Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism podcast. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities. And in this podcast, we interview thinkers, researchers, activists, policymakers, and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities and how to reduce the environmental impact, their environmental impact in a socially just and context specific way. With today's episode, we go back to the topic that we hold dearest to our hearts, which is, of course, urban metabolism. And if you have ever explored the topic of urban metabolism, one of the first pieces of text that you will encounter is the article, The Changing Metabolism of Cities, which quantified the energy, materials, water, and waste flows from eight different cities, which was co-authored by Chris Kennedy. In fact, Chris has been one of the main driving forces of the renaissance of the urban metabolism field, let's say, in the mid-2000s. Chris is a professor and director of Industrial Ecology Program at the University of Victoria. And he has worked for over 20 years in the fields of climate change, industrial ecology, accounting elements, and how to reduce the environmental impact of cities. Now he has developed a standard approach of city-wide greenhouse gases accounting, developed mitigation strategies, et cetera, et cetera. What is very interesting is I think that he has academic background, both not only from engineering, but also from economics and management. And I think this will also bring some interesting insights. He has worked with the World Bank, with NL Foundation, and many other prestigious foundations. So with all that being said, I'm extremely happy to have Chris Kennedy with us. Chris, welcome to the podcast. And could you please let us know who you are and what is your work like? I'm overwhelmed by your introduction. I don't think I need to say too much more about who I am. But that's fabulous. I love the way you use the word renaissance, because it really was. I was fortunate to be at the beginning of a restart of urban metabolism studies. Woolman had done it in the 65. And there was others between 65. And when we started looking at Toronto's metabolism, but it was fortunate and timely when we started piecing together the data from those eight cities around the world. And also tried to put a definition on metabolism, or urban metabolism, which was possibly why that paper gets cited so much, because it's got something there for people to say, what is this thing? Yeah. So you define it as the sum total of the technical and socioeconomic processes that occur in cities resulting in growth, production of energy, and elimination of waste. Wow, that's a difficult definition. Yeah, maybe I should say a little bit more about where that definition came from. And I basically looked up a dictionary. I think it was Colin's Dictionary, Definition of Metabolism, which sort of gave the common person's definition of metabolism as opposed to this more technical, biologist, anabolism, catabolism type of definition of metabolism.  It's not just about biological and chemical processes. And so it really was an adaptation of that. Yeah, that's the root of the definition. So there's not a lot of genius in that. It's just practicality. So I'm wondering, so you are a civil engineer. You also did economics. And as you said, there was, you know, in the accounting realm of sustainability in cities, there was already a woman back in the 60s. And then there was this phase in the 70s, let's say, where we had autumn, where we had the Newen Brussels, where we had a couple of people. We had the Hong Kong with Newcombe as well. So we had, I think, five cities that kind of did their homework quantitatively. And there seemed to be a lot of emulation as well. I mean, they seem to discuss with them between each other. So there was something happening. And then it kind of died off.  Do you know what happened there during these 20 years or so before you started again? No, I never really pieced together how much those other authors knew each other. I mean, there was Giraudet. I may be mispronouncing that he was working, not as an academic. He sort of, he wrote about metabolism of cities. I don't know to the extent to which those other four paper authors really knew each other. Maybe you've discovered things I don't know. But what was striking about them was just how different they were. I mean, one was a chemical engineer. One was a geographer, a civil engineer. Even the way they drew their diagrams of metabolism were very, one was very organic. The Brussels metabolism was beautiful. I use that slightly years as a way of introducing the complexity, right? Whereas the chemical engineers, it was just a flow-through reactor of Tokyo, right? So no, I mean, and there were others as well. I mean, I discovered years later getting into some of, there was some work on Barcelona and I think it was maybe Prague or something like that that was done under some European studies, not necessarily in mainstream literature. I mean, I was fortunate when I was doing that review paper with Josh and