 My name is Aristide de Tannas Yadis. I'm chair of Circular Economy and Urban Metabolism at the University of Libreau-Brosel And I share this chair with my colleague Stephen Kampelman, but I'm also the co-founder of the non-profit organization called Metabolism of Cities And in general what I do is research on urban metabolism I analyze cities, their flows, I try to compare cities between themselves to try to understand if there are any commonalities I also try to understand what are the drivers behind these flows and also the creation of their stocks And more recently, since the chair, I also try to understand how urban metabolism and circular economy are related But also how urban metabolism can be applied or is it applied in policy and in practice The first time I heard about urban metabolism I think was back in 2010 And back in the day I was doing a master thesis research And what I wanted to do was a life cycle analysis Well no, actually what happened is that I heard the word life cycle analysis A friend of mine was doing life cycle analysis for buildings And I was very intrigued by the whole concept of following a product or an object from the extraction to the waste processes So every phase of this product, sorry, from the beginning till the end And I was quite fascinated by this methodology and I said to myself perhaps we could do that at the scale of the city Not only the construction material, not only the building but perhaps the city level And then a lot of questions were added to that How many objects do I take into account? Is it enough or how do I classify all of those flows and all of that And I asked some questions to a professor and he mentioned the term urban metabolism And I was surprised by this metaphor at the beginning and then I did some research And I found a number of articles quantifying all of the flows entering and exiting cities And I was completely really interested by this topic And I said ok this is the topic I want to focus on But then by reading more and more I kind of saw some other papers that were discussing urban metabolism And didn't have this quantitative aspect, I remember the paper of Matthew Gandhi in 2004 about something about urban metabolism and water And it had almost no figures on it, almost no tables in it And I was very surprised, at that stage I thought that this is not what I... well I thought this is not urban metabolism At least that's not what I thought was urban metabolism And it took me some time to understand that actually urban metabolism is not a coherent whole or a consolidated field That has only one definition, a number of researchers use different definitions And that's when I got interested into as well the different aspects more and more of urban metabolism As I said before I'm an urban metabolism researcher so I mainly research on this topic What I do with it is mostly again understand, quantify some flows and understand how this is related with the functioning of a city I feel it's very important to quantify flows because first of all you have a solid baseline of what is happening in a city But also you eliminate some ideas, some bad ideas that you thought were good ideas Meaning that if you quantify some flows you know how many you have in your city You know how much that would result into developing new jobs or developing new spaces for storage or for recycling What type of infrastructure you would need, what are feasible solutions and what are unrealistic ones So I really think that by measuring flows you already understand more of the physicality of your city And I wanted to better communicate with city officials and administrations to figure out whether their mobility plans or waste plans or other plans are conflicting The energy plan with the water plan perhaps they have very common challenges that urban metabolism lens can help us to make something more coherent And negotiate between one and the other but also it really helps us to create a dialogue amongst many people Because what I understood as I mentioned before is that urban metabolism is not only about quantifying flows but also understanding who are behind the flows Who control, who govern the flows, who is losing by some flows, who is winning by other flows And therefore it's more of a negotiation and coordination tool that can help many stakeholders come around the table and discuss about some bigger urban challenges This metaphor has been used, I did an urban metabolism study for the Brussels region, so for Brussels-Environment back in 2014 And back in the day it was a very dry analysis of flows with a methodology and some action points that we found very prominent What were the promising sectors and some promising actions to make the city more circular So this preceded already the circular economy plan of Brussels And back in the day I thought urban metabolism was just a quantitative tool But because it was commissioned by two different administrations, one was state of the environment, the other one was transitional economy or the new economy I quickly understood that it's not just about quantification, it's also about how urban administrations can use this tool to answer their own challenges And the challenges of these two administrations were very different And that's where I understood that actually, well, urban metabolism brings forward some challenges that can be answered by different point of views And therefore I think what happened in the last five years, we kind of discovered new applications of urban metabolism Urban metabolism is not just a dry inspection of numbers and developing a baseline and a monitoring framework of flows This is one essential part, but other parts also start to appear Urban and territorial development, for instance, is now really connected to it So what type of city do we have? How the city that we have and the city that we want to have is going to be affected by flows So there's a whole new discipline around this There is more and more political ecology, so the politics of actors and also the agency of actors behind the flows that is now getting revealed But also there is behind all of these action plans, there is no coherent tool so far to help steer regions and cities around these complex issues And urban metabolism could have the possibility to provide a systemic understanding and at least a lens to better understand challenges that might seem diverging But at the same time they are happening in the same city, so we need to find a solution and we need to find something that is good for all the challenges simultaneously I think what also happened over the last five years is that we've done some trial and error We've rediscovered what happened with Duviniot and his colleagues as well We have seen what happened elsewhere as well, so I think we're getting a bit more mature with a group of researchers and also policymakers and some practitioners We're starting to get a more common debate, start to understand as well together in the same way And we're building a common trajectory, I think That's not to say that there is not conflicting views and diverging opinions on the challenges and how to resolve them But I feel that there is some vocabulary that is converging, that urban metabolism can be a useful tool That it's not only about numbers, that it encapsulates as well urban manufacturing, the productive city It encapsulates challenges of circular economy, sometimes of nature-based solutions So it has become a broader concept that tries to bring together people and to answer even further challenges than material flows It's still a relatively new word, we've seen it being used already for five to more years in Brussels Well, if you take into account Duviniot's work and his team's work, that's already 40 years ago But