban metabolic processes since the constitution of agency can be used to highlight the political character and the power dynamics underlying those exchanges and drawing on conceptualization of agency developing the field of urban political ecology allows to outline a conceptual framework that can be used to analyze the agentive dimension constitutive of the urban metabolism concept as understood from a systems-based perspective and the field can be used to explore the agentic features of the urban metabolism as a social ecological system this is precisely the starting point of the paper that we have co-authored with Daniella and which relies on a quote-unquote bottom-up approach in particular this paper aims to define a conceptual framework, a minimal conceptual framework based on conceptualization of agency developed within urban political ecology and to develop this framework by taking a computational approach and analyzing a large body of literature about the urban metabolism and this more bottom-up approach can be complemented through a top-down approach starting from the theoretical literature that constitutes the background for industrial ecology, social ecology and urban ecology in particular systems biology in the vein of Howard Odum and Eugene Odum and which is the aspect on which I'm currently working so you are the other member of the urban metabolism lab Professor Perotti, Elisabetta and Hazan Amarian who is a post-doctoral fellow working on the modeling aspect of the project and if you have any questions so far I mean, I can What do you want to, did you want to continue? I'm 55 minutes I don't know how you want to go from here, you're also the chair so you can kind of do whatever you want Yeah, of course It's your seminar so yeah Either you like me to develop on some points of this ground work presentation or I can start presenting some aspects of the Manuscript which Daniel and myself have been working on the computational analysis Who should start with questions on this? Could be just a little bit of the background of the one here It's everyone from philosophy, yes, right? Any source of philosophy, right? Not only philosophy of science, also other kinds of philosophy Mostly philosophy of science I have a lens of such urban planning background so it's a bit of urban planning and architecture I think that's important to know I could ask lots of things What do I want to start? I guess one thing to ask So you talked about this shift from a previous foundation that was sort of a more energy based understanding of urban metabolism to a sort of more bulk material based understanding of urban metabolism I wonder what, so that's cool and interesting and I guess this is just sort of an invitation to say a little bit like why did that Other than maybe just sociologically the people who are working on this they found a bunch of work in industrial ecology that seemed interesting to them so they ran with it, maybe that's the answer But why did that feel to them like the right, like the change to make? That's a big change, right? That's a radical rethinking of what the metabolism is sort of, if you will, running on running on mass versus running on energy versus I guess you could think about an integrated effort to do both at once What happened there? Thank you for the question, I can give a primary answer and maybe Daniela can correct or add things to what I'm going to say So as I highlighted in the presentation this kind of approach to say the urban metabolism of the metabolism of an urban area by trying to conceptualize and quantify the relations between the human social system and the natural system relied on the foundations of Odum's system psychology and in particular on the concept of embodied energy or energy as a universal energy equivalent that can be used to quantify the contribution of different sources of energy and this approach is still used in some studies in particular studies that have been undertaken in China for instance the metabolism of Beijing or the agglomeration which Beijing situated but this approach has been supplanted by approaches based on material flow analysis which is also this kind of material flow analysis relies on a kind of formula developed for instance by economists at the beginning by economists such as Ayers and Niez which was a generalization of the input-output table approach that was already used in economics and I'd say that this kind of formalism was more practical because... Imagine it's easier to get data about material flow that's got to help Yes, kinds of yes indeed if I may maybe add on an aspect this question is a very fundamental one it's a lot to do with the consolidation of industrial ecology as discipline itself differently from systems ecology or ecology as a whole intended by the UDRM's brothers so basically the shift to material flow accounting actually came with the idea of we need to establish our own tool set to quantify the biophysical foundations of societies as Nicola very well said borrowing tools that were already established at the national level and the MFA first the development of MFA where it worked at the national level to understand input-output tables of national economies and the idea of saying okay, do we have that very powerful tool what about shifting it at the system a skill about the system be them urban I mean urban actually in a second state but primarily industrial systems and use the tools people are familiar with in the terms of natural accounting to understand the biophysical foundation and that was the very significant shift that was brought to this new establishment of industrial ecology discipline and trying to move away from GPD only based accounts so money based accounts so the mass units were providing an interesting alternative to dollars so that was one of the history of science more kind