John, the other two authors. The University of Toronto where I was at that time had a fabulous library. It's the third largest library in North America. And I was able to find print copies of some of those relatively rare publications. And that's how I dug them out and pieced them together. And obviously the reading, what we're writing of Brunner and Buccini was also an influence because Paul Brunner had, he gave me some clues in some of his writings just where to go look for things, right? So it was a piecing together. But yeah, and then of course, putting everything into common units was important. And that was actually, if anything, the meat of the paper really. So yeah. But you did, before you worked a bit on infrastructures and transportation, if I remember correctly, before, I mean, before going into this review, but how did you say, okay, that's something that I might be interested to look at this or what was so appealing that you then, spent 10 years almost working on the topic? I thought you might ask me about why I started working in urban metabolism. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that. And I mean, we could talk a long time about this. And I was thinking, there's really sort of three things. Actually, three cities that influenced me. I gave London, Leipzig, and Toronto. And there's a story behind each of them. We can go into them if you want. But I mean, the first one is London. London's where I did my undergraduate degree as an engineer in civil engineer at Imperial College in London. And the fact that I even chose to go to London from I was living in Lincolnshire in the English countryside. I was obviously drawn to cities. I was something about the big cities that fascinated me. I always, and when I finished as a civil engineering degree, I decided I didn't want to be a civil engineer. And I went to study economics after that. Why? What was the, what did you like and why did you expect to find with economics? I think it was something about the left brain and the right brain. I think that engineering is very focused, it's really detailed. And to me, economics was an ability to sort of see the world in broader terms, but still using analytical skills, which is obviously where I guess my strengths lay at the time. So, yeah, that was it. Although I guess ultimately I went back to engineering and used my engineering degree to go to North America and do a PhD at the University of Waterloo. So you went to London, you said? Yeah, London, then Leipzig. Leipzig is a quirky one here. Many people probably don't know that I went to the Ombel Fortune Centre in Leipzig. And that was after my PhD. I did my PhD in groundwater contamination and then went out to what was East Germany or Eastern Germany. It was mid-90s, so it wasn't so long after reunification. And I worked on cleanup of environmental catastrophes, really, that were in the former East Germany. And I love the city of Leipzig, because this is a city where Gödel and Escher and Bach, you know, sorry, not Escher, that's a book. Gödel and Bach had visited and it had a great rich culture. But what I really got out of it was a witness firsthand, just how horrible man's treatment of the environment was, the environmental pollution that we had caused. It really, it was something that I really saw firsthand. Over there in the city? Yeah, not so much in the city, but just in the area around the city. It's in, Leipzig is surrounded by the brown coal lands of Eastern Germany. So there's these large areas where they've just done stripped surface mining to get down to the brown coal. And I worked on one particular site where they'd, there was a house in a little town called Sibling or something like that, or a row of houses, and across the road from them was this big pit.  And then the next generation, they took the brown coal and they processed it to get these cocoa briquettes. And then they took the waste from that and put it back into the pit. So there was this big black lake of organic nastiness, right? And then after that, they finally, it drained away and they turned it into a landfill. So it was, I just saw, what a horrible, what a horrible kind of existence of the generations of people. Yeah, yeah, it's just, it's unnecessary, right? If we're clever and smart, so yeah. Yeah, emphasis on if, yeah. Yeah, I saw that Leipzig itself, the city was fabulous. It was very entrepreneurial, it was growing. It was really responding from the opening up to the West really well and it had all this great culture to learn about. So I loved Leipzig, but it was this surrounding area that I just like, ooh. But that's what I was working on, right? That was my area at that time. And so groundwater pollution when you were looking at this was from, let's say, contamination. Was it from these, from coal or was it from other elements? In this particular case, it was pyrolysis wastewater. So it was from the manufacturing of core briquettes. But there was lots of other examples of waste sites in Eastern Germany. There was an area, they called it the black triangle of Europe because it went into Poland