GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
The Metabolism of Cities, with Erik Frijters
In this episode we explore the blueprint of future cities, that embrace sustainability at their core, with Erik Frijters of FABRICations, a visionary in architecture and urban design, who joins us to share his groundbreaking ideas. Erik's journey intertwines philosophy with innovative design, challenging the traditional boundaries of our urban environment.
Erik advocates for a symbiotic relationship between production methods and neighbourhood vitality, and how a deeper understanding of urban ecological systems is indispensable. We explore the complexities of modernist planning and how it often overlooks the intricate web of connections that bind city systems and regional ecosystems.
And of course, we talk about the formidable challenges climate change introduces to our urban landscapes, and about the idea of the 15-minute city model and its potential to reshape the way we conceive urban development.
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone, you are listening to Good Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mira Agency Istanbul.
Speaker 3:And this is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester. So this podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:So in this episode we're going to talk to Erik Freitas. He is the founding partner at Fabrications of Netherlands. Fabrications design better cities for a happy and healthy life planet on planet earth. Eric has spent his decades in designing, executing and consulting about projects in architecture, urbanism and regional strategies in the netherlands and abroad so brace yourself, eric.
Speaker 3:We're not done with the biography yet. Um, he's got a background in architecture from the karl ruse institute of technology and philosophy at the university of amsterdam, graduated kumar lauday, or lauday, which is very impressive. Um. At the eindhoven institute of technology, um, and basically massively understands this field and experiments with innovative architecture and urban design, healthy urban ecosystems, design thinking and, obviously, landscape, which we're going to touch on as well, eric. So it's really wonderful to spend some time with you today. Thank you so much.
Speaker 4:Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2:Eric, thank you so much for being here today, and it's great to have you with us. As we often like to do, let's start with your own journey. I mean, when we look at your background philosophy, architecture, innovation it's kind of a diverse renaissance persona. How did all these come together?
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's a good question. I think I was trained I was starting to be trained as an architect in a very confusing time of architecture. So I think architecture itself was in some sort of an identity crisis, so it was looking for meaning in all kinds of other realms. So there was a lot of architects trying to find justification for their actions in any other discipline and mainly they were looking at philosophy, for instance.
Speaker 4:So when I was a student I learned all these great, important architects like Bernard Sumi, cole Haas, peter Eisenman, all kind of exploring French phenomenalism and different thinking and deconstructivism and that's kind of directly related to their architecture. So their architecture became deconstructed itself and in that time I thought, if I really want to understand what these guys are talking about, let's explore the realms they are exploring by not reading it myself. But let's suppose I could be trained as a philosopher. So that's what I did. I started next to my architectural courses. I started to study philosophy in Amsterdam. That in the end would be the greatest mistake of my life, I think At least to become an effective designer. Because what I learned then for real is that where I thought I would find answers, I would only find more questions. So I became better in doubting and less good in making decisions. So it was really not very helpful in the first period of really become a better chooser right, Because designing is in many phases also making decisions. So I had to go through that. But it brought me a lot. It brought me, of course, a different perspective on what could be the legal or justified backgrounds to make decisions and where could design really have meaning? So that question became a very important question to me, because this identity crisis of spatial design actually helped me to reframe this question for myself and try to search for realms where I could find the justification that felt valid, and I found it in societal big questions that played around that time in the Netherlands. So my graduation project as an architect was actually not about architecture directly, but it was like a mix of regional strategy, landscape design, urban interventions and architecture mixed in a big mesh. You could say that it was really hard to say where the architecture stopped and the urbanism began and the whole basis for it. It was a new vision.
Speaker 4:On Dutch food production. As you might know, dutch food production is highly technological, is deeply researched, is really innovative. It has great solutions. It comes from a background where we have little space so we had to find intensive solutions to intensify the spatial use of our country. But it also has a lot of disadvantages. There was a lot of knowledge available but it also had some. It got some feedback in its systemic reality of animal disease, animal welfare, is the food safe that there was a lot of doubt and also starting criticism on the way we produced food.