of answer to your question and say okay, let's see if with these methods we can kind of move away from only associating resource consumption to money and trying to quantify biophysical foundation in mass terms using these input-output approaches that were already developed at the national level and this was done in a conference by water conference in the 90s con account conferences that then was translated into the social ecology kind of found family within the industrial ecology field so it really keep a very let's say, characteristic approach within all industrial ecology field let's say now yeah, so it's a really important aspect complicated sociology here too that's really cool I think questions yeah so I have a very general question on the relationship not in a way this framework articulates the relationship between metabolism and agency so for example when you were introducing the concept of agency I think you were quoting the Routledge handbook agency so the problem I see normally with that kind of analytical philosophy literature most of the time is that when they are thinking about agency they are thinking about the very high level of the spectrum so if you ask a normal analytical philosopher agency implies stuff like individuality propositional attitude so you kind of require rational personhood and of course stuff that was underlined there especially come from theoretical biology second order cybernetics theory of autonomy then through especially recent literature to say well we need to rethink agency also there is a huge debate in theoretical biology philosophy biology saying well we need to rethink agency organizational agency and the whole thing is well we need to rethink organisms as agents etc and the auto poetic framework which was somewhat behind the scene there it seems to me at least had a long history that comes from cybernetics in second order cybernetics of conceptualizing systems agency in a different way that is not like language and rationality and all that kind of stuff especially in the meradial tradition normally you have the so called the traditional biological autonomy the two dimensions of autonomy what they call the constitutive dimensional autonomy which is what has more or less to do with metabolism the auto poetic nature of the autonomous system and the interactive dimension which is of course the system as the circle structure we need to feed onto itself to maintain itself but it's not secluded from the environment because to have the exchange of energy matter you need to relate the environment so you need to have some sort of interactional asymmetry between the system and the environment in the sense that the system that initiates the relation and that is the so called interactive dimension of autonomy and within this great digital framework that most recently there has been some debate some colleagues in Brazil especially that try to apply this conceptual framework to ecosystems and then the big question is well but is the ecosystem really an agent in the sense that for example it lacks the principle of strong individuality which for example you have in an organism the ecosystem does have some feature that resemble agency but it's not exactly an agent so my question like within this general background in what sense within this framework I was thinking of the urban ecosystem as an agent in what sense is the urban ecosystem an agent and what does it imply for the project thank you you have first Hans Schwerer Daniel Isabetta who might jump in to regret things in case well I'd say that first thank you I think you precisely impact all the particular conceptual aspects that were baked into the first general presentation of metabolism that were kind of living in precisely in that way to answer your question directly I'd say that when one tries to understand the agentic dimensions of cities as an ecosystem there is an underlying assumption this underlying metaphoric attribution of organismal qualities to the city that can be found in particular some approaches to the urban metabolism in particular within the framework of industrial ecology and which in this attribution of organismal qualities to the city as an ecosystem comes directly from Odum in particular Eugene Odum this attribution of organismal points is well is exploited in a loose way let's say to in some sense lay the groundwork and justify the application of particular methods to the study of metabolism of cities and also to justify a particular attention in particular interest for applying those methods in order to in order to in a certain sense solve ecological imbalances within the city by equating them with metabolic disorders so this underlying metaphor has high heuristic function from an epistemological methodological point of view to the extent to which can be used to develop methodologies based on traditional flow-accounting methods or substance flow-accounting methods for its heuristic function in another sense that is more related to the application of urban metabolism based on models and methods and the goal of applying such models and methods which can be seen as a therapeutic goal i.e. the goal of curing ecological imbalances within the cities as metabolic disorders can be cured in the case of an organism and besides that, i'd say that based on the work we have been doing also on the analysis of the literature we have been we have performed and on the insights about the agentic aspects of the conceptual metabolism that we have drawn from this analysis i'd say that the agent is not an interesting and productive way of looking at the agency of urban metabolism relies less on conceptualization of the city of the ecosystem as an agent in itself but more on the identification of metabolic actors within the system itself because methods that are used for instance in industrial