urban metabolism

extending the framework from the city to the society

2011-10-05T00:01:00.001+03:00

Understanding living things can be hard. Sometimes things that don't appear to be living can be.

summary

In this post I will argue why we should consider large bureaucracy and corporation as actually living things. They are not actually made of the same stuff that we are familiar with living things being made of, but they are none the less alive. I think its important to understand these creatures, grasp how they perceive the world and perhaps then we can begin understand their cognition.

introduction

I have often argued that people are unable to comprehend what they can't see. We build a variety of tools to enable us to see into things which are beyond our ability for observation in part to allow us to see and understand more.

Microscopes are a good example of this principle. Before we were able to observe the microscopic we had no idea what were bacteria or how much of what modern medicine is built upon worked or that it even existed.

In my blog I occasionally make reference to a concept that I call "The Machine". In this article I will attempt to explain what this concept is. The Machine is not just a mechanism, The Machine is actually a kind of living organism but one which certainly not entirely organic and transcends a couple of layers of conceptuality. This is what makes the concept difficult to grasp and for many it will seem just some sort of fancy.

So what is a living thing? Seems at first like an easy task to identify that which is living and that which is not. I would like to venture a definition; I think that anything which can:

make an observable change on the world
reproduce
make a decision
die

is a living thing. Seems pretty obvious, but perhaps many will struggle against this definition set when I apply it in a moment.

How often have you heard some politician or company director or person employed in some role in a company, say

"I didn't want to do it, but I had no other choice in my role"

Quite often I'm sure.

People have struggled for as long as we have written records (and probably longer) to understand what is it that makes a person or an animal alive. The various sciences have grappled with the question and we have uncovered many things about the nature of the bodies of living things to expand our understandings. While we understand much about biology, biochemistry, anatomy and even the electro-chemistry of nerves we just don't know why people are alive or why they die.

In this essay I would like to turn the question around, instead of looking at us I'd like to look at things outside of us, things we can't see but yet like the common cold know exists. We often call then systems.

Lets start with a system called Government.

Once upon a time in history we were manged in less complex groups and had a person who was our leader. We might call this person a King. Eventually the area of power under the control of a King grew too large and he called upon others to administer his authority for him.

This can become so large as to overwhelm the King and others in the system that the King has created. Eventually those who the King gave power to realise that they command more power than the King. So when something occurs to give them reason they can challenge his authority and even wrest power from the King.

Since I'm Australian and since Australian government derives its existence from the English government I thought I'd examine the this history (not because its special in any particular way).

In 1215 members of the King of Englands system Barons rebelled against him and forced him to sign the Magna Carta. This essentially took power from him and imposed a codified system of written ideas called laws.

These laws removed his power to act in any way that he wished and imposed upon him punishments (punishments upon the King!) if he resisted these laws.

a committee of 25 barons who could at any time meet and overrule the will of the King if he defied the provisions of the Charter, seizing his castles and possessions if it was considered necessary(wikipedia).

So for the first time in English history the King, the person who ruled the land according to his will, was subjugated to rules written on paper.

I would guess at this point that some are saying: But these are just rules, just writing, they are not living, they are not something which can constitute as a living thing.

This is true, they are just a set of rules. But then so too are all the chemical reactions which define how our bodies work. These rules of chemistry and physics can also be used and manipulated to effect us and our thinking. Anti depressant drugs are a good example of this.

Lets consider a system with some very simple rules. Imagine a checker board for a game, but one which only has white squares. The rules of our game are simple,

if a checker exists on our board then that square is "alive" and if no checker is on a square then that is "dead"
Any live square with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
Any live square with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
Any live square with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any dead square with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live square.

This is essentially the rules of the game called Life by John Conway. It seems very simple, just a set of rules or laws governing what happens to the checkers. It also defines a method of spawning new life and a circumstance where death occurs.

Yet from this simplicity of rules comes something which if we represent it as it moves through time we see something amazing. Sometimes things seem to be alive, like the walker represented here to the left.

The graphic at left is an example of stepping though these rules and showing how this "thing" moves across the board in a simple movement behavior. Sure, its not living, perhaps its not even real ... but then when you look at the biochemistry of just one part of your body (say insulin production) that doesn't look alive either.

The same set of rules with enough pieces to act upon can make amazing things. For example:

this combination of rules and its effect on the pieces creates a system which is self perpetuating and grows forever.

