just for a second close your eyes and
think about nature or the concept of
nature very intensely what’s the first
image that comes to your mind
who is picturing trees or forests for
instance can you raise your hands oh
that’s that’s quite a few I think it’s
probably more than half of you right
how about lakes or in contaminated
Alpine landscapes anyone like mountains
are popular too but not that much right
so how about algae blooming for instance
like this one pictured by satellite in
the Baltic Sea anyhow the blooming guy
okay okay so mycelium networks where are
the microbiologists here there must be
at least one okay let’s see if this will
change by the end of the presentation
right so you may wonder why I’m talking
about this these things and things I’m
supposed to level cities but I think
today to really investigate the the idea
of future cities we need to start from
nature or better from the modern concept
of nature that we all share and that is
because modernity has brought us a very
fundamental idea and that is that
bacteria or microorganisms are dangerous
and needs to be removed from our urban
environment so at the root of modernity
is the notion of sanitation right and
you know to be fair this started even
before think about Haussmann’s
renovation of for instance Paris so the
the Shamsul is a this big Bulevar
cutting through the dirty medieval town
or for instance the first public park in
the East London a Victoria Park open to
the public to to give them some fresh
hair a tutu to breathe right so these
examples really tell us that that
sanitation is really into our the
shaping of our series but I think the
modern moment really took this to the
next level and turn it into a style so
this
clean nice modern looking surfaces of of
modern architecture came to symbolize
the humans rational ability to frame
nature and especially the the most
threatening aspects of it and and at the
scale of the city this rational attitude
was brought into removing or moving
functions of productions like energy
productions or the treatment of waste
outside of the city centers technically
separating them from our living quarters
or leisure areas so to prevent
contamination of course but at the same
time the effects was to remove them from
our sight and so I think at a more
fundamental level also from our
consciousness so this is the origin of
the modern city what I call the
metabolically linear city
that means resources come in on one side
waste goes out of the other side
we don’t know don’t care too much about
where they’re coming from and when they
are going it’s basically up to the
biosphere to to you know do the rest of
the work and and I think we all more or
less now aware that as we are
approaching a four billion actually we
are beyond four billion people living in
dense urban environments globally but
the strain that this is putting on the
biosphere is enormous and and some of
its ecosystems are being pushed outside
of equilibrium let’s say in the kind of
tipping point but yet we fail to act
this is the news everyday news you see
you know us pulling out of the Paris
treaty Mayor of London from you know
supposedly a progressive mayor still
struggling to implement far-reaching
policies and why is that
I often ask myself why is that and and
of course there are multiple reasons
political economical Exeter but I think
one very important and often overlooked
reason is really nature or our modern
concept of nature and I think that you
know we came to believe that the the
rationally organized habitat that we
consider our our leave
environment really applies a stand to to
the whole biosphere in other words we
have developed a machine like model of
nature I believe which is you know
chronic grounded in the ideas of growth
of prosperity of equilibrium right and
so we think about regaining series of
Rinat realizing forests as if such easy
fixes can be at all possible like you
know at some point we we would be able
to anyway plant a few trees and sort of
rebalance the biosphere before it
completely falls apart right but the
problem is the biosphere doesn’t work
like that
natural is a is a nonlinear complex
dynamic system that means that there are
millions or trillions of little feedback
loops interacting one with the other and
of course there is growth there is a
life on one side but there is also
dissolution destruction digestion and
death on the other side and and these
components are fundamental to the
circularity of natural ecosystems right
so of course this process is tend to
happen in the dark you know they smell
they generate in us this kind of
atavistic fear of contagion you know in
that sense we we much prefer removing
them from from our consciousness they
they have become this a kind of dark
side of ecology some people call them
right but at the same time scientists
are discovering everyday the exceptional
properties of such microorganisms and
things that happen at these micro scales
really is what makes possible to turn
what we understand as waste or pollution
and and sort of back into a useful raw
material nutrients for the nest next
cycle of growth to happen so I believe
this kind of hidden world is the key the
the missing link to our future a
metabolically circular City so we took
this vision together with my team in
Tallinn which is the capital of Estonia
for a project called Anthropocene Island
and the project site is a very peculiar
Peninsula at the the outskirts of the
city used to be a soviet military base