ecology to study metabolism of cities rely on the identification of subsystem within the cities and the relation between the logical relation between the systems between such subsystems in particular it's the case of different family of methods that i haven't mentioned before which is ecological network analysis which builds on the basic flow accounting approach by introducing network formalism and also methodology of analysis that is more akin to ecological analysis and tries to identify relations between different sector between different economic sector within the city by framing those relations as ecological relations can be quantified by looking at how those different sectors contribute to the overall flow of materials or energy between between the different components of the metabolic system i hope my answer was sufficiently clear I think there is an interesting interplay between the first parts and the first part of your question in terms of we are mainly with this project we are mainly with the inboundary agents but this is exactly due to the missed link with the very origin of industrial ecology in terms of second order cybernetics so on the one hand if you look at the first research I studied online and that's what we call urban metabolism they all try to establish just link with second order cybernetics but then predominantly predominantly refer to Varela in which they try to say basically what distinguish the way we get the idea is the fact that we can understand things to play between systems social systems and then at the time they go far away let's get into the lumen side of things and get into the communications systems but what has been predominantly put forward is the fact that these systems are structurally coupled which makes possible for them to self generate and then go into the other process and then if they are structurally coupled what about the agency in terms of the lower spectrum relationship so as you know with the intentionality where is this agency if there are all these structures that kind of guide the development of the system and this is where we kind of chipped in in the discussion then yes indeed where is the agency what can be defined as an agent and what not and then looking on the one hand this discussion okay so if you keep me maintaining especially the lumen kind of evolution of cybernetics including also communication systems so what about other way other systems conceptual systems are trying to present the notion of agency within the metabolic kind of cosmos especially urban political ecology which was named also at the very end where there you really they really are after a different way of understanding agency because they want to establish a clear divide between urban political ecology martin urban political ecology and the obitulist approach for example new materialism so they will tell you yeah let's look into agency because we want to follow the money because we don't want to compound a new human agency but we are kind of in that okay on one side look back to second order separatism where okay that was the agency in structurally coupled system and on the other hand okay the urban political ecology side of the spectrum which I think is really interesting then also to advance certain things and with metabolism there is one paper that I might want to suggest which was published in adaptive behavior in 2009 the title is defining agency defining defining agency by Shavir Baranda so that I think that really provides so you are thinking of that cognitive science also kind of approach okay and they try to provide a very abstract systems definition of agency which avoids usual issues you have with agency that are already very high up in the spectrum and they try to really okay what makes a system whatever comes system and that's kind of to me might be useful to really think about yeah sure thanks so much for your talk for the answer and actually it's kind of between clarification question and curiosity it's very easy to make for a neurological side but the idea very basically sorry because I don't know anything about that but the idea is that when we talk about urban metabolism it's kind of assuming that you already told us this but I would like to be sure it's kind of the city is a kind of metabolism or unless it's a metaphor because it's not the same and it's you the last answer you said this is heuristic tools so it's a metaphor that is heuristic tools or it's really a metaphor we look for a metaphor it's another kind of memory but nonetheless we look for a metaphor and this is my first clarification question and the second let's because from the logical side that even accelerometer is very complex this complexity is intrinsic to any metabolism all the stuff that you show us kind of mega you can see stuff are kind of trying to figure out in a mechanical way what is going on but actually the complexity is still there it's difficult to unravel all the level this complexity even even also at the cellular level so my question is what about this complexity it kind of could be a weak point from some of the fact that we use metabolism as a metaphor I don't know if this is the way to say to the city or could be a a strong point metabolism for our cell in the same way we can see the complexity of the city because you told us that your biological base approaches system biology try exactly to deal with this complexity of different level of biological organization and the last clarification, curiosity you really talk about metabolism but all the literature on industrial ecology I don't know anything about it, it's super interesting but the city is then a metabolism or an ecological system what is the answer you said something like in order to be able to understand the system the ecological ecological system we have to look for metabolic I don't