So is this a machine? Well classically we call things made of metal that use energy and go round and round machines. Stuff like this classical representation of a 4 stroke engine. It used to be harder to think of a machine as being something just composed of rules.

It is in fact exactly that when you look at it from an engineering or scientific perspective. The engine is a collection of the rules of thermodynamics, chemistry and physics.

By applying these rules (collecting things together in the correct manner) we can create a machine.

Since the advent of computers it becomes perhaps easier to understand that a system can in fact be just a collection of rules, after all programing languages are actually just descriptions of what to do and what decisions to make.

Clearly computer programs require computers to operate them and equally our government system requires humans to execute the instructions and do the tasks.

So people have become the base hardware for the machine which we run and execute.

If this sounds like something out of the matrix, or something out of fiction which could not be possible; ask yourself this question:

Can you imagine a person doing something that that don't want to do but have to do it because its their job and that they are compelled to do this by law?

so what about reproduction?

Well consider that the English Government started colonies in Australia, when on 13 May, 1787, the First Fleet of 11 ships set sail for Botany Bay. They intended to establish a colony. That would require governance and that governance was clearly going to be modeled on that of England. The English government had successfully spawned a child. This child then became children with the creation of additional colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and so on.

Eventually some years later these colonies consider unification and the creation of a new governing body; the Federal Government was spawned in 1901.

When it comes to rules for the system to have complex morphology have a look at the list of legislations below, each one of them being far more complex in nature than the simple 5 rules which defined the operation of the "Life" simulation above.

If Government is a living thing then clearly Government is a very complex living thing.

It is not however only Governments which can be considered as living things. Companies too (especially under corporate law) are legal entities; they hold property, employ people, and make decisions.

So it would seem that we already have in our midst an organism which lives, yet does not breath and can not be easily touched. It shapes our lives and controls us in ways which expand with the rules which it creates.

If you doubt this then consider this article in a UK news paper where a child is accused of being racist by calling a boy ‘broccoli head’ and another was said to be homophobic for telling a teacher ‘this work is gay’. The article goes on to mention:

Schools are forced to report the language to education authorities, which keep a register of incidents.

and that

In total, 34,000 nursery, primary and secondary pupils were effectively classed as bigots because of anti-bullying rules.

The school can keep the pupil’s name and ‘crime’ on file. The record can be passed from primaries to secondaries or when a pupil moves between schools.

And if schools are asked for a pupil reference by a future employer or a university, the record could be used as the basis for it, meaning the pettiest of incidents has the potential to blight a child for life.

This does not sound like the sort of reaction a human would have on how to treat their kids but yet this is the reaction that the machine has for sorting us out.

What about this? It sounds more like a system protecting its component parts rather than something designed to look after humans.

I believe that there are far more examples and comparisons I could make to support my argument that Government and Corporations are actually living things, but rather than do that I'll leave you with a couple questions.

How do you negociate with such a machine?
Will it listen to you?
and can it be directed by human will?

holding the system responsible or even punishment of the system

If we decide that we don't like the party in control of government and we vote them out, does that change the machinery of government or just put it on a different PC?

As it stands at the moment we have very little understanding of this life form. We as yet are perhaps uncertain that it is a living thing, but make no mistake this thing can control our lives, alter the environment and exert influence.

The simple rule based system above called 'life' created stuff not so much different to observing bacteria growth, look again at the list of rules below which form our Acts of Law in Australia and tell me that does not form the basis for even more complex interactions. Combined with the execution on the human computing platform I think its almost certain we have something alive here.

*List of Australian Commonwealth acts (and don't forget the State legislations either!):

