Stories and Matters
2018
29
28
Ecology
L
eonia1 is one of Italo Calvino’s invis-
ible cities, it is a city that refashions
itself every day: it produces, accumulates
and discards. The result is that “each year
the city expands, and the street cleaners
have to fall farther back. The bulk of the
outfl ow increases and the piles rise higher,
become stratifi ed, extend over a wider
perimeter. [...] A fortress of indestructible
leftovers surround Leonia dominating it
on every side, like a chain of mountains.
[...] The greater its height grows, the more
the danger of a landslide looms: a tin can,
an old tyre, an unravelled wine fl ask, if it
rolls towards Leonia, is enough to bring
with it an avalanche of unmatched shoes,
calendars from bygone years, withered
fl owers, submerging the city in its own
past which it had tried in vain to reject,
mingling with the past of the neighbour-
ing cities, fi nally clean. A cataclysm will
fl atten the sordid mountain range, cancel-
ling every trace of the metropolis always
dressed in new clothes”. It is almost
a model or symbol city that Calvino takes
to extremes in order to reveal the potential
contradictory and catastrophic elements.
But it is not just a grim prophecy: on the
20th of December 2015 in Shenzhen, in
Southern China, a 100 metre hill-like
pile of rubbish collapsed under heavy rain,
devastating tens of buildings and burying
at least 85 people. That hill-like pile had
been there for two years and it was forever
getting bigger: the debris produced by the
building boom were heaped up there.
Italo Calvino wrote about Leonia in 1972,
in the years when the concern for the
consequences that our model of economic
and consumer development began to shift,
even amongst the general public, overturning
and transforming the very notion of ecolo-
gy. The scientist Ernst Haeckel coined the
word in 1866, defi ning it as “the study
of the relationship of organisms with their
environment”.
The idea that the “outside world” or the
environment can be transformed on
a large scale by man is not such a recent
one. In 1695 the English naturalist
John Woodward Williamson, claimed that
deforestation and cultivation by colonists
in North America led to an improvement
in air quality. With time, it was common
belief that the milder winters and the cooler
summers were some of the benefi ts of
deforestation. The medieval idea of the
animal world and of nature, as something
mysterious, something different to us,
dominated by irrational and uncontrollable
magical or religious forces, gave way to
the insight that mankind could, with the
help of science and technology, dominate,
command and transform to its liking its
surroundings and that this was for the
good of the “extraordinary and progressive
fate” of man.
It was only in the 20th century that the
judgment on the impact of mankind began
to change direction, stoking the fear that
the ecosystem could be irreparably disturbed
reaching a point of no return. In 1938 the
engineer Guy Stewart Callendar analysed
the concurrent rise in temperature and the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the air,
hypothesizing a connection between the
causes. It was one of the fi rst “registrations”
on environmental change.
In the following decades, despite the debates
on the connection between causes,
the empirical fi ndings on the environmental
impact of man developed to such an extent
as to fuel the suspicion that this impact was
becoming disruptive, so much so as to
challenge the forces of nature. In 2000
the Nobel prize winner of Chemistry
Paul Crutzen, and the biologist Eugene
F. Stoermer, put forward the idea of
adopting the word Antropocene2: to describe
a new geological era, separate to the
Holocene era, in which human actions had
drastic effects on the environment.
The endorsement of Antropocene as a new
geological era is now under close ex-
amination by the International Union of
Geological Sciences, and regardless of
the outcome, the idea that mankind has been
able to irreparably change the climate,
the evolution of the species and even the
geological eras has been a scientifi c and
political breakthrough.
T
he processes of decolonization and
industrialization of the so-called third
world countries accelerated and highlighted
the growth limits of industrial civilisation.
As the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh affi rms,
paradoxically the geopolitical predomi-
nance of a handful of European powers,
based on the exploitation of natural re-
sources for the benefi t of a small share of
the planet’s inhabitants, has delayed
the advent of a climate crisis. Pursuing in-
dustrialization or the “Great Acceleration”,
undermined the sustainability of the post
industrial revolution economic model,
and that now risks to drag with it it’s promise
of growth. The growing global energy
requirement has intensifi ed with the increase
in population growth: today 7.3 billion
people consume approximately the equiva-
lent of 14 billion tonnes of petroleum.
According to the forecasts in the BP Energy
Outlook 2017, the global GDP will double
by 2015, for 25% as a consequence of the
increase in world population growth (+1.5
billion), for 75% for economic growth.