which was abandoned after Estonians
independence and as often happens in
this case it was recolonized by nature
and birds especially migrating birds
found it a sweet spot for for nesting
and resting and more recently it was
also the site of the main wastewater
treatment plant
of Tallinn right in the middle of the
peninsula ever since that happened a
kind of struggle or battle came up
between the management of the plant and
local ecologist or bird watchers
claiming the plant is contaminating
their natural reserves I think this is a
kind of classic case of you know kind of
green versus dark ecology right but what
is particularly interesting and we just
almost by accident found out when
visiting the site is that birds don’t
seem to look at it in that way you see
in this piece of footage that birds are
quite happy to to hang around in the
kind of warm and nutritious waters of
the wastewater treatment plant and even
seems to play with the kind of heavy
machinery there right so in that sense
we decided to take let’s say the the the
bird perspective and and and and take it
as a starting point for a speculative
project about the future of tannin and
this non anthropocentric approach as i
should call it became the topic of this
year styling architecture biennale do
you see the main exhibition here in the
back and we we really wanted to make it
into a kind of lab a kind of collective
project on the future city and and we
invited eleven groups between scientists
artists architects working together on
this proposal and the idea the basic
idea of this proposal was to imagine a
new city model that would grow from the
wastes of contemporary Tallinn
right so almost like the other way
around as
it normally happens and integrate
microorganisms in the built environment
within the built environment so that bio
digestion could become the founding
principle of the new city the the
proposal started by imagining or
imagining the peninsula as a kind of
distributed habitat where little bio
digesting gardens as we may call them
would receive the wastewater from
Tallinn and begin to process it the
process would obviously generate a
surplus of heat and nutrients which
would begin to create peculiar niches
peculiar micro climates right and and
that in turn in the kind of feedback big
feedback loop model that the dista
McCulloh biosphere will begin to
generate the possibility for an expanded
the ecosystem new species settling in
increasing the photosynthesis increasing
the level of biomass that can be
produced and eventually of course from
that new resources could be fed back to
the city of tallinn itself so what we
would create is a new city that is in a
way symbiotic of the existing city right
but another interesting aspects of this
project was the the kind of vision
obviously is populated by different
systems of the human beings that are
perhaps at the core of it but at the
same level of importance I think we have
microorganisms we have machines we have
birds we have a kind of communication
systems and so we started to think about
this new collective group as a sort of
form of bio citizenship right so we
understand this collective as a kind of
a new group that would found the this
kind of metabolically circular bio
darling and this idea of bio citizenship
let’s say of this kind of extended
understanding of who is participating in
the shaping of our cities is a kind of
key notion around of one of our longest
project which is called urban alga farm
the basic idea of the project is to
create or to design habitats for
microalgae micro organism like micro
algae to grow
part of the building envelope right this
project was running for more than days
running for more than 10 years and and
the interesting one of the key aspects
of it is that we did this framework
microalgae are not just simply
photosynthesizing the energy from the
Sun like they normally do but they are
also fed by the output of our built
environment especially co2 which is one
of the fundamental building blocks so in
that sense they become a kind of active
layer that exists across the metabolism
of both natural environment and urban
environment so in other words they they
become in my mind a kind of connecting
layer between between the city and the
biosphere and of course there are
multiple interactions that can be
activated by the intelligence of these
colonies and this is an example of a
public space we created in milano where
all of a sudden new interferences and
new collaborations between this micro
world and the world of architecture can
can emerge and as I mentioned before
microorganisms actually grow faster
within our artificial habitats and this
is because they are nurtured by the
emissions of our building the heat the
excess heat the co2 we constantly
produce it’s actually for them nutrients
it pushes it from us as their growth and
in turn the biomass that they generate
becomes source of energy source of
nutrients for for us and and for our
city so this again is a new kind of
symbiotic relationship that we can begin
to imagine and that you know it’s it’s a
completely turning upside down the
paradigm of modernity so we start seeing
building as something that is not
necessarily finished when we end
construction and we leave the building
site but the building itself becomes a
system that evolves continuously and our
job as designers is to imagine really
new urban topologies that can
accommodate these this new expanded
notion of citizenship and this year has