and the Czech Republic as well. So, and the Germans were really, it was great. They were working at different ways of remediating these sites from forestry to creating natural lakes or and other processes. I worked with a limnologist while I was out there which was really cool because that's got a different discipline to mine. So, yeah. And the third city? Well, the third city was Toronto, right? So I returned back to Canada after my stint in Germany and got a job as a assistant professor at the University of Toronto. And there were several things about Toronto that really influenced this work on urban metabolism. One was, I started reading the work of Jane Jacobs who was very famous for her several of her books on cities including life and death of American cities. And I'm not sure everyone knows but Jane Jacobs had been a New Yorker and she'd sort of written about amazing insights as to how cities economies work from a framework, from a grounded social, on the street, eyes on the street perspective. But she'd moved north with her family to Toronto and stopped some highways going into downtown Toronto as part of her work there. So she was an icon of Toronto and I, and Toronto's a confidant. It's sort of one of those wannabe city-states. It's a capital of Ontario. It's not the capital of Canada, but it's a wannabe city-state. So I read Jacobs' work and it kind of, I got on, there's an urban vibe that Toronto's got very strong that I really picked up. And also, I got this job as a faculty position and it was fairly open. It was actually a call on something to do with sustainability, which was, there was some really well-minded professors at U of T as we used it. And I'd gone in as a groundwater researcher, but within two years I decided, you know what, I want to do something different. And so I was quite brave, you know, in the middle of tenure track, I switched my disciplines, right? I did a part-time MBA just to cover myself in case I didn't get tenure. And I had an old colleague called Rodney White who'd written a book on urban environmental management. He was a geographer. And I'd seen in his book, there's a few attempts to sort of quantify energy use in Toronto.  So he didn't have time to do any work in the area. And amongst it was the Hong Kong metabolism paper. And I just thought, I think I put two and two together. I just thought, you know what, wow, someone's tried to look at metabolism in Toronto and they've not really done it. And this is a framework that as an engineer, it's very quantitative, it's a framework we could use as an engineer to take on this topic of urban sustainability. So that was really the genesis of that, right? And you can also see the groundwater is an influence because in that changing metabolism, the city's paper, I use groundwater as a way of talking about storage and flow processes, right? Which is a little bit more in-depth than the most urban metabolism researchers would go into, right? Sorry if that's too long, but there's a lot, you know? I'm always curious what's the story because there's no, of course, let's say, curriculum on urban metabolism or there's no single way to get inside of it. And I think each one of us have a different entry path to the discipline and it also explains why some people are more interested in some parts of this field than another, let's say. But yeah, when I discovered this topic, someone told me about this metaphor and because I wanted to do quantitative stuff for a city but I didn't know what to do and a friend of mine did LCA of buildings, I think. And I said, okay, let's do an LCA of a city. Well, how would that work? And I couldn't understand how to do it. And then someone talked to me and said, well, perhaps you're looking at urban metabolism and well, you know, everything was clear after that. You know, I just, but of course, I then discovered the work from Matthew Gandhi and from urban political ecology. And then I said, whoa, wait. Yeah, that's some good, that means very interesting work in the geography or literature, right? And even going back to Marx and the others who talk about metabolism. Yeah, which makes it more, so it makes it more interesting, right? Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's not something that I feel that we comprehend still. I mean, even if the principle is easy, let's say, we still are, I guess, perhaps not at the genesis but there are so many things to be done at least in its implementation, not its implementation because, you know, it's just a lens to look at cities but at least that how to use it to do stuff or to use it for policy making. I feel we're still at the very beginning but perhaps you have experienced this very much over the last years. Yeah, yes and no. I mean, just to pick up on one thing you said, you use it to our metaphor and some of the early papers did use metabolism as a metaphor but I learned from Maria Fischer-Kowalski that it's not a metaphor, right? Cities really do have energy and material flows through them but the policy side for me, I think the importance of urban metabolism is that it's brettz, it