 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. In this second episode of the Circular Metabolism Podcast, Stefan and I wanted to break the myth that third-world cities like Bruxelles consume less resources than industrial cities. We are now going to talk about the real fact that industrial activities have become almost non-existent in Bruxelles. However, due to the indirect effects of our consumption, the environmental impact has not necessarily decreased but has simply been pushed back to more distant territories. By the way, by presenting the figures of some metabolic flows of Bruxelles, it becomes clear that the circular economy will not be able to have only a limited effect within its territory. Although solutions and innovations are being multiplied in cities, to really circulate the flow of matter coming out of cities, you will have to look at the minimum at a metropolitain or worldwide scale. Take advantage of this episode and meet up on our site CircularMetabolism.com to find out more about our reflections and productions. Welcome to the second edition of our Circular Canapé. Here we have the idea of making small videos on themes that are linked to the subject that brings us together, namely the circular economy and urban metamolism, major metropolises like Bruxelles. Today, we would like to offer you a view of the third-world city, of the urban economy. Because often, we present the city of Bruxelles and its economy as a third-world city, where there are many offices and many people who work in administrations, seats, companies, insurance, finance, the lawyer's offices, that's what dominates the distribution of jobs and the distribution of added value to Bruxelles. That's what saved the city from the 1970s and 1980s, when the industry of Bruxelles decided to close the factory in Bruxelles or to go to the periphery and then to Asia. Where it was forced by the force of things, because of a structural change in the economy. That's it. Bruxelles was an Austrian city. It was the most important industrial place in Belgium since the late 20th century, until the 1960s. Bruxelles was an Austrian city with all its factories, furnaces, workshops, and manufacturers. It was a gas factory in Buda, and so on. It was an Austrian city, but also the capital of Belgium, especially the economic assets that were industrial. Then, in the 1960s, the industry started, for different reasons, but in this movement of industrialization of Austrian cities, in other cities like Charleroi, Liege, Detroit, and even New York, which was a very industrial city until the 1960s. So, the city of Bruxelles had to reinvent its economy. What happened was that it focused on the extension of this tertiary function, which was already occupied as the capital of Belgium, and attracted the functions of command in the implementation of European institutions in the Leopold district. Here, we are in the Manhattan district, in the North Sea. So, we have the place for a new economy of command. So, decision-making centers, studies centers, where we produce ideas, we produce control, but we no longer produce goods. And so, from there, we could say that, in fact, today, the urban economy is much more immaterial, because we produce less goods, we produce more services. And a lot of post-Australian cities have been able to release their games, how do you say, their game balance, and so on. So, they have re-converted, they have returned, they have known a renaissance, by converting from an industrial city to a tertiary city. So, New York has returned as a financial center. London, the same. London has returned as a financial center. There are cities like Lille or Kink that have become a logistics center, with a bit of research in very particular sectors. So, in Lille, there are a lot of informatics, in Kink, there are a lot of new environmental technologies, for example. But there are other cities, like Detroit, like Charleroi, that have not yet been able to convert economically, which are therefore a bit less resilient compared to the economy, because they are still post-Australian cities, without being a tertiary city. So, these tertiary cities, they seem to be more immaterial, but from an urban metabolism perspective or circular economy, in fact, it's another perspective, because we must not forget that these cities have a tertiary economy, but they still remain very material cities, with an extremely large material impact. And one cannot say, it's just wrong to say that the tertiary economy, an urban city with a tertiary economy, is immaterial. It may be true that cities like San Francisco or Bangalore produce, above all, virtual services, which are their immediate and immaterial products, but they contribute to the production of computer waste, because to make their software toned, they still need material support, like smartphones or computers. So, we can say, yes, it's true that the Apple company does not produce themselves in California, it's just the designs that they produce by their sector, but they contribute directly to the production of tens of millions of iPods that now throw away the world's waste. So, the same for cities like Andres or Frankfurt, which are financial centers, they contribute to the construction of airports, dams, hotels, etc. So, they are directly linked to the physical impact that has activities that are no longer in urban areas, but that we have delocalized elsewhere. And for Brussels, it's the