* 1901 - Acts Interpretation Act 1901 (No 2 of 1901)
* 1901 - Customs Act 1901 (No 6 of 1901)
* 1901 - Excise Act 1901 (No 9 of 1901)
* 1901 - Pacific Island Labourers Act (No 16 of 1901)
* 1901 - Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (No 17 of 1901)
* 1902 - Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 (No 8 of 1902)
* 1903 - Judiciary Act 1903 (No 6 of 1903)
* 1903 - Defence Act 1903 (No 20 of 1903)
* 1904 - Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 (No 13 of 1904)
* 1906 - Designs Act 1906 (No 4 of 1906)
* 1908 - Quarantine Act 1908 (No 3 of 1908)
* 1914 - Crimes Act 1914 (No 12 of 1914)
* 1918 - Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 (No 27 of 1918)
* 1928 - Transport Workers Act 1928 (No 37 of 1928)
* 1938 - Passports Act 1938 (No 15 of 1938)
* 1942 - Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942 (No 56 of 1942)
* 1948 - Australian Citizenship Act 1948 (No 83 of 1948)
* 1958 - Migration Act 1958 (No 62 of 1958)
* 1959 - Banking Act 1959 (No 6 of 1959)
* 1960 - National Measurements Act 1960 (137 of 2008) [1]
* 1961 - Marriage Act 1961 (No 12 of 1961)
* 1968 - Copyright Act 1968 (No 63 of 1968)
* 1973 - Insurance Act 1973 (No 76 of 1973)
* 1973 - Seas and Submerged Lands Act 1973 (No 161 of 1973)
* 1974 - Trade Practices Act 1974 (No 51 of 1974)
* 1975 - Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (No 52 of 1975)
* 1975 - Family Law Act 1975 (No 53 of 1975)
* 1976 - Federal Court of Australia Act 1976 (No 156 of 1976)
* 1976 - Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 (No 191 of 1976)
* 1980 - Crimes (Taxation Offences) Act 1980 (No 156 of 1980)
* 1982 - Freedom of Information Act 1982 (No 3 of 1982)
* 1982 - Taxation (Unpaid Company Tax) Assessment Act 1982 (No. 119 of 1982)
* 1984 - Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (No 4 of 1984)
* 1986 - Income Tax Act 1986 (No 108 of 1986)
* 1986 - Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986 (No 125 of 1986)
* 1986 - Australia Act 1986 (No 142 of 1986)
* 1988 - Extradition Act 1988 (No 4 of 1988)
* 1988 - Financial Transaction Reports Act 1988 (No 64 of 1988)
* 1988 - Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988 (No 106 of 1988)
* 1988 - Privacy Act 1988 (No 119 of 1988)
* 1988 - Higher Education Funding Act 1988 (No 2 of 1989)
* 1989 - Lands Acquisition Act 1989 (No 15 of 1989)
* 1990 - Patents Act 1990 (No 83 of 1990)
* 1991 - Social Security Act 1991 (No 46 of 1991)
* 1992 - Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (No 135 of 1992)
* 1992 - Radiocommunications Act 1992 (No 174 of 1992)
* 1993 - Native Title Act 1993 (No 110 of 1993)
* 1996 - Workplace Relations Act 1996 (No 60 of 1996)
* 1997 - Telecommunications Act 1997 (No 47 of 1997)
* 1997 - Euthanasia Laws Act 1997 (No 17 of 1997)
* 1998 - Charter of Budget Honesty Act 1998 (No 22 of 1998)
* 1998 - Native Title Amendment Act 1998 (No 97 of 1998)
* 1999 - Federal Magistrates Act 1999 (No 193 of 1999)
* 2001 - Corporations Act 2001 (No 50 of 2001)
* 2001 - Intelligence Services Act 2001 (No 152 of 2001)
* 2003 - Intelligence Services Amendment Act 2004 (No 57 of 2004)
* 2004 - Corporate Law Economic Reform Program Act 2004 (No 103 of 2004)
* 2004 - Australian anti-terrorism legislation, 2004, incorporating:
o 2004 - Anti-terrorism Act 2004 (No 104 of 2004)
o 2004 - Anti-terrorism Act (No 2) 2004 (No 124 of 2004)
o 2004 - Anti-terrorism Act (No 3) 2004 (No 125 of 2004)
* 2005 - Anti-Terrorism Act 2005 (No 127 of 2005)
* 2005 - Repealed Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 (No 153 of 2005) - (Repealed by Parliament, 2008).
* 2009 - Fair Work Act 2009 (28 of 2009) [2] (Passed as Replacement to repealed Act No 153 of 2005)

other paradigms

2011-01-04T06:56:00.002+02:00

Urban Metabolism has been used by other Authors to assist in the conceptualization of a topic using the metabolic framework as a metaphor. Gandy for instance took a non-functionalist approach to this in his work.

I was thinking earlier today that other such metaphors can be substantial aids to other concepts,for example;

if we regard a city as a complex multi cellular organism, then a possible view of this is that particular roles within the city can be compared to metabolic pathways or even organs.

More complex organisms take advantage of cognition to advance their possibility for success in life. The less complex animals regularly differentiate food from toxins, remember where food and water is and as complexity evolves develop methods specific to hunting particular prey or remembering where food is.

This can be applied to the human situation and to the city.

Clearly the city needs to optimize itself and to adapt to changes, both environmental and those which result from the reorganization or growth of its population.