gives you a broad view of the city and the real policy lesson for me or breakthrough for me was really when it came to the greenhouse gas accounting work because when I was writing the urban, doing the urban metabolism study of Toronto and doing the comparison of cities worldwide, at that point the literature on urban greenhouse gas accounting was very weak. There was a few, I think there was pockets in different nations of people that did it and there was competing, similar but competing frameworks that were kind of, they were hidden, they were really, they were sort of businesses and they weren't wanting to give that method away. And so I then moved on to do this comparison of the greenhouse gas emissions of these cities because as you well know, the greenhouse gases, it's all about multiplying emissions factors by activity levels, right? And the activity levels are all in the metabolism, right? So the metabolism provides all this data which goes right into your greenhouse gas calculations, right? So I did this work comparing the greenhouse gas emissions of 10 global cities, largely was industrial ecologists and people that you know quite well, and you may have probably interviewed a few of them on your part, right? And at that time I got to know this guy called Dan Horvig who was the urban anchor at the World Bank and he was from Canada, so I met him in Toronto and he said to me, you know, the bank has been wanting this for five years what you just produced because you've used a consistent methodology, it's transparent, you've collected data from all the cities, you've given all your data sources, you've done a rigorous scientific approach to greenhouse gas accounting from cities. And we can use that. And I tell you now, within a month of us publishing the results paper in ESNT, the World Bank made a $75 million investment to Bangkok on the basis that they had, Bangkok was one of our 10 cities. And I didn't get a cent for this from the World Bank, right? At that point it was like, hey, we've arrived in the policy world, the World Bank built its financing mechanism for funding cities, I mean, they actually deal with countries, but they built it on that accounting message which basically came from the metabolism and that was really the sort of the connecting of the dots from the metabolism, which is kind of science through to the policy. So yeah, that's the experience there. But what type of funding would they then provide? Was it for infrastructure? Was it what type of, yeah? Yeah, it was, they had a larger package of funding for Thailand, I guess, and they added an extra $75 million in. It was for funding public transportation infrastructure. I guess the Thai government had said, we want to put this transit in and it will reduce, it's part of our strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And the bank was able to say, hey, yeah, okay, we've got a measure of your emissions. We know how much you've got from transportation and the message is consistent with that that New York and London are using, right? So we know the New York and London, so yeah, okay, we can go ahead and do that. There's probably a bit more to it than that from a financial perspective, but anyway, that was my insight into it, yeah. And it wasn't the last time you compared cities, right? So you compare them in the changing metabolism of cities, you compare them then for the greenhouse gas emissions. And then you also compared the 27 mega cities and this mega paper that is, well, very condensed actually, but it probably took a lot, a lot of time. And it was, so I think it was in 2015, it was called, what was it? The energy and material flows of mega cities. And I think it was like a bomb when you dropped it, it was, wow, 27 cities compared at the same time in terms of metabolic flows, well, that was a lot. And I think most of the field was very excited to read it. So what happened there? Well, I'm pleased to hear that, that's a great way of describing it. It was, yeah, I mean, it was a fabulous journey. I mean, first of all, you know, Angelo and others at the Angelo Ficcini of the Enel Foundation were a big part of that. It was, yeah, no, it was a fascinating project. There was the Enel Foundation who, they didn't just sponsor the work, they were inherently involved in it. They, it was a new foundation created by Italy's National Utility, that's basically a global renewable energy entity today. I'm back then. They actually reached out to me. I think they'd been speaking to some people in the Industrial Ecology Network about, they had an interest in urban metabolism. They had an interest in mega cities. In particular, South South American mega cities, which came out. And they reached out to me. They said, hey, we're gonna be in North America next month. Would you like to meet us in New York City, right? So here's, I'm in Toronto. So I did a short flight and we met for lunch on this Avenue in New York, which was all kind of very kind of, enjoyable. It was just a lovely experience, right? And basically, the Enel Foundation said to me, hey, we wanna study metabolism, mega