same. So, Brussels is a city that controls the flow of companies, of value chains and production chains that connect the global economy. It's from here that we directly contribute to the opening of mines, the construction of Asian factories, the importation, the logistics chain, so everything is linked to a global economy. And the particularity of the third world life like Brussels is just that we specialize in an immaterial segment of global value chains that are, in the same way, extremely rich in resources and that produce very concrete physical waste, so that's something that is very material. So, that's one aspect of why the third world life remains a material city with an industrial component, except that it's an industrial component and it's no longer in the urban area, we delocalized it elsewhere. But what's interesting here is that there are several things. There are two flights, the indirect one, as you present, so the flight, what we consume here, but in fact it's produced elsewhere, so pollution is found elsewhere, but even in the direct flight, so what we measure if we draw a line around Brussels and we measure all the flows that come out of a typical study of urban metabolism that we call territorial, well, in fact, since the years, the consumption of resources since the beginning of the century has only increased. Even through this transition towards the third world, we consume even more, since the 1970s, we consume 40% more total energy, for electricity, I remember more, it's 300%, for gas too, but obviously we have to say that there has been a change in energy vectors for heating, etc., etc. For water too, while the population was in the 1970s, it reached millions and millions of people, and then, for 40 years, we lowered it to the same level. So there was a kind of U-shaped curve that accompanied this transition from industrial to tertiary, that is to say that many people went to the brabants to live, to have a big house and all that. But while the city was empty of inhabitants, the consumption continued to increase. So I find it quite interesting to say, here, our economy has become more immaterial, but we have had even less inhabitants and we have consumed even more. So it's not necessarily... It's clear that the flows of a productive city and of a tertiary city are completely different, that is to say that a tertiary city in the North, overall, if we want, they will all have the same flows. It will be energy, it will be food, it will be the construction, the three big flows, and water, of course, and water in terms of weight, crush all the rest, but that's why we often remove it from the equation. But in tertiary cities, it's often the same thing, in the same proportions, but it still increases. So even if this economic transition comes, it still exists. We will talk about it, however, with an indirect effect, it's amazing. That is to say that today, in this global nexus of consumption production, we lose a bit of the ball, we no longer know what impact it has on us, and where it is. But I think that in what you say, it's fundamental, that is to say that the economic activity is no longer green if it is, as we see here in Manhattan, much more office-type than factory-type. Well, here, from an economic point of view, we can distinguish these two aspects, what you say is indirect by the contribution of tertiary in value chains and indirect. By saying that on the one hand, there is the contribution of the city as a producer of goods and services, and on the other hand, the impact material of the city as a consumer of goods and services. So here, what you say with the contribution of food, of the energy, of water, that is the consumer city, and on the other hand, the tertiary city is the producer city of goods. These are two economic roles. And I think that you are an expert in the analysis of the role of the city as a consumer of things, of flows. And I have the impression that the scale and the volumes that we are talking about here, they are still very, very little digested and understood by people because we do not realize the volumes when we hear questions. So there is this idea, for example, that a city like Brussels could become circular by producing a large part of its food within the city itself. So at present, and there, well, it's very lawful, maybe with a much higher environmental impact, there are also social advantages by producing food within the city. But when we look at urban metabolism and the volumes that it represents for a population of more than a million inhabitants, we realize that Brussels brings about 500,000 tons of food a year, the rent and the food, that is what restaurants need to be added, and that a city like Paris, like the urban metabolism exercise that was done by Parisian colleagues, the Parisian metropolis today, in its food consumption practices, needs 2.5 million hectares of agricultural land. So at present, it is completely unrealistic to consider that Paris-Entra-Mureau could produce the equivalent of 2.5 million hectares. So the urban metabolism exercise also allows, I think, to be aware of the fact that the city is strongly dependent on a very, very, very large, global, for them. The concentration of the population as it is done in the great metropolis is dependent on a subsidiary organization that allows access to resources outside the city. So the question can be in part how to better circulate things in the interior, especially