the significance of Urban Metabolism

How we see the world

As an individual person we begin unconsciously studying our environment, we learn about how things work and see the things that in nature are already working as a system.

Eventually we go to school and are influenced and guided by other people who have gone before us and have seen and studied more of the world. They in turn influence the way we see the world.

However the world we see is different in some ways than the world they saw. This difference is mainly in the human shaped and influenced environment, the world of forests, oceans and sky remains the same (well, except for the effects of consumption of and demands of its assimilation of our wastes).

The problem begins to emerge

The more we develop as a society and the more complex our society becomes the more complex the problems become and the more abstract each individual becomes from the reality of the physical world.

While living in a city can (and does) provide benefits to the individual there are so many lessons which were once clear parts of life to our forebears that we no longer learn. The basics of life are provided by a chain of human created processes and systems that we can easily misunderstand them. Water for instance is so easily available that we simply need to turn on a tap to get it. Disposing of that waste water is equally as unconscious as most taps are even situated over a sink. So simple yet, it was only recently that we were carrying water into our homes in buckets, urns and jugs. Using it in a basin, then tossing it out the window for a lack of plumbing.

Every day the methods we use to make our lives "good" have results which produce mountains of waste.

In the countryside noone would give this a thought, but in cities it was a problem and a quick look through history shows us the problems of hygiene created in the cities of the world.

So what I hear you thinking ... we already have plumbing and sewage and garbage disposal ... there is no problem.

Out of sight is often out of mind
who cares if "over there" is a filthy place, just don't go there. Well, perhaps for those living in the city this problem is taken away, but away is not solved.

In more densely populated locations (such as Tokyo) simply finding a location where garbage can be taken away to is problematic.

The facility to the left is the Tokyo Metropolitan garbage disposal facility. They are building an enormous land fill site in the center of Tokyo Harbor as a method of stashing their garbage locally because they can't just "take it away". Why not? ... well the neighbours have their own problems and of course the further you take it the more it costs.

This is a photograph on their wall from 2001 which shows how far they'd progressed.



Below you can see how well its progressing right now (as long as google maps keeps working)


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As you can see they've filled in quite a bit of it since then.

Away is a relative place

As transport systems evolve, people seem to long for living outside of a city, rather than live in small cubes in the heart of the metropolis, those with the means to buy a place in the outer areas are moving there and traveling in and out of the city. Soon people are living in these "away" places and realizing "hey there's a problem here"

Other places also develop and cities are built near to other cities, compounding the problems of just where to send waste away to.

This whole thing starts to become a tangled nightmare of cause and effect. When we make a change in one area it seems to make things better but then we discover that things are worse in another area.

A city planning and development is not the product of only a single persons vision and execution, it is a collaborative effort which is the product of our organisational structures, and occasionally is quite often simply "how it happened". Despite this 'system' people are often left bewildered by the decisions and outcomes of exactly these management processes.

Part of the reason for this is that while these organizations are functional and operational "entities", able to make decisions, influence planning, and effect our lives, they did not grow up in a place, go to where we've been or see as we see. Sure these organisations are made up of people, but each person is "acting in a role" within the organisation and has limited scope for how to behave within it and how to influence it.

Framework of Analysis

As humans, with enough wisdom and experience we can start to examine things (perhaps even unconsciously) from the basis of comparing to what we know (works). The Organisational Entity however has no such grounding and no basis for discovering it apart from the rules which govern it.

Of course we are the ones who codify these rules. A current theme in systems management journals is the search for an overarching framework for analysis which would encompas various disciplins and bring together presently disparate groups.

Like any organism in nature this organism can by understood by examining its environment and its biology to some extent. This is essentially what an Urban Metabolic framework is.

So, by applying a metabolic framework of analysis to a city we can give the Organizational Entity a method of holistic reflexive analysis, a way to see itself which is quite like our own application of Medicine / Anatomy / and Biochemistry in trying to understand what is happening to us.

In his essay "Biology of Cognition" Humberto Maturana put forward ideas on how and why we think. These ideas can be applied to any cognitive organism and I am sure to any organisational entity. Since Organisations are clearly able to undertake reflexive analysis of problems why not place the Urban Metabolic framework of analysis within the consciousness of the organism?

It is as much us (its "corporate body" parts) as the organisations own cognitive processes that have the ability to determine how it can see and what it may do which have applicability to our understanding of the organizational entity and its metabolic development.

Since it increasingly controls us, hopefully we have something to teach it to make it more successful in managing the world which we all share.