been very
exciting for us because that’s when we
completed our biotech Hut project in
Astana is our first permanent
biotechnological building and it’s of
course the dimension the size of it is
more or less 180 square meters in plan
it can host a large families with
friends and so on and especially it it
has a system to to host one thousand and
six hundred liters of channel bacteria
of living cultures of channel bacteria
and the culture grows within these glass
tubes that you see there and like
integrated within the skin of the
building and in an optimal condition the
building produces approximately one
kilogram of dry algae per day and this
may not sound much to you but actually
it’s equivalent to one liter of biofuel
which releases approximately 10 kilowatt
hour of energy that’s what a UK average
home needs to power its system so in
other words we have created a system a
model of self-sufficiency of circularity
in terms of energy but that’s of course
wasn’t enough for us you know one of the
crucial topic I mentioned to you is
really to create a deeper relationship
is not just absorbing our waste but is
feeding us back right and we are going
to become five billion urban dwellers in
in 10-15 years how do we feed an LT diet
– – – all of this population and
chlorella for instance is one of the
most popular microalgae around it
contains 60% of vegetable proteins that
means the biotech Hut could actually
produce 600 grams of protein that feeds
12 adults and if we compare it to our
meat based protein diet requires 8 cows
to do that so it is a substantial amount
if you think about that we can
completely substitute this this stream
if we wanted to and of course eight cows
and eat greenhouse gases maintain the
farming industry is the bigger and meter
of greenhouse gases more than any CV
combined together that’s not many people
know about that right so we not only
use that but as I said before microalgae
absorbs you to to grow so the biotech
Hut absorbs 2 kilograms per day which is
equivalent of 32 trees so again if we
compare it with with something we know
it’s like having a kind of family-run
micro forest integrated within our
building skin so I I told you all these
numbers just to give you a kind of
spatial and material understanding of
really the potential the efficiency of
integrating micro cultures in the in the
built environment in the urban fabric
and this is obviously a crucial
transition because as I said before that
means turn in the urban fabric into it
is their ability to synthetize resources
so it goes from being just a container
of functions right how it was in in some
modern parodying of the machine for
living and it becomes itself a dynamic
process of production a living machine
and in the world in the realm of living
machines things are very different we
all know it living machines can
synthesize information matter energy in
a way it is completely different from
the way we actually generate and
distribute energy today so this is the
key from moving from this linear
metabolism I show you before to a kind
of multiple interlocking circular
metabolisms and this also has a very
strong impact on the shape of our cities
right it’s about kind of moving from
centralized grids which are the one we
we are used to today going from main
power station dams wind farms to all of
our houses so this image of the tree
again the centralized grid – distributed
networks distributed networks mean each
one of our houses parks public space
arenas is going to become both a
producer and a consumer of energy and
there will be continuous exchanges
between one another and when my team we
try to visualize this model to study
this model what kind of intelligence we
will need to make this to make this
happen and and we in the last four years
we started to work with this really
unique creature which
called slime mold you see it in action
here in the video it’s a protest a
single-cell organisms which contain
within his membrane thousands or
millions of nuclei in the Plasmodium
phase which is the one you see here the
nuclei are a float and interact one with
the other through biochemical reactions
and what is fascinating is that they
leave traces in the environment which in
time accumulated to to create a
distributed this partial memory of the
interaction this is the key for the kind
of intelligence that this this organism
is able to develop which is called
emerging collective intelligence and and
in that sense it’s it’s it’s beautiful
that it’s really through this multiple
interaction that that something emerges
and you know we developed apparatus to
try to record and understand these
aspects like the one that you see here
developed together with bio artist
Heather Barnett and and of course when
you see them from from from from far it
there is similarities to to some of our
urban networks which is fascinating but
in this case there is no designer
there is no engineer there is no
architect there is no central
intelligence it’s really the product of
emergent collective intelligence at work
so to conclude this journey in urban
microbiology I want to try to repeat the
little experiment we did the beginning
and see if we get some different results
so if you close your eyes again just for
a second and think yourself as an
ecologist as an activist fighting let’s
say to save our planet from the
catastrophe of climate change and who
would you rather be a tree hugger like
this ones or a zombie thank you very
much [Applause]