Speaker 4:So I thought can I have a role in that playing field? Can I have another vision on how we produce food and what kind of spatial effect it would have on our countryside? So together with scientific institutes in Wageningen, we developed a new vision 15 big mega farms would produce food in the Netherlands. All the other farms were irrelevant from then on and those farms were based on regional consumers, so the amount of consumers decided how big the farm would be. So you have a very sustainable, systemic approach to these new farms, the classic farms, as entrepreneurs would have a job in those spaces. So also that kind of culture of being your own entrepreneur would kind of change.
Speaker 4:But the biggest radical change would be this empty countryside that we would have, because the amount of animals that we would be needing to feed the whole netherlands would reduce radically. We would not have this ridiculous situation that we would grow pigs in the south of the netherlands, bring them to italy to become parma hum and then be returned to our supermarkets. That stuff was over right, so we only would produce things that we would really need in our own neighborhoods. So that new strategy of food production resulted also in a new approach, actually my first metabolic, without knowing it, my first metabolic test ride in designing approach of urban and architectural environments. So the outcome was, like I said, said architecture, urbanism and landscape design in one, because I needed everything to to come up with a, with a solution for this space, and that I think is made my practice, or our practice today as well. It kind of infected. This type of new thinking really affected many of our projects that we have been doing since then.
Speaker 3:Erik, I love the idea that. Well, I'm sure the very word saying studying philosophy was probably the worst decision I'd ever made in my life would have philosophers everywhere going. Hmm, interesting, let's consider that for a moment. Does the philosophy actually deconstruct itself through its very study? Let's do it. Let's not get diverted, though I'm going to leap around.
Speaker 3:We had some Damla and I had some questions prepared and she's about to look very alarmed because I'm about to leap right to the end of my questions because of what you just said, because I'm really interested, almost at a planetary scale, about our debate and our strategy around land use and cities and food consumption. As part of that, part of that, and if you see it all basically as your nutrition and protein equation, which we want to love and enjoy, obviously, could it be that some of your thinking liberates landscapes from intensive agriculture so that they can go back to nature? Perhaps they could produce biofuels to solve the aviation conundrum. They could actually be used to mitigate some of the effects of climate change through flood alleviation. It's really interesting your thinking around shrinking the footprint of food production, bringing it closer to cities, and then then that casts, doesn't it a big question around what's our global strategy for land use in response to that, yeah, I think there to this topic there are two sides that that are relevant.
Speaker 4:My studies now are focusing on multiple use of the same space. So what I notice is that we tend to tackle problems in in a one-dimensional way. So if there's we new sources of energy, we kind of radicalize that proposition. We look at land that we now use, for instance, for food production, and say let's erase that and let's make this whole field a solar panel, a PV panel to generate electricity, which is actually again a singular approach. So we replace one problem with the other.
Speaker 4:If you have a country like the Netherlands that has space not in abundance it's actually in 2050, our country will be 10% too small. That's a problem, right? So if we have the same characteristic of spatial claims in this country, we will have to find new land somewhere. Or we decide that some of our solutions can also be combined with other solutions. So we have to look at our available space and try to have it multiplied times two, times three, to make sure that we have three solutions in one spot instead of one solution in one spot.
Speaker 4:So I'm very much interested in working on new models of, for instance, productive work in the inner hearts of cities, can we have factories in our backyards and can we still have happy people, with the difference they don't have to take the train for one and a half hour a day to go there and back, but they just take the elevator down and they're at work, right. So I mean I can do that because I carry a laptop, but many people cannot do that. Because I carry a laptop, but many people cannot do that. But I actually would like to share that feel of richness of going to work by foot or on your bike and share that luxury with everybody, and I think that's possible, can make new, innovative urban arrangements that allow for quite heavy versions of, for instance, urban manufacturing and still have great neighborhoods, still have places where our kids grow up, become soccer players or football players. This is continental right, so I can say football. Yeah, exactly, this is continental right, so I can say football.