remember what you said what is the relation between these two aspects of the metaphor if it's a metaphor thank you so much sorry if it's native but I'm very curious about the answer thank you starting from the first for for instance from the standpoints of Odum psychology has understood by for instance by Podvinio that I quoted whose work I referenced in the beginning of the presentation this city is an ecosystem a particular kind of ecosystem once again within this Odumian framework an ecosystem can be regarded as superorganism so from based on based on Odum's outlook on ecology the city has an ecosystem is also a superorganism however in the way in which this this between city ecosystem and superorganism has been appropriated and developed by industrial ecology is more heuristic in nature for instance definition I showed is interesting because it's it exemplifies how how the city as superorganism metaphor is understood as a heuristic device without insisting on any ontological or methodological commitment however there's been criticism have been addressed to this industrial ecology approach to the city as an ecosystem particular from the field of urban ecology that I on which I touched very briefly and in particular by works related to school in urban ecology that is known as the Baltimore School of Urban Ecology because it was built on the basis of studies on the ecosystem of the city of Baltimore which those criticisms are expressed in a debate between Nancy Gulubievsky Urban Ecology and Christopher Kennedy one of the very important prominent industrial ecologists and those criticisms highlight precisely the problem the question of understanding what kind of ecosystem a city is in particular Gulubievsky criticized the metaphorical metaphorical and analogical use of the identification between organisms and cities and insisted on precisely the view of the city as an ecosystem not as a system that is analogous or akin to an ecosystem but as an ecosystem in itself which raises the question of precisely looking at the fine-grained dynamics within the urban ecosystems and trying to understand how the entropized elements of this ecosystem interact with non-entropized element and therefore the necessity to understand social aspects of the human social components of the urban ecosystem and the nature once has been different components of the same ecosystem and also the necessity to understand localize and heterogeneous dynamics within the urban ecosystem understood as heterogeneous ecosystem in which entropized elements are connected with less entropized ones and to answer the other questions here I have a slide that I bring to you the presentation and it's a substance flow analysis based model of the metabolism of the greater Toronto area and the mechanistic approximation of complex dynamics is also in this particular presentation of the urban of the urban metabolism of the greater Toronto area and as you mentioned before one key challenge is identifying the complex dynamic that are that underpin this mechanistic representation of the ecological relations between different subsistence within the urban metabolism of the greater Toronto area and one of the methodological problems that are raised in literature reviews on the urban metabolism from the standpoint of industrial ecology is precisely the necessity to open the black box constituted by this representation at this high level representation of relations between different subsistence from the standpoint of the balance between input and outputs so the question you raised is actually one methodological issues that is discussed in the field and to answer your last question the the urban metabolism of a city can be understood as a system as a socio-ecological system a system of flows and interactions between between component subsystem and this particular way of looking at the city as an ecosystem or as a hybrid socio-ecological system so for instance to go back to the solar metabolism the cell can be understood as a system from a particular standpoint and solar metabolism can be also understood as a system that is located within the cell boundaries and overlays is overlaid on the solar system in the sense that this systemic representation of this semi-understanding of the solar metabolism is a way of starting processes that unfolds within the cells so it has a metabolism it's not a metabolism but the fact of having a metabolism to controversies within different schools and then I can imagine in the literature to have different authors have a general understanding of the relationship between notions and in your project what is your position concerning this point it's kind of a metaphor for you what is your orientation we are trying to understand how these different readings can coexist if you want because we believe they can both bring something to the discussion especially when we are looking into the agency which is our end goal together with other that's the main angle of the first years of the project and also not try to unify these few but just try to understand they're incompatible yes or is it just because people are not using terms to say why so we're trying to put in order between different schools and we are looking to different different communities to have feedback on the work we're doing just to know how this is going to be I myself have more to the industrial ecology historically from the relationship of my own work but I try in this project for example to really embrace the more urban ecology aspects so we don't have a start position we are trying to say ok let's see if these things can be compatible it's possible to speak together about this in order to understand it could you say more about this thanks to Alex's mentors maybe I'm going to devote another session of the series precisely on that point to give you a quick