cities. Would you like to propose something, you know? And I said to them, well, how much do you wanna spend, you know? What's the scope of the project? Yeah, and it was interesting because they said to me, I'm trying to think, I've forgotten someone's name, if he's terrible, but Angelo wasn't there at that meeting. But they said to me, yeah, maybe just study 10 cities. And here's a couple, we're interested in the South American ones, so make sure you include them. I mean, that's because Enel was the electricity provider for some of the mega cities in South America, plus cities that weren't quite mega cities yet. They were including Lima, and I was like, well, Lima's only nine million. I'm sorry, that's out of bounds, right? And I convinced them, or I wrote a proposal to say, look, for us to, you know, if we study 10 mega cities, that's kind of interesting, but if we did all 27 mega cities, if we did all of them, then that's a landmark, that's a real piece of science, right? Because, you know, there's no kind of holes or gaps. It's comprehensive and complete. So I made a proposal to them to study all 27 mega cities. And we devised, the challenge is the data, obviously, you know really well, I mean, just doing 27 cities, but 27 mega cities where we're going beyond the central city into the suburbs, and you know, some of the cities were like 20, 100 municipalities, you know, we're in there. And so we, but I'd learned enough that really the trick is you need a person in every city, or at least a person in every country, right? So we devised a mechanism whereby every, every, we found a partner in every city, just about, and that was really using the industrial ecology network. We used the World Bank network at that as well. And I had a colleague, Patricia McCartney, who was running the Global Cities Institute in Toronto, right? We used her network as well. So that was an effort just to get that network of people together. And we offered honorariums. I can't remember this, $1,000 or a couple of thousand dollars, it was not a lot. It was an honorarium to say, hey, you know, just, you provide the data, we'll give you an honorarium, but you'll also, we want you to contribute to the paper. We want your reflections on the data. We want you to give us insights. We want you to co-author, not all the papers, but the PNAS paper was so. So, and, you know, amazingly it worked, right? I mean, I had a post-doc Ian Stewart and the project went twice as long as it was meant to go. Not that we got twice as much funding, but it was, you know, and now had a reorganization of the foundation halfway through the project, which we survived, which was tricky. But yeah, at the end of the day, it produced this paper with some really neat insights into the working in mega cities, I think, yeah. Yeah, and what was interesting is, I don't know, I guess it was within this whole project you had also this indicator set that you developed so that you could really compare, let's say the cities have comparable data within, well, or comparing all of these cities. And of course that's always the bane of the existence of urban metabolism studies. What do you account for and what do you exclude? You know what I mean? Because we could always include more and more and more or, you know, what's in and what's out in the quantifications. And so what we also have inherited in metabolism of cities in our global datasets and all of that is this layering system. I think that speaks a lot to have layers on explaining the context and then layers on the flows themselves and different layers. And as we see fit, we can add or subtract some layers. And so I think that this was perhaps even most interesting is how do we build something that, you know, all cities can be compared at the end of the day because just the flows is something but then we also need, you know, how do you compare Tehran with Paris? How do you compare Buenos Aires with Bangkok?  Oh, absolutely. I mean, those layering of those layers, actually I think it was Angelo or Renata. That Renata was a colleague at the NL Foundation who were really sort of keen on that layering approach that we know. And yeah, I think you've got it absolutely right. It's, you know, there was certain data you really want to get. You want to energy use if you can. I mean, that's kind of natural. But some of the material flows are pretty difficult to get. Some of them are a bit quirky, right? Much more difficult actually than energy and water, right?  