Speaker 4:Yeah exactly so. I think that's the first notion. It's not about replacing functions with another, it's trying to search for combinations. And that's also the research we do in the office. We do proposals for energy production next to ecological development, next to food production, all at once. That requires new technologies, but also new spatial arrangements. You cannot grow.
Speaker 3:Sorry, yeah, I was going to ask you Eric on that, though I get that. I completely get that fusion of those different functionalities and typologies across different use cases. But one thing is do you get frustrated? Because my take on global urban strategies, particularly city strategies, is they do sometimes talk about nature in the city and they talk about green infrastructure and they talk about green infrastructure, but they come to a very abrupt halt at the city boundaries and they don't consider the regions that these cities sit within and whether they are in a kind of bio-region with lots of other functionalities alongside those neighborhoods that you're talking about there that are much more functional. And does it frustrate you that city strategies, in particular that I encountered, don't see that bigger regional picture?
Speaker 4:Yes, it does, because I think that it's still a modernist version of looking at cities and that's actually the one that we have to replace. In the 20s of last century we came up with this type of ideas of separating that nasty manufacturing processes and make sure that they're outside cities. Of course, there were very good reasons to do that, but many of these processes are now clean, accessible, don't make any sound, are super safe. They can be reintegrated in our urban lives because it saves us a lot of transportation that we would not have to be involved in. But it will also, I think, generate the kind of underestimated quality in our cities as well, because I believe that, like sports, production processes could give identity to urban neighborhoods. You could be proud of things that your neighborhood is good at. You could even identify with it. You could say I'm from the Shoemaker neighborhood. Or in my neighborhood we make chip technology that is unpaired. Somewhere else we make the best chip machines ever. So that's something you could be proud of and it could be doing something with your personality, the regional character. I think that is a value that is underestimated, because I think it's a value that is important to people to be part of such environments because we built a global space. That is very generic, right, it's the same everywhere. So back to your question.
Speaker 4:I think that modernist thinking of separating these things is a big mistake, or at least these days, because now we can reintegrate it. So we have to learn to look at cities not only as spatial phenomena, because there, you say, the space ends, so the city might end here and country starts. But in terms of systems, that's not the case. This is completely different. Systems are much larger than the visual boundaries of cities. So I believe that we have to generate a new reading of what is a city in general and integrate that systemic view in it. It's a very technological approach. That's not the technological approach I favor. But before we get emotionally, socially, culturally involved, we have to understand that technological background of it as well to be making the right decisions.
Speaker 4:I think so nature is not the green stuff that we sometimes put in cities as well. Many of the green things we hang on walls or we produce in parks is not ecologically helpful to the, the type of um ecology that is actually naturally there already. So understanding and helping and enforcing um real nature in cities needs an understanding of how it works first, before we hang up green stuff everywhere and think we are doing good things to the city, right, so it's, it looks nice, I agree, but it's not always working. So I think that understanding is important and I see it changing. Also, people tend to spend more time in really understanding the ecological system they're intervening in and how it penetrates urban systems and how it could enrich urban systems as well, and it's not only good for, I would say, plants and animals, but in the end, it's also good for us if we have a robust, functioning ecological system deep in the hearts of our cities.
Speaker 2:So Steve said that I will keep you all in track, but this time I will divert from our path, because there are some things that you and Steve both mentioned that opened a lot of doors in my mind. So I will combine my question with some tricky things of your perspective and vision. So you see the city as a metabolism, as a living organism, and you want to take a metabolic approach to that. And when we think of it and exaggerate this metaphor a little bit, until now our cities have grown to be, let's diagnose, obese. They have COPD, chronic obstructive lung disease, they have metabolic syndromes and so on. But what you said was very important and mind-blowing.
