he processes of decolonization and

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

fulfilling lifestyles; a story able to outline

the transition to a new artificial 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.

industrialization of the so-called third

world countries accelerated and highlighted

the growth limits of industrial civilisation.

As the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh affirms,

paradoxically the geopolitical predomi-

nance of a handful of European powers,

based on the exploitation of natural re-

sources for the benefit 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 intensified 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

Ecology

Stories and Matters

2018

New growth paths.

From the industrial Revolution

to the ecological Renaissance.

Curated by Rimadesio

L

eonia

1

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

outflow increases and the piles rise higher,

become stratified, 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 flask, if it

rolls towards Leonia, is enough to bring

with it an avalanche of unmatched shoes,

calendars from bygone years, withered

flowers, submerging the city in its own

past which it had tried in vain to reject,

mingling with the past of the neighbour-

ing cities, finally clean. A cataclysm will

flatten 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, defining 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 benefits 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

28

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 first “registrations”

on environmental change.

In the following decades, despite the debates

on the connection between causes,

the empirical findings 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 Antropocene

2

: 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 scientific and

political breakthrough.

T

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 find 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 2017

3

,

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 defined 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 profit 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

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 first 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 first 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 affluence,

means thinking about entire flows 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 artificial environment

par excellence: the city. Is it feasible to think

about and to subsequently design complex

artificial 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 artificial 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: first 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 flow in regenerative

cycles. Can artificial systems be redesigned

as circular systems? With its first 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 flows 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 flows of material that enhance the cir-

cular city are reintegrated in the biosphere

(biological flows) or are revalued (technical

flows). 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 flows: 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 flows. 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

McDonough

5

, “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

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.

he tides have the advantage that they

4

are regular and predictable. MeyGen

n addition to technology and design, a

29