in the construction sector, for example, but the question is also how to balance the exchanges, how to ensure that we will not just always exploit the same territory and when they are exploited, we pass on to another. But to have, at the agricultural level, for example, exchanges more at eye level with certain production regions. So for example, there was in the Antiquity, sometimes in the big cities of the neighborhoods that had a sort of partnership that adopted agricultural producers that always provided the same market in the neighborhoods. So it was another relationship. We are not just going to order tomatoes on the global market. We do not know where it comes from. And when it rains, we pass on to another country or another continent. But we know where it comes from. We have privileged links. Producers in me say about the evolution of the city and they do that. So I think it's this kind of reflection that needs to be brought up and not just to say the circular economy is something that happens in the interior of the city. And the attempt for Brussels to stay confined in the administrative borders is extremely high because for the administrations... The power... The power stops there. There is the Flandre, the Baleunis, the Inoua, in Brussels. So we try to make a circular economy to a territorial scale to which it is very difficult, very utopian, to do it. So there, I think, to be aware of the true immaterial nature of the city and the enormity of the rain will force us to go at least into metropolitan territory in which we have a new talent in which we could produce food, in which we could maybe produce primary materials for the construction sector, where it is most realistic to have energy production and we just have the necessary space to do that. But that raises a lot of questions, what you said, because you have to say, well, what is the role of the city? That is to say, when we talk about productive activities, like earlier, is the ultimate goal is that Brussels becomes 100% circular? First, we will never be able to get there, because there are so many products in our telephone that do not exist in the local area. And even if we recycle them after X iteration, unfortunately, the thermodynamic makes us need it again. So in any case, let's say that Brussels will never be 100% circular. And a city in general will never be, maybe, because a city, by definition, is based on surplus, on the other hand, or on surplus. That's how we built cities and our society. But there are a lot of interesting questions that arise there. What is the scale of circularity? Is it the metropolitan scale? Is it the scale, as you say, where we have partnerships with certain countries, producers, and we make sure that there is a circularity between them, etc., etc. Because you talked about indirect effects, for me, it fascinates me. Obviously, the methods are still questionable, the data is still fragile. But when we realize a little bit of the numbers, it's a bit crazy. That is to say that we have done, I spoke earlier about the evolution of energy consumption that has continued while the population has decreased and then increased. Let's say that energy consumption is starting to stabilize, but the indirect counterpart continues to increase enormously. What you call indirect is the consumption of resources, the production of waste, the exterior of the urban cloud, in the production chains. That's it. So let's take the example of a phone. The phone has all the energy, all the materials, all the water, all that has been put into work for the construction of this phone until it arrived at our house. All this, all these infinity chains of values, are taken into indirect effects. So we have to say that in urban metabolism, we generally count what comes out and what comes out. A phone, when it comes in, weighs 200 grams. So in our metabolic balance, it's just 200 grams, while it's in reality... Your phone weighs 200 grams. You're not at the height of technological development, I think. But suddenly... No, but tell yourself that in reality, the toxicity, the extraction of resources, because for each of these precious and rare metals, we extract tons and tons of other useless materials. And it's the same thing for when we make the indirect equivalent with the direct effect of urban metabolism, for the energy, for the materials, for the greenhouse gases, it's three to four times more. So we consume what we measure on our counter of Sibelga, it's something. Well, in fact, all that we consume in addition to us, it makes three times more consumption. And for water, it's 42 times. So it's huge. Yes, but I think... The great contribution of this type of urban metabolism exercise is first of all the awareness of this. That is to say, well, as a city, if we do an action only restricted to our territory, eliminate waste that we physically see under our eyes. But in fact, these waste constitute just a part and even perhaps a weak part of waste in its whole. So even if we eliminate all waste in the city, we won't still have the problem because the large waste happens during production. So this taken awareness, I think, it allows us to prioritize and also, perhaps not to be disappointed that there is little impact on the planetary scale or on the largest scale that action can even have. And I think it's important to first take awareness of how it works in a general way and then identify what we do when we know where the limits