Speaker 2:In 2050, your country will be 10% smaller. So this opens my mind in a in another way, saying that, okay, usually what we have in society paranoia is losing our land to invasion, losing our land to others, but we're losing it and we're gonna lose it all of us, some, some bigger, some smaller, but we're going to lose it. So this erases everything. Everything is going to change. I mean, our nationalism is going to change our perspectives. Everything is going to change, but even though the old is dying, the new cannot be born yet we are talking about the values we have to put in this new. So my question is I know it's a little bit complicated and has a lot of things in it, but what are the values of this going to be born, cities and also societies, and how will cities play a role in building those values?
Speaker 4:Wow, an avalanche of questions. Actually. I think the problem that we face in the Netherlands is different than problems cities in Turkey face or cities in the United States or in England or in France face. It's really different in the Netherlands. It comes with a lack of resource, a lack of resource for space, right. So we have a spatial issue connected to, for instance, instance, climatological changes. That's a different package than what happens in Turkey, for instance. So I think it's hard to say if the challenges we meet in the Netherlands are and the solutions we come up with are necessary and also justified in other contexts.
Speaker 4:I can't really make that estimation, but in general I would say metabolic thinking in the context of cities makes sense, because it kind of reestablishes some logic that we've lost somewhere in our urban development. One good example is the way we produce energy and transport it towards our city, while our body only generates energy where it's needed and it does it at a place where it's needed, so there's nothing to be transported. It's not that my toes generate energy that my brain is using. That's not the way it works. So we can learn from this metaphor in a way that makes our cities more effective. In one of the notes that we shared before this conversation.
Speaker 4:You mentioned the 50-minute city. I think the 50-minute city is a good starting point to talk about the future capacity of cities and how we can experience that. But I think the capacity of that model goes further than just transport. I don't think it's only about transport. It's actually the beginning of making everything more near to each other. I actually think it's a metaphor of mixing the city.
Speaker 4:What happens now here in the place I am sitting in the middle of Amsterdam, is that this place is heated with residual heat coming from energy production in the harbor, so there's a big pipe going towards the center of the city so I can reuse part of that and we lose a lot of stuff. Of course, and it's a very big investment and it costs a lot of money, but I'm reusing heat. But it would be much more sensible when I'm on top of that factory. That factory is below me, producing heat and electricity that is directly available for the neighborhood. That's also part of the 15-minute city. It means that we have to mix functions again, because it's not only nice for people to reduce their the travel time to work and to home and to school, but it's also it also allows other travel time to be shortener, for the exchange of wastes, for instance, that we are producing constantly in our cities.
Speaker 4:I think in general that would be a good model for any city. It cannot be a problem to build cities around that logic. I'm quite confident of advising everybody to look into that. But to see what kind of, let's say, tailor-made solution you have locally. I think they might be different. Producing culture in Istanbul or Izmir or any other Turkish city is something really different than doing this in Manchester, but it would have kind of similarities, I would say.
Speaker 3:I think on that one, eric, if we stay with 15-Minute Cities. I've got one penultimate question. Jamla has one more.
Speaker 3:But obviously we represent agencies that communicate sustainability to populations, to citizens, to business, and that's the whole ethos behind our entire network across Europe and the 15-minute city concept. I found it quite extraordinary to look at it and obviously Paris is where it really flourished, and certainly in Manchester we started discussing it and looking at it and then there was this crazy moment where it became a global conspiracy theory which, at its most extreme here in the UK, had people convinced that the 15-minute city theory was a way of locking you into your homes and having a curfew to enforce this kind of crazed worldview. And it really made me reflect on urbanism, urban design, urban strategies and how you engage people with them and how you talk to citizens about these ideas and these strategies. And do we do enough on that front to really win people's hearts and their minds over to some of the ideas that you're talking about? And could we do better at engaging people on a more sustainable metabolic future for our cities?
