Summary: The Material City

Read the summary and the most important questions on The Material City

• Introduction

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• What are examples of ecosystem services?

  Provisioning services- Clean air and CO2 sequestration
  Regulating services - Regulating the water balance: green roofs Essential given the increase of extreme precipitation and fewer permeable surface
  Cultural services - Urban greenery makes people feel at home, and provides a spiritual and esthetic value

• the city system and urban metabolism

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• How do we control the material production?

  A new (sustainable) metabolic transition
  
  The future cities need to provide adequate:
  -housing
  -access to food
  -employment
  -education and cultural services
  - health services
  -drinking water, sewage, and waste management
  - roads, transport and communication
  - clean air and recreation

• How do we understand the city system?

  - Urban ecosystem services (urban dwellers depend on the productive and assimilative capacities of ecosystems well beyond their boundaries)
  - urban metabolism
  - urban political ecology (system of institutions, power dynamics, impacts of human dealin gwith nature and using nature from institutional and organitional perspective)

• experimentation transitions

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• What is resilience in the context of the city?

  The ability of a system to return to status.
  For cities:
  

  • climate change; infrastructure of cities, build infrastructure (buildings, streets, etc).
  • transitions in the weather; how cities electricity (hot cities in the summer > more airconditioning systems> impact of functioning of the resilience)
  • floods and how cities react to that

• What is the role of cities?

  Cities are often portrayed as centres of innovation, and have provided important leadership in mitigating and adapting to threat posed by climate change. Therefore,
  cities play a vital role for sustainability transitions. Many new initiatives and interventions to counteract unsustainable behaviour and practices have originated in cities!
  Cities can be ''agents of transformative change''. This is because of all the experiments that take place in the city, that are exported to other cities (sustainable transition economy).

• how can we say concrete what Urban experimentation is?

  1. A process in which you have materials, bodies, and spaces that are limited.
  2. you start small
  3. you have the flexibility to adapt to changes in the physical space. A slow controlled transformation.
  4. Then, you see how the system around this experiment changes.
     
  5. This experiment tries to highlight aspects of innovations that are unexpected.

• What is a example of sustainable initiatves?

  Lund University- Greening the Economy
  
  Urban living-labs
  - engagement: try to engage the local people and find together: what are the drivers of innovation and motives that stimulate people to interact with one another in the community?
  - exploration; 
  - experiments
  
  Evaluate
  entrepreneurship

• What are urban living labs?

  Sites in cities (streets, buildings, districts) used to design, test, and learn from social and technical innovation in integrated ways.

• How can be cities in the global south make an impact?

  Cities in the global south are also affected. Indigenous knowledge. Much of the challenges and opportunities of urbanization are in the global south. 
  
  Cities in the global south have strong imperatives/need to act in those cities, and unique but often overlooked capacity, to innovate and experiment for sustainability.
  
  there is a silver lining:
  lack of a formal institutional set-up can open space for innovation and experimentation.
  
  strong social supporting networks, informal economies, and resilience built around strong family ties and community interactions are fertile ground for grassroots experimentation and innovation.

• What can we learn of slums (the paradox of slums)?

  A lot of grassroots innovations take place there. We see slums as islands of misery and insalubrity - and they are. But they are also places where they're experimenting with innovative ways of saving resources and energy. 
  opportunity and inspiration > reusing materials/ exchange of resources  > cities as urban mines.