But does the city always make ideal choices?

Town planning for instance relies on many complex determinations and regulations. These are no different to the rules which govern any chemical reaction. However more than regulation is required as the rules in managing a complex environment outstrip the ability of codification.

I would argue that this is why complex organisms developed cognition.

The city has at its disposal cognitive ability in that the components of the city are actually humans. To be effective this cognition requires memory, and this is something which at the moment is present only in people.

This means that effective use of cognition in the city requires that many of the people who make decisions and determine policy need to have not only knowledge but memory: meaning they have had to work in that role for some decades.

An excellent example of this comes to mind in the damage occurring in Queensland due to flooding at the moment. Much of this damage is occurring due to changes in zoning of areas from flood prone to not flood prone. While in the previous 15 years flooding did not occur, in the previous 30 it did. Those with experience would know that.

energy flows in the city

2009-09-15T21:36:00.011+03:00

identification of a problem

Energy is perhaps one of the most critically significant aspects of metabolism, the simplistic view of food = energy misses the point on how that energy is generated and transported.

While many animals put food into their mouth and digest it in their intestinal tract its is not just the end of the story. If we think of both kinetic and potential energy then chemistry contains potential energy and things like muscles turn that into kinetic energy and places like the brain and neural systems use that potential energy for other processes.

So while energy is perhaps centrally generated (by the gut) it is distributed to locations and then converted locally on demand.

I've been thinking of writing about this topic for a while, but last night I happened to be watching a BBC programe called "Britan from above". This went a little into depth about the issues of managing loads and demands on the electrical system. Starting with an overview of the City of London, they observed all the patterns of activity from the air and remarked how much like a machine it was to observe the way millions of people went about their daily lives "on that tiny island". It immediately piqued my Urban Metabolism mind as being exactly a good description base.

As night fell on the city they rose to altitude to see the network of lights and started to consider the generatoin of electricity. From here they cut to an interview with the senior electrical controller of the UK's electrical grid, where they discussed the nightly ebb and flow of electrical demands within the UK.

This was simply a stunning display of what is wrong with our fundamental paradigm of energy generation and distribution.

Simon (as he was named) sat with a TV on tuned into the "East Enders" waiting for the end of the program so that he could cue in massive additions to available the power grid to cope with peaks in demand of 600 mega watts occurring just because everyone would get up and put the kettle on.

He pulled in power from several hydro electric systems all cued to suddenly inject massive amounts of power into the grid (potentially frying it if not balanced) and even had to pull power from generators in France.

A stunning display of the effects of distributed but synchronised demands.

Imagine for example you're talking on the phone and walking across the road on the phone and suddenly "Bwaaaaaa" a bus blows its horn and you realise "shit, there's a bus coming straight at me"

You suddenly put everything you've got and lurch out of the way. In that instant you drew together almost every muscle you had and pulled quite a peak demand on your system.

You didn't need to cue in power from the bloke next to you, so clearly you're managing your energy much better than the urban metabolism is presently.

the natural solution

So how do we do it ... I mean as metabolic organisms we can't just pull power from external sources when we suddenly need to call upon every muscle of our body. Lets go back to look at our metabolism and we see that while we get energy from consuming food, we transport that energy to be stored in locations (or reservoirs) like fat and perhaps less obviously in blood sugar and Glycogen.

This blood sugar is the energy reserve which is called upon to provide the muscles with the energy (ATP) they need for providing the kinetic energy. There is even a mechanism (the Mitochondria) to keep this going well past the point where Oxygen is available in the system.

This system (unlike the electrical grid) decouples conversion of the energy resource (food for us or coal for the power station) from the delivery of energy at the site. I think its fair to say that almost all organisms from the simplest single cell organisms through to mammals follow this strategy.

solutions suggested by this analysis

For our city, electricity (not APT) is the currency of energy. We convert the chemical energy stored in our fuels using a chemical process (burning), a nuclear process (using thermal capture and steam to make the conversion) or even capture of kinetic energy in the form of hydro electrical generation. What ever way we use we get our energy as electricity there. From there we distribute it to the homes or businesses (the cells) via a network.

Economies of scale mean that its better to make the conversion to electricity in the power station and transport it to us, so learly what we need to do is store that energy to use it when we need it not just when its made.

A quick review of the electrical industry will soon reveal that its not a problem to generate the average amounts of energy we need, its just dealing with the spikes which is the problem. Some sort of reservoir of energy at our homes would be ideal.