Speaker 4:on a more sustainable metabolic future for our cities? That's a very good question, and I think the answer is no, we do not do enough. I think what I notice in my realm of spatial design is that in many cases we do have solutions but we did not have any communication strategy to share it, and I think we come up with solutions that people might want but they don't know yet why and when and when. And I think when we think we have solutions, there's still lagging information in that we don't have complete solutions like, say, 70-80% solutions, and the tailor-made part is still not connecting to people. So I think we should invest or we should develop a skill that goes beyond the engineering approach that is a lot available in design processes and find ways to get that other crucial information, to get really involvement for our final products and our final visions, for our final products and our final visions. That's a hard part, because it also goes the other way around. We still make design very superficial. It's advocated in magazines in great colorful pictures, and the deeper potential is never really harvested, it's never part of a dialogue, it's never center of discussion and its potential as well is not really explored. So there's some ground to cover here, and I think it's important to get there round to cover here, um, and I think it's important to get to get there.
Speaker 4:But I I noticed that the moment you actually make the reality of having a factory in your back garden or in your, in your cellar, and people have all kinds of prejudices about that topic, of course, and they, they like ai, they generate imagery themselves. That is the most horrific images you can imagine, of course. And they, they like ai, they generate imagery themselves. That is the most horrific images you can imagine. Of course, having a factory in your garden is not a very pleasant sight, but if they come to a place where it actually happens and they think, oh, that's what you mean with a factory, oh, and this is my advantage, oh, and at night I can use your tools because nobody's in that factory and I can actually, as a neighborhood, uh, as your neighbor, I can actually use the tools that are not doing something after closing time and so on. So if there is some sort of social interaction, action generated in that new kind of urban metabolic systems that are reappearing in the way we entrepreneurs meet real neighborhoods, or real and real neighbors, of course, that live there. When we kind of generate those interactions again, then people start to see the advantages of these new frameworks on looking and designing cities.
Speaker 4:But this is the only tool we have now. If you show for it, prove it and I'll might believe it, but it would be much better, as you suggest to, to generate another topic. So maybe we could say what I learned from this podcast is maybe we have started to make an end of the architectural identity crisis that started in the 90s and that's maybe now Getting new meaning. But now we have to find a way To discuss this new meaning With people that are Involved, and there we are not. That's not the reality yet we have to make contact there somewhere. I don't know how to do it, but maybe podcasts are solutions to that new challenge.
Speaker 2:Wow, this is completely another topic that we have to discuss together. And Time Flies. I'm proposing to change our theme song to Time Flies, especially with our guests. Like Eric, we have surpassed the time we have and we had so many more questions about your book, about other things, but just one question, because we really love to ask this one. Our network is ironically called do not smile, because we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world. That's what we believe. So what object, place or person always makes you smile?
Speaker 4:oh, I did not prepare for this one. I think what always makes me smile is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm of people that do not immediately ask the the but remark or question, but they are really intrigued and get energy from the energy we try to generate with new ideas, or sometimes crazy-looking ideas. So people that are really enthusiastic in embracing new visions, new concepts and try to support it immediately before they become. You have to be critical, of course, but first they give some energy back to get us really enthusiastic in the whole room and then we start to kind of critically deconstruct the happiness that we created together, but in a positive way. How can we make it happen? And I think there's. I feel there's sometimes too many people thinking in risks and too little in opportunities, and I think we have to balance that a little bit better, to innovate a little bit faster.
Speaker 3:I love that, Eric energy, enthusiasm, optimism, and I'm taking away something more than a kind of communication strategy for a spatial plan. But actually what you were talking about there was almost a social exchange between people and their thoughts and their needs, and that makes it much more real than any clever communication strategy that Damla and I could come up with, even though we would come up with a brilliant one. Anyway, Damla, over to you.
Speaker 2:So thanks to everyone who has listened to our Good Guys podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies.
Speaker 3:And make sure you listen to future episodes, where we'll be talking to more amazing people like Eric about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future. So, damla, eric, see you soon.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability Hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
