 It's exciting to be in Cape Town for the first time, especially in this very urban metabolism-centered venue in between the two wastewater treatment and waste treatment plan. We had the opportunity to visit the landfill site. It was eye candy for us. But anyhow, I'm very excited to be here today for a couple of reasons. First of all, because I wear two hats. My first hat is I'm a co-founder of Metabolism Cities with Paul and other colleagues. And the other hat is chair of circular economy and urban metabolism back in Brussels. Just one sentence about that, the idea is that the government of Brussels, well, Brussels is a region at the same time as being a city anyhow, the government of Brussels is paying us and me and my colleagues, Stefan Kampelman to be the chair to reflect upon what the policies are and do they really change the metabolism of the city. So we're trying to already build this interface between academia, policymaking and practice back at home. But I'd love to hear more and to understand more how are things happening today. So this presentation is just to make you understand what's the rationale behind these three seminar series and what we'll hope to get out of today and the two other ones in Beijing and in Brussels. So very quickly and Paul is going to more explain what urban metabolism is. I want to explain to you what urban metabolism is from a research, policymaking and practice perspectives and how we can use these seminars to find the interface between those three. So urban metabolism is a very diverse research field. I'm not going to go into details, there are many point of views over there, but for today we're going to use this analogy, so the city being a living organism with ins and outs and transformation inside. We're going to use this analogy to explain the actors and the flows that are around and within a city from a systemic perspective. I'm not going to go more in details, Paul is going to do that just in a second. But urban metabolism is also a tool for city officials. So back in 2014 for instance, so it's a tool for city officials. The best example I have today is that city officials use it for developing their circular economy action plans. Everybody's familiar with circular economy in general, yes, in broad terms, great. So here are three cities, Brussels on the left, Paris in the middle, London on the right, that have used urban metabolism to inform their circular economy action plan in one way or another. Sometimes it was just done and then put in a drawer, other times it was much more actively integrated. So for instance, when I did the urban metabolism study for Brussels for the government, that was in 2014-15, we kind of identified the main flows entering and exiting and then trying to identify some promising sectors and flows and where to work on. That resulted in 2016-2020, so we're right in the middle today, to the circular economy plan of Brussels. There's 111 measures, there's some about flows, there's some about sectors, blah, blah, blah. The chair is one of these measures, right? So this is how policymakers can use it as well. So it's a heuristic model for cities as well. The same for Paris, they did their study back in 2009 I think, and today they have their circular economy action plan. They had 15 actions, now they have 15 more this year. So you see here that cities also can use urban metabolism and that's how they use it so far. And then in practice, well, practitioners is a very diverse field. It's not just one profession, there are many different professions. For instance, you can see here some people that are using excavated earth from construction sites to build bricks in order to use them on another construction site. That's one urban metabolism practice. They're kind of transforming unwanted flows to another function. This can be the reuse of construction waste, for instance. You can think of many practical underground applications of urban metabolism. If they transform the flows to make the city a more sustainable place, you can kind of say that it's urban metabolism practice. That's a bit damning it down, but anyhow. But there are also a bunch of consultancy firms that use urban metabolism or the material flow perspective to provide insights to industries, to cities, to regions, et cetera, et cetera. I just present two of our friends, Metabolic, for instance, in the Netherlands. Over here you just see a number of Charlottes in the US, Rotterdam. They have an island as well. So they've done a number of cities as well. And then some of our other friends, Circle Economy, also based in the Netherlands, they also have a city's program, and they use urban metabolism thinking in that. So there is the practical side, there is the consultancy side, and then there is more of the urban planning landscape side. There is a lot of landscape architects and urban planners that use urban metabolism to kind of project what a future city can be from a flow perspective. You can see here this is a landscape architecture firm in, again, the Netherlands. And they've done a number of cities with maps and infrastructures and visually impacting what urban metabolism is. So these are kind of the three how urban metabolism manifests in research and policy and in practice. The goal of these seminar series is to really understand what this interface is. So we have picked three locations, Cape Town, Beijing, and Brussels, that are very diverse, and that means the actors are very different. The metabolism of the city is very different. And the practitioners and how to change the metabolism must be very different. So we want to learn from these three different contexts what type of constellation exists between these actors and how can we put everyone together around the same table to make our cities a more sustainable place from a systemic point of view. Now, we also want to initiate a global discussion because this challenge is not unique to any of these cities. There is commonalities and differences between these cities and we also want to learn at the end of these three seminars what can we transpose from one city to another and what is unique from one city to another. So in this sense, what we hope is to understand how can we build a better science policy practice interface. Today in the World Café, we're going to try to see that. But we also want to, thanks to these seminars, develop tools for collaboration because collaboration is not just a word we throw out and then it happens. We actually need those tools. Tools can be better understanding. So this is a MOOC we have done on urban metabolism. So an online course on urban metabolism. There is a sharing component. We need to share in between ourselves articles, learning practices and all of that. So we're trying to also kind of locate where the urban metabolism studies have been made and who has published them. There is also the analyzed point of view and Paul is going to touch upon that later on. We need better common analytical tools. How do we analyze the city together? For some policy makers, you might only need some indicators. In our side, we might need more maps or samples or data etc. We need these tools to centralize our efforts. And then there is the connect side. So how do we take this discussion forward? For instance, there might be some good and bad practices and we should not replicate the bad practices that we should document. So what are the good and bad practices that exist around the world and how can we connect them in order to avoid spending time and money on something that might not work and to create this type of community around the world? The last tool that we might need is to communicate. How after this seminar can we continue to communicate? It can be a forum, it can be anything else. All of these tools I have presented are just suggestions. We also want you to tell us how do we keep this momentum after this seminar? How do we keep us collaborating in this unusual place and in this unusual format? I don't know if all of you know each other. I appreciate you knowing me here and some of you. But perhaps how can we make all of you stay together as a group and continue working after this seminar? So that's in brief the role of this seminar series. Now, are we going to explain a bit more on urban travel? Yes, that's it. And we're going to take some questions after your presentation in mind to kind of wrap up this first part of the seminar.