over the last five years you can see it here and there in some documents and policy, in practice Much more in academia, there is a strong regiment of researchers that is now behind this field And I feel that in Brussels, well in Belgium, sorry, we have a strong team of people that is behind this concept But I feel that we're still figuring it out, there is no real consensus Some people use it for urban design, other people use it from an industrial ecology and methodological point of view Other people use it for governance, other people use it from an operational point of view So a lot of different facets, other people use it from a history point of view So a lot of different facets, none is really predominating I feel that we're in this phase that we're exploring the next phase We're exploring the next use of urban metabolism We're exploring how we're going to really settle and perhaps converge towards a tool that can accept many disciplines at the same time I think right now we're struggling to make it a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary field We're all bringing our small stone towards the bigger building that is urban metabolism But we're still struggling to connect all of these pieces together What I hope with urban metabolism in the future is that it becomes a common ground That it's something that we can use collectively amongst a vast range of stakeholders So not only researchers, not only within researchers, not only industrial ecologists, so people that are really quantitative I really hope that it's going to become just a basic layer of understanding that we can stack things upon it And make our understanding even more complex But also to take it out of academia, I think a lot of things have been happened over the last 40 years in academia And yet it's still not very usable today in other fields It's still about understanding and less about acting And so I hope it's going to become not something that offers clear guidelines and operational tools But at least to have a better interaction or feedback loops between what happens in practice So between a very specific action on the ground and then going back to what is the policy behind it Has this policy really changed any of the metabolism of a city? And then we as researchers kind of analyze those and then also go on the ground to better understand which actions work which do not So I really hope this is this tool and this is going to help us to better collaborate between fields So between researchers, policymakers and practitioners And just be the tool that helps us be around the same table and challenge ourselves with similar tools A similar language, similar analytical tools, similar visualization tools So I think what we lack today and what urban metabolism can help us with is to develop a certain amount of common tools That will help us rediscover some challenges that are predominantly based in one of the three categories I think what's great in Belgium right now is this group of people that's behind this topic It's not recent, we've built that over time And I think there is this real envy to change things and to make things happen And a number of people share this feeling and we share that doing work on our own is not sufficient So we are very eager to hear what our colleagues elsewhere are doing And how can we be helpful to them and how they can help us in our own endeavors And so because there are so many projects, events, etc, etc on the topic We get to see the same people over and over again And we get to have a small family of people that share the same concerns And want things to move faster and forward So by finding each other and by discussing between coffees and things like that We are thinking about how do we go from five minute talks between coffees in an event To something more structured where we find time and we dedicate time to see each other and to work together For that I really think we need some neutral places and neutral where we find each other And we take out our personal hats which is an academic hat or a policymaker hat And we just keep our expert hats So we know a bunch of things around this topic We enter the room and we share with others on our expertise And we forget about kind of the obligations that all of us have in our own topic So I think to structure this community we need a place We need to find each other relatively frequently every couple of weeks, every month or something like that We need to have a common place where information is there Where we don't have to find all over again documents and data and plans and all of that We have all this information it's there and we can directly go to cut to the chase and work there And we also need the topics, we need common topics that we try to work from A to Z together And so we discover the facets of all of these challenges together So we get into each other's shoes Again I think this relates very much to the previous question which is We need to have very similar approaches, we need to have similar places, tools I really think that we need some analytical tools that are common to everyone Of course we're not all into analysis but if we manage to have one place where everything is stored Where everything can be easily visualized and on top of that we can build some models to say What will happen to one of our cities if that And then we test scenarios and these scenarios can help us negotiate Say this is not the future we want for Brussels, Antwerp or any other city or for a region But today we're guessing many things because we don't have any solids Well we have a good understanding of things by looking in the past But we struggle to kind of build many scenarios for the future And I think by putting associations, citizen groups and all of that behind these scenarios, behind these possible futures We can now feel involved into a future Right now we're more defensive, we don't want something but we don't know yet what is the future we want Because we don't know all of the potential futures So I really think that if we have these analytical tools, visualization tools, understanding tools that we build all together We can really step up and bridge these three fields Just some last thoughts and going back to what has changed since the masterclass that had been done Designing with Flow's masterclass that was co-organized by a number of people including OVAM, Architectural Workroom Brussels and Metabolism of Cities I think there was a lot of energy back in the day and it's not lost, it perhaps dissipated in many other efforts So a lot has changed and been developed since then But I feel that that's the challenge, the dissipation How do we manage to keep the momentum and to understand that we're still doing the same thing? We might do it in many other projects and events simultaneously But it's still there, we're still trying to better understand, better analyze, better communicate with our peers But we need to have this common exchange, this common exchange can be through continuous engagement and communication Small videos, podcasts, texts, whatever, but continuous communication to keep this community alive Continuous informal events, but also bringing other people on board We just mingle with people that we know, we just mingle with people that agree with us But it's very high time that we include practitioners, citizens that are not familiar with what we do That do not understand why this is relevant and perhaps it's not relevant for them So we really need to make some extra effort to communicate to outside of our common people and peers And figure out what makes more sense, what are the preoccupations, what are the worries of our colleagues That we can then help transform our common tools to answer this type of questions