preview so we worked on we worked on a corpus of research articles that we selected based on a primary selection of source documents more specifically we identified the literature reviews and more theoretical articles that were related to urban urban metabolism or to the theoretical foundations of three systems three systems based approaches to urban metabolism that we are interested in which are industrial ecology urban ecology social ecology and based on this selection we we applied we extracted the abstracts title and keywords from those articles we assembled those three elements in a document that was then pre-processed using canonical methods so we cleaned the text by removing words and by homogenizing the text and removing capitalization etc etc then we modeled those documents as a bag of engrams basically it's a technique that allows representing text as a set of expressions constituted by and adjacent words and adjacent terms identified through sort of moving filter so more precisely in our we presented each document as a sequence of morograms and pentagrams so individual tokens also before modeling we lemmatized the document and we selected expressions up to 5 token expressions and to avoid including meaningless multi-word expressions we eliminated the expressions that were not present in a statistically significant sense using our package Contida so basically by doing this we eliminated 5 we eliminated multi-word expressions of either very present in very few documents or very widespread and based on this through this methodology we identified a lexicon of around 17 number 17,431 unique terms and the starting corpus was consisted of 1481 documents and then we analyzed this corpus with the aim of identifying words that could be used to characterize the semantic field of the term urban metabolism as reflected in the corpus of literature so we analyzed may share my screen because what did you show if you just drag it it's like a second monitor you just have to drag it over it's acting like a second monitor yeah there it is oh the resolution is awful unfortunately that's our projector's fault not your computer's fault this is a bad projector soon as much as you can it's here yeah that's ok there we go so basically we drew methods from computational linguistics in particular corpora and text mine to identify words with lexicon associated with urban metabolism in a meaningful way and more specifically we adopted a method based on a version of the log likelihood test for significance of frequency and we subdivided we split the corpus into a corpus of interest constituted by the documents that explicitly mentioned contained urban metabolism and urban metabolism as an expression and sub corpus of reference comprising the rest of the documents and we calculated the expected frequency of words occurring with the expression of urban metabolism in the sub corpus of interest and the frequency of those same words in the sub corpus of reference basically the expected frequency of word is just the actual frequency of the word in the whole corpus divided by a factor that is the ratio between the total number contained in the sub corpus of reference or the sub corpus of interest and the total size of the lexicon so it's a way of weighing the actual frequency of the word in the whole corpus and then we used this log likelihood statistic that is found in the literature about corpore comparison and this log likelihood this statistic can be interpreted as in the same way as the key squared statistic and by that I mean that we can use the same a prior can use the same critical values to to assess the significance of the difference between the frequency of again work in the sub corpus of interest and the frequencies are the expected frequency of the same word in the sub corpus of reference and this test allows to identify terms that are characterized the sub corpus of interest in that their frequency in that sub corpus is either higher or lower than the frequency in the other corpus in a statistically significant way so by doing so we identified words and expressions that are associated with the expression of urban metabolism because the co-currence with urban metabolism is significantly more important the co-currence in general in the whole corpus or is significantly less important that their co-currence in the whole corpus and therefore those two groups of words can be used to identify either the core of the semantic field associated with the term urban metabolism because in question are significantly co-curring with urban metabolism they are significantly more co-curring with urban metabolism in a sense with the expression urban metabolism whereas the other words whose frequency in the sub corpus of interest is significantly lower than their frequency in the sub corpus of reference are words that co-cur with urban metabolism but which map in a way the boundaries of the semantic field of metabolism because they are more associated with part of the section of the corpus that does not contain whose document does not contain the expression of metabolism as such I also try to use word embeddings and well the the I think that the main the main the main the main the main the main the main game from this kind of method is that it allows to start this method starts from a holistic perspective corpus based perspective and then allows to identify section of the corpus that are related to the expression of interest as set of documents and by zooming in the selection of documents allows to map the semantic field of urban metabolism of the the term of interest by incorporating creating information about the thematic content of information that is in both the documents why don't we make that appear in the superior conversation because it is a 359 now it's four exactly but we thank our speaker and move on