think about nature or the concept of
nature very intensely what’s the first
image that comes to your mind
who is picturing trees or forests for
instance can you raise your hands oh
that’s that’s quite a few I think it’s
probably more than half of you right
how about lakes or in contaminated
Alpine landscapes anyone like mountains
are popular too but not that much right
so how about algae blooming for instance
like this one pictured by satellite in
the Baltic Sea anyhow the blooming guy
okay okay so mycelium networks where are
the microbiologists here there must be
at least one okay let’s see if this will
change by the end of the presentation
right so you may wonder why I’m talking
about this these things and things I’m
supposed to level cities but I think
today to really investigate the the idea
of future cities we need to start from
nature or better from the modern concept
of nature that we all share and that is
because modernity has brought us a very
fundamental idea and that is that
bacteria or microorganisms are dangerous
and needs to be removed from our urban
environment so at the root of modernity
is the notion of sanitation right and
you know to be fair this started even
before think about Haussmann’s
renovation of for instance Paris so the
the Shamsul is a this big Bulevar
cutting through the dirty medieval town
or for instance the first public park in
the East London a Victoria Park open to
the public to to give them some fresh
hair a tutu to breathe right so these
examples really tell us that that
sanitation is really into our the
shaping of our series but I think the
modern moment really took this to the
next level and turn it into a style so
this
clean nice modern looking surfaces of of
modern architecture came to symbolize
the humans rational ability to frame
nature and especially the the most
threatening aspects of it and and at the
scale of the city this rational attitude
was brought into removing or moving
functions of productions like energy
productions or the treatment of waste
outside of the city centers technically
separating them from our living quarters
or leisure areas so to prevent
contamination of course but at the same
time the effects was to remove them from
our sight and so I think at a more
fundamental level also from our
consciousness so this is the origin of
the modern city what I call the
metabolically linear city
that means resources come in on one side
waste goes out of the other side
we don’t know don’t care too much about
where they’re coming from and when they
are going it’s basically up to the
biosphere to to you know do the rest of
the work and and I think we all more or
less now aware that as we are
approaching a four billion actually we
are beyond four billion people living in
dense urban environments globally but
the strain that this is putting on the
biosphere is enormous and and some of
its ecosystems are being pushed outside
of equilibrium let’s say in the kind of
tipping point but yet we fail to act
this is the news everyday news you see
you know us pulling out of the Paris
treaty Mayor of London from you know
supposedly a progressive mayor still
struggling to implement far-reaching
policies and why is that
I often ask myself why is that and and
of course there are multiple reasons
political economical Exeter but I think
one very important and often overlooked
reason is really nature or our modern
concept of nature and I think that you
know we came to believe that the the
rationally organized habitat that we
consider our our leave
environment really applies a stand to to
the whole biosphere in other words we
have developed a machine like model of
nature I believe which is you know
chronic grounded in the ideas of growth
of prosperity of equilibrium right and
so we think about regaining series of
Rinat realizing forests as if such easy
fixes can be at all possible like you
know at some point we we would be able
to anyway plant a few trees and sort of
rebalance the biosphere before it
completely falls apart right but the
problem is the biosphere doesn’t work
like that
natural is a is a nonlinear complex
dynamic system that means that there are
millions or trillions of little feedback
loops interacting one with the other and
of course there is growth there is a
life on one side but there is also
dissolution destruction digestion and
death on the other side and and these
components are fundamental to the
circularity of natural ecosystems right
so of course this process is tend to
happen in the dark you know they smell
they generate in us this kind of
atavistic fear of contagion you know in
that sense we we much prefer removing
them from from our consciousness they
they have become this a kind of dark
side of ecology some people call them
right but at the same time scientists
are discovering everyday the exceptional
properties of such microorganisms and
things that happen at these micro scales
really is what makes possible to turn
what we understand as waste or pollution
and and sort of back into a useful raw
material nutrients for the nest next
cycle of growth to happen so I believe
this kind of hidden world is the key the
the missing link to our future a
metabolically circular City so we took
this vision together with my team in
Tallinn which is the capital of Estonia
for a project called Anthropocene Island
and the project site is a very peculiar
Peninsula at the the outskirts of the
city used to be a soviet military base
which was abandoned after Estonians