Well, that doesn't take much thinking as we have had rechargable batteries for well over a century. These can provide both deep cycling (long discharge) and support many cycles of charge and discharge.

A system like this takes (say) 5% of your maximum demand all the time and provides the extra resources of energy for the shorter times when you actually need them. Times like:

when the lights are all turned on around the town as people wake up to go to work,
when the fridge motor kicks in to start cooling down your fridge
when you start cooking dinner or boiling the jug (if you aren't diversifying your energy already by using Gas that is...)

This technology is essentially the same as a UPS or that which is used to store the output of a solar power system would, when connected to the grid, essentially:

take 90% of the fluctuations out of the system,
make management and planning of the infrastructure easier
be more compact and cheaper than those used in Solar Electrical Systems (because they could be trickle charged all the time)

Considering that many power companies actually sell "off peak" electricity at much lower than normal rates anyway, although this is so far aimed at just electrical hot water systems.

This also brings with it an added benefits of;

security: whole regions could be 'blacked out' without impact for short time and damage to the grid would not be as catastrophic
capacity building: enhanced knowledge and awareness of power usage by each householder will likely result in more interest / knowledge in efficient behavior
economic benefits: a more distributed "power economy" would also result in the generation of some new long term jobs perhaps in the maintenance of home storage systems

I'm actually surprised that people are not thinking of doing this already ...

initial questions

One of the first things which comes to my mind is what will be the issues with storage cells, their lifecycle and disposal?

Urban Metabolism: filling gaps in analysis

2009-08-25T16:57:00.011+03:00

Urban metabolism, Ecological Footprints and Material Flow Analysis

Town planning is often a collection of disparate disciplines which are grouped together as much by the expedient of cost, as for any recognition that each section is actually related to the other.

For instance water supply and waste water may or may not be under the same management in a town or city. Sometimes they are even given out to entirely separate organisations by sub-contract. If you haven't thought they are related then at the very least there is a cause and effect relationship as every time you turn on a tap almost all of that water will end up nearly directly into waste water. Especially if you're:

having a shower
washing your hands
doing the dishes (even in a dish washer)
flusing your toilet (yes, it fills up from the tap)
preparing or cooking food some pasta or noodles for instance

If you have trouble imagining this, put the plug into your sink, don't flush your toilet and block up your shower hole for a day. Imagine how it would be after a week. I think you can quickly see how important these things are.

Looking around in nature you'll find animals and plants all living together. Forests don't look dirty even though there's no taps, no one takes away the garbage or has a toilet. Mainly this is because the population density of the creatures which live in the forest is within the 'carrying capacity' of the environment. Carrying capacity is part of the method called "Ecological foot printing" which works out how much land is needed to provide for and assimilate the waste products of a city (or the urban footprint). Its a really interesting and revealing look out how much space our city really takes up.

We may think that our city sprawls over some dozens of square kilometers and we may be concerned about the impact of that on the environment. Wackernagel & Rees however in their book "Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth" show us that it extends to require much more than we actually see.

Knowing and understanding this is important in grasping our influence on the environment, but it doesn't really help us find ways to reduce it ... other than just saying "gosh, maybe we should use less"

What has this got to do with metabolism?

Consider for a moment two things one is your own body and the other is a large group of single cell algae living in a lake (say, here in Finland), both humans and algae are independent organisms which are alive. People however are made up of many different cells, while the algae are just clusters of exactly the same cell.

But the density of cells that makes up your body is enormous compared to what we would consider to be the most dense algal bloom in the lake.

In the small area of your body are millions of cells all living in just the same manner as the bunch of Algae on the lake. The algae could not ever hope to have the same density of population (a measure of success in some ways) because they have individual metabolisms confined to their own cells, your body on the other hand has an integrated metabolism which exists over and above the metabolism of any given cell in your body.

Key in this is that you have a circulatory system to carry nutrients and oxygen to the most inner parts of your body, and also to carry out waste.

Since the Algae do not have this they would start to die in their own waste products If one single system (such as your kidneys) were to stop working. I'm sure you would find your own body producing wastes well above what the cells can tolerate. If you've ever experience a power outage in your city, or had some water break down in your building you see pretty quickly that the same things seem to apply there too.

However it is exactly how our early cities, in medieval periods were built and operated. The European cities were quit filthy, often riddled with disease and the stink of garbage because there were no utilities such as waste disposal. In fact its not hard to imagine what it would be like to live in this manner now, as all you have to do is visit any large city in the developing world where budget is not spent on this sort of infrastructure.