are. And I think a thing for which... I mean, why do I still think it's very interesting to do the experimentation of the circular economy in the metropolitan space, in the urbanized and very dense space? Because historically, the innovations that have allowed the evolution of humanity to something that has allowed us to survive as a species, despite the ecological catastrophes that we have already produced, and often the innovations that have emerged are still urban things. And people, for example, economists like Jane Jacobs think that even the innovation in agriculture, even the invention of agriculture, is an urban invention because that's where the problem emerges first. That's where enough concentration of ideas, resources and materials to do something new. And once we invented agriculture, we delocalized it to the countryside. As we delocalized the industry, which is first something that came from the medieval artisan, we invented the industry, we experimented with the industry until we delocalized it. And the circular economy, I think... If it's something that's going to increase, it's first in the urban context that we can experiment with. And once we've found things that work, they will necessarily go to the urban area, to the areas where there are more resources, more space, etc. So I think that's where we'll first take our conscience. Thanks to urban metabolism researchers, they are sometimes... If you stay in the Alps, we'll never take our lives seriously, so you have to come here sometimes to talk to us. So first, we take our conscience into our city. Experimenting at a small scale, by improvising, by trying, there's a lot of failure, but we'll first do it in the city. And once we've taken our conscience of the fact that it's a multi-scale thing that goes beyond the city, and if there's something that works in the city, then we'll have things to propose to the outside of the city in terms of models, in terms of technology, in terms of governance, etc. So that's why I think... Well, the urban economy plays an extremely important role for the development of the circular economy, even if in the end, given the flows and the way it turns together, it will have to go beyond the metropolitan borders very quickly. But yeah, I think that for me, I'll give a little bit of a conclusion, a positive and a negative in relation to all of that. First of all, we talked about urban agriculture, and how urban agriculture may never be able to exist, or at least feed us all. But I think it's a good element of what we call a mind-shift, a paradigm shift. That is to say that if more and more people start putting their hands on the dough, to work the land, to feed themselves, it can change the mentality, as you said, and really have a great effect, or a snowball effect. Even if in the end, it's not Brussels that feeds Brussels, maybe, as you said, all the global agriculture will change, maybe, thanks to these citadines that change ideas. Because a part of it, first of all, they will prepare the market within the city, and when you find models that could work, they themselves are the urban energy that will go to the urban area or be relocated to the countryside to put a new model. It's not the organic movement, the movement of the short-circuits. It doesn't emerge from the agricultural industry. It's not the farmers who will say, well, here we have something new. It's the citadines that are engrossed, who first develop something in the city and then go outside. The urban agriculture can play a role in that. Yes, yes, yes. And that's it. Maybe that's the positive part of the thing, that the consumer, because unfortunately we are rather consumer in the city as a producer, of many things. So the consumer can and must do something. That's the positive side, the negative side. It's also that when we take this indirect effect of water, I said that the indirect effect of water in Brussels is 42 times more than that of the direct one. So, in short, taking a shower instead of a bath, we don't care. That is to say that it will not change our water consumption. After, of course, that means, that's it. We talked about that, regional powers will give policies, will create policies for their territory, not for the rest. But that means that in a global way, if we are a global citizen, it will be useless. So we have to see how, in a more systemic way, does the water department of Brussels Environment perhaps work with the food department because in the end, it's our food that creates this huge indirect effect of water. And to say, in fact, if you decrease the consumption of meat, it will have a huge impact on the direct water consumption. And I think that this, that the Metabolism 20, in general, offers this opportunity of a systemic action that can have cascades on several scales. And we really have to realize that it is our consumption that will change things or not. Our production does not exist anymore. We see it in Brussels. Productive activities do not really exist anymore. Now, is it going to be the particular one that will say to themselves, I'm reducing, I'm not buying a mobile phone, I'm replying to interrogation. Is it going to be the politicians who are going to say to them, to people who are going to vote, listen, don't consume anymore? It's even more difficult to imagine. I don't know how we're going to address this issue, but it's really the consumers who will or who will not save the world. That's it.