The demand for energy will increase
by 30%. To keep the Earth in its balanced
state, the amount of absorbed energy must
be balanced by an equal amount of energy
emitted from the Earth’s surface and from
the atmosphere as radiation. If you don’t
want to give up the level of well-being
achieved by the numerically speaking
minority of the world’s population and you
want others to aspire to reach that level
of well-being, the only way to make growth
more sustainable is to fi nd a new model
based on clean, renewable energy sources
and at the same time endorse a lifestyle
that requires less resource consumption.
According to the report Global Trends
in Renewable Energy Investment 20173,
drawn up by the UNEP, the resources
allocated to renewables in 2016 covered 58%
of the total investments in the energy
sector. Energy sources are defi ned renew-
able and clean in comparison to fossil
fuels (eg gas, petroleum and coal): they are
considered renewable as they are inex-
haustible and clean as they do not release
polluting substances into the air. In order
to use the sun, the wind and water as energy
sources, technology research and devel-
opment are required which would lead to
their use on a large scale at competitive
costs of production. Between 2015 and 2016
the capacity of installed renewable energy
increased by 14%, from 127.5 to 138.5 GW,
making up 55,3% of the increase in the
global energy production capacity. If, in 2011,
the renewable sources covered 6.9% of
electricity production, in 2015 this percent-
age rose to10.3% and in 2016 to 11.3%,
thus hindering 1.7 gigatonnes of carbon
dioxide being released in the atmosphere.
In recent years it’s production has been stable
despite an increase in energy consumption,
set against an annual average rate of +2,2%,
as registered in the preceding decade.
All this in light of shrinking investments in
renewable by 23% between 2015 and
2016, shown by the reduction in produc-
tion costs. According to Erik Solheim, a
senior manager for UNEP, “Clean technol-
ogies have never been so economical: for
investors this means a real opportunity to
obtain more with less. This is exactly the
type of situation in which the interests of
people coincide with profi t making which
allows you to hope for a better world for
everyone”. Today solar, wind, water, geo-
thermal and biomass power are considered
mainstream and marketable at competitive
prices. Then there are sources which offer
huge potential and are to this day still
undergoing testing. The most appealing is
probably marine energy, that refers to
the use of energy carried by oceans taking
advantage of tides, currents, ocean waves,
salinity and even ocean temperature dif-
ferences. The potential of waves alone, in
theory, is huge: according to a group
of scientists in 2010 it was estimated to be
32 PW per year, meaning almost double
the amount of energy produced in 2008.
The tides, caused by gravitational forces
that are produced by the movement of the
Earth, the Moon and the Sun, consist of
an excursion between the highest and the
lowest sea level, which can then be used
to produce electricity through turbines.
T
he tides have the advantage that they
are regular and predictable. MeyGen4
is the largest tidal stream project in the
world. It was presented in 2007, with the aim
to develop a tidal stream project of up
to 398 MW, through the use of 269 subsea
turbines in an offshore site in the Orkney
strait in Scotland. The energy produced will
be enough to power 175,000 homes.
The fi rst phase of the project (Phase 1A)
was completed in August 2017 with the
deployment of 4 turbines, setting a world
record for a monthly production capacity
of 700 MWh. In November 2009 the
world’s fi rst osmotic plant was opened in
Tofte, Norway on the Oslofjord inlet.
The prototype is by Statkraft, one of Nor-
way’s leading grid companies and it
is aiming to produce renewable energy from
the physical interaction of salt water and
freshwater. If these clean and renewable
sources are a reality, creating a sustainable
economic model that allows an ever-grow-
ing number of people to aspire to affl uence,
means thinking about entire fl ows and
complex and interdependent processes,
in which only fuel able to integrate with
environments and processes is being used.
The UN publication “World Urbanization
Prospects 2014” forecasts that by 2050
66% of the world’s population will live
in urban areas, compared to 30% in 1950
and 54% in 2014. Rebuilding a balance
between man and the planet cannot help
but focus on that artifi cial environment
par excellence: the city. Is it feasible to think
about and to subsequently design complex
artifi cial systems, cities or even megalopo-
lis that have a low environmental impact?