So it is not just a loose metaphor to compare the metabolism of a city to that of your own body. At a different scale a city is indeed a collection of cells, each household can be thought of as a cell. Each apartment in a block, each home, each building is connected together by a network of pipes and wires which bring in water, energy, communication and dispose of wastes generated by those cells.

Without that we would be living in the wastes we produce ... sort of like these places.

Urban metabolism vs Material Flow

Material Flow analysis is a tool for understanding and tracking the flow of stuff and energy into and out of an ecosystem / city / environment. This is handy stuff, but in many ways its just inventory. It can be surprising to learn just how much and of what goes in and out.

Consider a basic analysis of water in the house, some 140 liters of water is needed by each person per day in the house, and you then need to dispose of about the same amount (yes, we keep very little of what water we put into our mouths). A curious researcher may extend this to wonder about energy, and wonder how much energy is used by our community. What Materials Flow doesn't provide is a basis for logically relating these informations.

For example if we consider the metabolism of water But it doesn't just end there, getting water to you requires energy, as does removing waste water. Processing waste water is even more costly than the process of carting it away. In fact in a typical urban situation the cost of waste water removal and processing is about 75% of the costs.

Yes that's right. To give a concrete example from a large Australian east coast city in 2005:

disposal of sewage accounted for 78% of the electricity usage of
while supply and treatment only required 22%.

With only 67KWh consumed per property in water supply yet 255KWh per property in waste water treatment per year.
Part of the reason for this is the linear flow of water, and part of it is related to our historical use of gravity to supply water, thus assisting the costs. Dams are a major supply of water in countries like Australia.

This may be different in countries like Finland which rely more on ground water (which must be pumped up from the ground). Perhaps there the water supply costs would be higher as gravity is not really being employed to assist.

Either way it follows the pattern in the figure to the left of drawing water from the source, treating it and providing it for use. Then after use waste water is treated (thank god we've started doing that, many places still dispose of sewage raw) and then disposed of into the environment again.

Putting a metabolism spin onto this view, lets consider the city as something like a tree. A collection of cells, depending on water from the roots and a system of pipes (xylem) to transport the water to where its needed like the leaves (households and properties).

In this way we get a model rather like this one on the left.

It seems similar until you realize that plants go to great lengths to stop water loss at the leaves. They have mechanisms to prevent it (such as closing the stomata). As well water is reused in their metabolism as a normal practice. Plants are actually so effective with their metabolism of water that if they have CAM metabolism they can get by on almost no water inputs at all.

This is where making using a model for analysis which makes comparisons to natural systems brings its other advantages over simple scientific analysis. It facilitates comparison with already working and proven successful systems.

Putting metabolism to use

Could we reuse water?

Sure, what would stop you from saving the shower water to water your plants (why put good high quality treated drinking water onto the plants), or your could save it to use to flush your toilet.

If you did more than one load of washing at a time then rinse water could be reused to mix with detergent in the next wash cycle ...

all this stuff has been and is done by people who live in places where water is in short supply. Heck if you've ever stayed in a cottage or gone camping where you have to draw water from a well I'm sure you've learned to be frugal with it.

As well municipalities are now starting to treat waste water to higher qualities and using it themselves and distributing it to other users for non-drinking purposes (like watering local parks / golf courses / washing roads and dust control on dirt roads.

Metabolically on site water reuse is different to the reuse of water collected by the town and redistributed.

Water reused on site like the washing water requires far less energy, remember the costs of waste water disposal above. But rather than simply dispose of it we can still put it to use.

I've represented this in the diagram to the left.

This not only makes greater use of the water resources we have, but reduces greatly the impacts on the environment of disposing of the wastes.

Following practices like this we can transform our cities into much cleaner places for us just like our kidneys transform the concentrations of waste products in our blood increasing our bodys ability to tolerate the dense cellular population.

the significance of Urban Metabolism

2009-08-19T15:29:00.003+03:00

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)

View Larger Map

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.

what kind of organism is a city

2009-04-24T09:17:00.005+03:00

Cities are complex things and forgetting for a moment about the human social interactions there are so many things and places and interactions with the environment that make it perhaps better represented by a complex multicellular organism.

If you are unfamiliar with this line of thinking, consider Conway's game of Life. Which is a basic simple set of rules on a checker board. The rules are simple, based on any random (or chosen) starting of checkers on the board which squares will remain covered, which will "die". The graphic at left is an example of stepping though these rules and showing how this "thing" moves across the board in a simple motile behavior. Sure, its not living, perhaps its not real ... but then when you look at the biochemistry of just one part of your body (say insulin production) that doesn't look alive either.