independence and as often happens in
this case it was recolonized by nature
and birds especially migrating birds
found it a sweet spot for for nesting
and resting and more recently it was
also the site of the main wastewater
treatment plant
of Tallinn right in the middle of the
peninsula ever since that happened a
kind of struggle or battle came up
between the management of the plant and
local ecologist or bird watchers
claiming the plant is contaminating
their natural reserves I think this is a
kind of classic case of you know kind of
green versus dark ecology right but what
is particularly interesting and we just
almost by accident found out when
visiting the site is that birds don’t
seem to look at it in that way you see
in this piece of footage that birds are
quite happy to to hang around in the
kind of warm and nutritious waters of
the wastewater treatment plant and even
seems to play with the kind of heavy
machinery there right so in that sense
we decided to take let’s say the the the
bird perspective and and and and take it
as a starting point for a speculative
project about the future of tannin and
this non anthropocentric approach as i
should call it became the topic of this
year styling architecture biennale do
you see the main exhibition here in the
back and we we really wanted to make it
into a kind of lab a kind of collective
project on the future city and and we
invited eleven groups between scientists
artists architects working together on
this proposal and the idea the basic
idea of this proposal was to imagine a
new city model that would grow from the
wastes of contemporary Tallinn
right so almost like the other way
around as
it normally happens and integrate
microorganisms in the built environment
within the built environment so that bio
digestion could become the founding
principle of the new city the the
proposal started by imagining or
imagining the peninsula as a kind of
distributed habitat where little bio
digesting gardens as we may call them
would receive the wastewater from
Tallinn and begin to process it the
process would obviously generate a
surplus of heat and nutrients which
would begin to create peculiar niches
peculiar micro climates right and and
that in turn in the kind of feedback big
feedback loop model that the dista
McCulloh biosphere will begin to
generate the possibility for an expanded
the ecosystem new species settling in
increasing the photosynthesis increasing
the level of biomass that can be
produced and eventually of course from
that new resources could be fed back to
the city of tallinn itself so what we
would create is a new city that is in a
way symbiotic of the existing city right
but another interesting aspects of this
project was the the kind of vision
obviously is populated by different
systems of the human beings that are
perhaps at the core of it but at the
same level of importance I think we have
microorganisms we have machines we have
birds we have a kind of communication
systems and so we started to think about
this new collective group as a sort of
form of bio citizenship right so we
understand this collective as a kind of
a new group that would found the this
kind of metabolically circular bio
darling and this idea of bio citizenship
let’s say of this kind of extended
understanding of who is participating in
the shaping of our cities is a kind of
key notion around of one of our longest
project which is called urban alga farm
the basic idea of the project is to
create or to design habitats for
microalgae micro organism like micro
algae to grow
part of the building envelope right this
project was running for more than days
running for more than 10 years and and
the interesting one of the key aspects
of it is that we did this framework
microalgae are not just simply
photosynthesizing the energy from the
Sun like they normally do but they are
also fed by the output of our built
environment especially co2 which is one
of the fundamental building blocks so in
that sense they become a kind of active
layer that exists across the metabolism
of both natural environment and urban
environment so in other words they they
become in my mind a kind of connecting
layer between between the city and the
biosphere and of course there are
multiple interactions that can be
activated by the intelligence of these
colonies and this is an example of a
public space we created in milano where
all of a sudden new interferences and
new collaborations between this micro
world and the world of architecture can
can emerge and as I mentioned before
microorganisms actually grow faster
within our artificial habitats and this
is because they are nurtured by the
emissions of our building the heat the
excess heat the co2 we constantly
produce it’s actually for them nutrients
it pushes it from us as their growth and
in turn the biomass that they generate
becomes source of energy source of
nutrients for for us and and for our
city so this again is a new kind of
symbiotic relationship that we can begin
to imagine and that you know it’s it’s a
completely turning upside down the
paradigm of modernity so we start seeing
building as something that is not
necessarily finished when we end
construction and we leave the building
site but the building itself becomes a
system that evolves continuously and our
job as designers is to imagine really
new urban topologies that can
accommodate these this new expanded
notion of citizenship and this year has
been very
exciting for us because that’s when we