As the architect, William McDonough, in
LeScienze the September 2017 issue,
writes, “the way they will reconsider and
redesign the urban landscape will affect
the future of life itself”. Cities generate
up to 70% of the global carbon dioxide
emissions, using large amounts of water
and producing mountains of waste and
rubbish. All artifi cial processes, that is to say,
the work of man, have been conceived
since the dawn of the industrial revolution,
as processes based on a model of con-
sumption: fi rst there is the extraction of
raw materials, these are then transformed
with workmanship and energy, the product
then goes onto another phase, ending its
journey with the end-user, who discard it
when it is no longer of use. Leonia and our
cities work in exactly the same way: they
are developed by products that come from
external sources (food, cement, water...),
that are used and then discarded. Natural
systems work differently, in a circular way,
where there is no waste because the cycles
of birth and decomposition mean that the
nutrients constantly fl ow in regenerative
cycles. Can artifi cial systems be redesigned
as circular systems? With its fi rst volume
released in 2012 Towards circular economy,
the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, started
to propose winning business strategies to
companies aimed at accelerating the shift
towards a circular economy, in which the
wastage of resources in the transforma-
tion and circulation processes is reduced,
product-life is lengthened and any discards
are recycled as raw materials for other
processes. Cities play a fundamental role:
they are centres of innovation, creativity
and produce wealth. Moreover, they are
complex systems in which fl ows of goods,
people and services, processes triggered
by different causes and for diverse functions,
inevitably intersect and affect one another
in a growing entanglement and with increas-
ing complexity. The city, then, is the best
disposed social environment for fostering
a circular economy and a re-birth of ecology.
The fl ows of material that enhance the cir-
cular city are reintegrated in the biosphere
(biological fl ows) or are revalued (technical
fl ows). In Vancouver the 200,000 tonnes
of organic waste collected every year are
used to produce methane and soil con-
ditioners used as fertiliser for farmland.
In Oslo things happen at an even earlier
stage, on the dissipated energy along
the fl ows: the suburb of Sandvika has heat
pumps running along its sewers that
capture heat and, depending on the season,
use it to heat or cool homes. In Stockholm
the biogas produced by sewage water runs
36% of the city’s buses.
A steelwork factory based in Brescia has
been using the heat from its industrial
electric oven to heat 2,500 homes since
October 2016. In the natural world rubbish
doesn’t exist, at the end of the life cycle
the organisms become nutrients. In cities,
too, the rubbish can be transformed and
recycled.
According to the Engineer Michael Webber,
Professor at the University of Austin
“in simple words rubbish is what we have
when our creativity and imagination have
run out”. Kalunborg Symbiosis is an
industrial park in Denmark where com-
panies co-ordinate the energy, water and
material fl ows. The secondary products and
the waste from any process (eg wastewater,
ethanol) are transformed into materials
for other processes. A connection of tubes,
cables and conductors that bring steam,
gas, electricity and water back and forth.
In the circular city urban planning plays
an important role: there is no longer the need
to divide activities and housing dictated
by concerns for pollutants and health haz-
ardous production sites: so workplaces
and centres for processing waste into energy
may rise up in residential neighbourhoods,
next to schools, public buildings and delicates-
sens. The neighbourhoods would be real
organisms living in harmony with others.
There would also be less need to move,
therefore reducing the energy required and
the time wasted in doing so. Today architects
are able to design buildings that have a low
environmental impact and are independent
from an energy point of view, using eco
sustainable, long-lasting materials, organ-
izing the size, the structure, the positioning
and the interiors so as to take full advantage
of natural sunlight and ventilation.
The buildings in a circular city, says William
McDonough5, “work rather like trees: they
capture carbon, produce oxygen, distil wa-
ter, offer a habitat to thousands of species
and use solar power for their own electrical
and thermal requirements”.
I
n addition to technology and design, a
narrative is also needed in order to sto-
ry-tell the new lifestyles in circular cities,
to imagine them and describe their spaces,
the architecture, the objects, the furniture,
to create models of consumption and rela-
tions, ways of movement and attractive and
fulfi lling lifestyles; a story able to outline
the transition to a new artifi cial environ-
ment, so that Leonis can be kept away in
books, as a warning to remind us of a city
that could have been, but that we have
decided to build differently.
New growth paths.
From the industrial Revolution
to the ecological Renaissance.
Curated by Rimadesio
1. Leonia is part of Italo Calvino's novel Invisible
Cities, published by Einaudi in 1972.
2. Anthropocene is a term coined in the 1980s by
biologist Eugene Stoermer, was adopted by the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry Paul Crutzen in the book Welcome
to Anthropocene. Man has changed the climate,
Earth enters a new era, Mondadori, 2005.
3. Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment
2017, was published on April 6th by UN Environ-
ment, the Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating
Centre, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
4. MeyGen (full name MeyGen tidal energy project)
is the worlds largest tidal energy plant which is
currently in construction. The project uses four 1.5
MW turbines with 16 m rotor diameter turbines
submerged on the seabed.The project is owned and
run by Tidal Power Scotland Limited and Scottish
Enterprise.
5. William McDonough is an American design-
er, advisor, author, and thought leader. Between
his many activities, is the co-author with Michael
Braungart of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way
We Make Things, North Point Press Publisher, 2003,
and The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability Designing
for Abundance, North Point Press Publisher, 2013.