Given that Cities can't easily move a static organism is perhaps best which is why I often choose a plant for my comparisons. The interesting thing is though that most plants get their energy needs from the sun while cities rarely get their energy from the sun (although this is changing). So perhaps cities can be compared with the Monotrope family of plants.

These plants are quite unusual in that they rely on relationships with Fungi to survive (and so they're called Myco Heterotrophs). I think this quote from Wikipedia sums up the city well enough too.

Myco-heterotrophs can therefore be seen as ultimately being epiparasites, since they take energy from fungi that in turn get their energy from vascular plants.^[3] ^[4]

This isn't far from a city, as the energy for a city is mostly from the burning of fossil fuels (most electricity is generated from burning fossil fuels) but some solar and some animal power still serves.

multicellular organisms

2009-04-21T09:21:00.006+03:00

I think one of the key observations in biology is to discover how complex single cell organisms actually are. Protists in particular are quite complex creatures with distinct observable behavior and complex morphology.

As humans we're clearly multi-cellular organisms, but an interesting view on this is that as humans we are complex members of an even more complex society.

Just as our bodies are composed of organs, which are in turn composed by cells (all of which share a common DNA) our society is composed of organizations and bodies (which essentially consist of rules and definitions) and bound into corporeal form by the law and a common factor of humans (us) to be the 'agents' which carry out the functions of the organization.

If this seems a bit 'far fetched' reflect for a moment on the fact that we regularly describe organisations using vocabulary which comes from nearly the same set as that which we use to describe organisms. Even the nature of the words are similar:

organisation <=> organism

However as the organizations and bodies do not (as yet) think for themselves they rely on us to do their thinking, and so it is valuable if we can think as an organism not as a cell when working within the organisational roles we have.

This viewpoint is one such viewpoint which is facilitated by Urban Metabolism and lends itself nicely to examine (for instance) the operations of a city.

If you're finding it hard to comprehend this try looking at a wonderful new tool like Google Maps, pick a city which you know, and zoom in until you start to see blocks beginning to be separated by streets. It doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to begin seeing streets as vessels of transportation and if you could see the reticulated water and sewage system overlaid on that map then you'd clearly see this as a vascular system.

Viewed this way its easy to see how the organisation of a city can resemble the organisation of a complex multicellular organisation / ism.

Brisbane City at Night
slowing down our time scale shows the cars on the road as like streams though a vascular system (in this case the road). Like all models one of the purposes for representation is to facilitate our understanding of things (not just to have fun), because we (as humans) seem to have a lot of problems understanding what it is that we can't see.

Just look at recent biological history, before we had microscopes and understood that there were micro-organisms we invented all manner of concepts to explain their effects. Without the right way of looking at things we struggle to understand what may from another perspective appear obvious.

Because water (and sustainable use of water) is my personal topic of interest I see great benefits in examining the cities use of water from this perspective.

Multicellular organisms are composed of single cells, which bear great resemblance to eukaryotic organisms. However significantly they can exist in much greater densities than single cell organisms are able to. For example, in our own bodies there are something like more than 50 trillion cells (that's 50 million million folks). This is concentrated in quite a dense area and if it were not for some complex specialisation of roles and development of systems then they would simply not be able to survive in this density.

Now look at human development, as we begun to develop the world around us (to be more suitable) we added structures and created environments to shelter us and look nice.

We wanted gardens and cover from the rain, dry place for bedding (away from pests and parasites) as well us being social creatures we kept living together in communities much like this example.

But just like the problems which a single cell organism faces this all starts to fall apart when population densities grow. Without a system of planning, a method of waterprovision and proper waste disposal we move quickly to areas which look more like this:

Which are no longer nice, no longer separate us from disease and parasites and in fact open us up to problems.

Its easy to forget that Europe was much like this in the period before the Industrial revolution. Its easy to take for granted all the adaptations and changes we have made as a society to enable us to live together in larger and larger groups (could anyone have imagined the population of London being over 7 million people (that's nearly 5 thousand people per square kilometer). Without our sophisticated systems of water provision and waste disposal we would not be able to be living in such a way.

This brings me back to my diagram of a tree (representing plants).