completed our biotech Hut project in
Astana is our first permanent
biotechnological building and it’s of
course the dimension the size of it is
more or less 180 square meters in plan
it can host a large families with
friends and so on and especially it it
has a system to to host one thousand and
six hundred liters of channel bacteria
of living cultures of channel bacteria
and the culture grows within these glass
tubes that you see there and like
integrated within the skin of the
building and in an optimal condition the
building produces approximately one
kilogram of dry algae per day and this
may not sound much to you but actually
it’s equivalent to one liter of biofuel
which releases approximately 10 kilowatt
hour of energy that’s what a UK average
home needs to power its system so in
other words we have created a system a
model of self-sufficiency of circularity
in terms of energy but that’s of course
wasn’t enough for us you know one of the
crucial topic I mentioned to you is
really to create a deeper relationship
is not just absorbing our waste but is
feeding us back right and we are going
to become five billion urban dwellers in
in 10-15 years how do we feed an LT diet
– – – all of this population and
chlorella for instance is one of the
most popular microalgae around it
contains 60% of vegetable proteins that
means the biotech Hut could actually
produce 600 grams of protein that feeds
12 adults and if we compare it to our
meat based protein diet requires 8 cows
to do that so it is a substantial amount
if you think about that we can
completely substitute this this stream
if we wanted to and of course eight cows
and eat greenhouse gases maintain the
farming industry is the bigger and meter
of greenhouse gases more than any CV
combined together that’s not many people
know about that right so we not only
use that but as I said before microalgae
absorbs you to to grow so the biotech
Hut absorbs 2 kilograms per day which is
equivalent of 32 trees so again if we
compare it with with something we know
it’s like having a kind of family-run
micro forest integrated within our
building skin so I I told you all these
numbers just to give you a kind of
spatial and material understanding of
really the potential the efficiency of
integrating micro cultures in the in the
built environment in the urban fabric
and this is obviously a crucial
transition because as I said before that
means turn in the urban fabric into it
is their ability to synthetize resources
so it goes from being just a container
of functions right how it was in in some
modern parodying of the machine for
living and it becomes itself a dynamic
process of production a living machine
and in the world in the realm of living
machines things are very different we
all know it living machines can
synthesize information matter energy in
a way it is completely different from
the way we actually generate and
distribute energy today so this is the
key from moving from this linear
metabolism I show you before to a kind
of multiple interlocking circular
metabolisms and this also has a very
strong impact on the shape of our cities
right it’s about kind of moving from
centralized grids which are the one we
we are used to today going from main
power station dams wind farms to all of
our houses so this image of the tree
again the centralized grid – distributed
networks distributed networks mean each
one of our houses parks public space
arenas is going to become both a
producer and a consumer of energy and
there will be continuous exchanges
between one another and when my team we
try to visualize this model to study
this model what kind of intelligence we
will need to make this to make this
happen and and we in the last four years
we started to work with this really
unique creature which
called slime mold you see it in action
here in the video it’s a protest a
single-cell organisms which contain
within his membrane thousands or
millions of nuclei in the Plasmodium
phase which is the one you see here the
nuclei are a float and interact one with
the other through biochemical reactions
and what is fascinating is that they
leave traces in the environment which in
time accumulated to to create a
distributed this partial memory of the
interaction this is the key for the kind
of intelligence that this this organism
is able to develop which is called
emerging collective intelligence and and
in that sense it’s it’s it’s beautiful
that it’s really through this multiple
interaction that that something emerges
and you know we developed apparatus to
try to record and understand these
aspects like the one that you see here
developed together with bio artist
Heather Barnett and and of course when
you see them from from from from far it
there is similarities to to some of our
urban networks which is fascinating but
in this case there is no designer
there is no engineer there is no
architect there is no central
intelligence it’s really the product of
emergent collective intelligence at work
so to conclude this journey in urban
microbiology I want to try to repeat the
little experiment we did the beginning
and see if we get some different results
so if you close your eyes again just for
a second and think yourself as an
ecologist as an activist fighting let’s
say to save our planet from the
catastrophe of climate change and who
would you rather be a tree hugger like
this ones or a zombie thank you very
much [Applause]
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