Much like a city a plant is a complex multicellular organism which depends on the environment for its water supply. It gathers water through the roots and channels it through vessels to the sites of metabolic activity, but unlike a city a plant is very particular on how it manages its water. Water out of the system is mainly losses through expiration losses metabolism of water in the Criric Acid cycle.

Both the City and the plant use water and depend on it for the existence, but the tree however is not only more frugal with its water, but has a much greater diversity of mechanisms for reducing water losses and coping with reductions in supply of water.

So, what has this got to do with administration of a city?

Firstly it has to do with choice. A main purpose of science is to study the world in order to be able to make accurate predictions; like "will that bridge collapse if 30 people walk across together". Much of science and our engineering knowledge has come from observations of nature in just this sort of way. By making an analogy (or building a model) with a natural system we can look to see what works in nature and what doesn't.

For example if a plant places all its dependence on water from what it obtains via the roots what happens if one year there isn't enough water in the environment?

Well, some plants will die, some plants will diminish their growth, perhaps only some parts dying.

If such a thing happens to a city (not having enough water) what will reaction of the city metabolism be?

Is it acceptable for parts of the city to die? Remember, that's people we're talking about now, not just cells.

Such a thing can happen and has happened many times in human history. In recent memory the cities have been towns and they could either ship in more water (essentially extending their root system successfully) or they could diminish in size and perhaps even vanish off the map (with the people moving away). If the city is substantially large, and has importance to the broader community then other solutions must be found. These can be expensive.

Such an example can be found in South East Queensland with the 'drought' of 2002/2003 when the city of the Gold Coast came within very close margins to having a failure of the city water supply (IE the dam nearly dried up). The response was to extend pipelines to other dams in the region and undertake an expensive water grid upgrade in order to source more water. As well restrictions were placed on the use of water by the residents.

Essentially in metabolic terms the reaction was control metabolic activity (with economic consequences) and attempt to extend the 'root system'.

The first strategy is not something which is by any vision sustainable, and the second worked in the short term until the water supply started to dry up in more of the region meaning that other 'organisms' could not lend a hand any more.

At this point two strategy's were considered:

obtain more water
recycle more water

Strategy 1 would be essentially attempting to further extend the root systems, and the approach of generating water by obtaining water from the ocean. While this is a plentiful supply of water it brings with it a problem: salt. The resulting "desalination" plant proposal has to this point in time (some 5 years after its mooting) failed to contribute to the water supply, cost many millions of dollars and will ultimately result in increasing the energy needs of the city by a very large and significant factor. Hey, this has a metabolic equivalent too!

Strategy 2 seems to be attractive, but there are a number of legislational issues which encumber this (in place for good reasons such as human health).

A quick look around the plant kingdom suggests a few other methods for solving the problems after all Mangroves (once so common on the Gold Coast) live in salty water and and Bromeliads still common in the rainforest (and hey, who can forget such a prominent example of a Promelaid, the Big Pineapple, if you've visited the sunshine coast) provide excellent examples of what a plant can with less water as well as how to get more when there is nothing available to the roots.

Summary

Hopefully I've been able to provide an example of how urban metabolism can be used not only as a metaphor for the logical grouping of city needs and wastes for analysis (such as material flow analysis, which is something which perhaps also stems from Wolmans works). Gradually I hope that I have been able to share a little of the concepts and advantages confered by the metabolic viewpoint for systems planning.

in the beginning

2009-02-08T09:14:00.001+02:00

Abel Wolman in 1965 published "The metabolism of cities" in Scientific American and coined a term which remains helpful in exploring and understanding how we design cities, as well as how to make them better.

At its most simple level the concept of urban metabolism compares the requirements of energy and resources of a city to the metabolic requirements of any organism. For example just as a tree requires water (mainly obtained by the roots) for its metabolism (mainly in the leaves) a city requires water which is used by the citizens mostly in their properties.

In the diagram at left I've shown a comparison of this overlaid on a sketch of a tree.

Water comes into the system and is transported to the locations of metabolic activity. Indeed its remarkable how closely the water pipes of a city resemble the Xylem of the tree in the job of transporting water from the water source to where it is used.

Like any model, having something concrete to compare our experiences provides a basis for thinking about it and gives our minds something to compare it with. This then facilitates making observations and comparisons from the real world (also called nature) where things have been going on for longer than we can imagine. There we only find systems that work, so rather than apply trial and error we can copy what we know already works.

In the pages of this blog intend to discuss things which relate to urban metabolism as well as develop the idea further. I encourage any positive feedback and will attempt to publish any comments and credit those contributors.