We didn't really make a lot of it, but we got some data on steel, which was for about, you know, if you got data for seven or eight cities, that would be enough. Yeah, and you know, it sort of made sense that the cities that were growing fastest, not necessarily the largest mega cities, but the ones that were doing lots of construction, you know, you could see the correlation with steel. We also tried to get data on food and it really, you know, it was really completely inadequate. We didn't, I don't think we ended up reporting it in the paper at all, but you know, I just remember sort of, I think it was Cairo, we got sort of like someone reported the numbers of tins of hot chocolate or something like that. It was really quirky and I was like, yeah, I'm not sure that we can do much with that, but you know, others have gone on to do really good work on food, but we really didn't get it at all, you know, in our data set and that was okay, right? And what do you, I mean, because you've compared so many times different cities, what's, how do you approach this very extremely difficult task to compare cities and to what insights do we bring out of it and how can we really compare cities? I was gonna stare. Yeah, no, I was actually, I was sort of, I wanted to twist the question a little bit. I mean, let me say something that's kind of a response but isn't exactly a response. I think what I love about doing it is you actually learn something about the city, right? You know, you can read about the history of the city and I've written books on the evolution of cities, right? Which is another topic, but- We have a cheer, yes. I have some questions later on, yeah. Sure, but it's like, you know, as an economist, you can find out about the GDP of a city or you can look at a map at the geography, you can look at the map of the city and you sort of know where the main subway stations are or the main squares are. You learn the architecture of the city. And when you study the metabolism of the city, you learn something else, right?  You add the physiology to the morphology, right? That's what you do. And you think, you look at a place and you go, yeah, it makes sense that this place has all this energy used. Look how spread out it is.  Or look how cold it is here. You know, it adds something to sort of the understanding, the understanding of a city that could be amazingly lost. I mean, I remember if we go back to the greenhouse gas paper, one of our 10 cities was Denver. You know, Anu Ramaswamy, of course, I'm sure you know well, she was based in Denver at that time. And she and one of her grad students were the co-authors of the paper. And Denver is a little bit, I don't say off the map, but it's a relatively bad North American city in terms of its greenhouse gas emissions. And I just remember going, I did a number of radio interviews around that paper. One of them was a radio station in Denver itself. And I just remember the presenter introducing me and saying, we the people of Denver think we're living in the greenest city in the world, right? Because we have these beautiful Rocky Mountains behind us and it's clean living. And I had to explain to him, but you've got an interior continental climate. So you've got a lot of energy for the heating and cooling and you're running off coal power. That doesn't help, yeah. Doesn't help though. And you've got this really spread out, typical North American sprawl. I see you're driving an awful lot, right? So it's your heating, your high carbon electricity and your transportation emissions, which are the big three, right? That's why you're over 20 tons per capita. And it was like, it was news to them. You don't perceive that, right? Until you've sort of studied the metabolites of city. So I don't know whether that answers your question, but it kind of worry, it took me I suppose. No, you're right. I think it always goes back to some similar insights, let's say, each city, their main flows or energy, water, construction materials and food, let's say. Of course, water dwarfs them all in terms of mass. And on the output side, it's more or less the same thing. So we have, I think now some generalizable insights, which are good because at least when we start a new urban metabolism study, it's not from scratch. We already have some habits and some insights that are comparable from one city to another. Of course, then there is some specificities. And this is why we're also very attached to context-specific elements is how do we start then doing policies which are perhaps not exportable and are very context-specific? Or is there something that, are all policies universal or should we ground them all and how do we start grounding them? And I think that's the next level which we're right now in or something like that. Yeah, I mean, that provokes a couple of responses to me. Just first one, again, and going back to the mega cities paper, I remember when we were collecting the data for Karachi in Pakistan, how a big part of Ian Stewart's work was actually proofing the data and checking it was right. I mean, I remember the electricity used for Karachi was coming out way, way much bigger. I mean, it was like we had Delhi and Mumbai and then like, and then Karachi was like way, way bigger. I was like, no, that just can't make sense, right? No, let's double check that number. And so, you know, we went back and it turned out they'd given us the electricity used for the whole of Pakistan, right? So, it was like, no, we spotted that one because, you know, we'd expect it to be similar to those other types of cities. Not like the difference would be interesting, but, you know, we knew that those South Asian cities were really low metabolisms, right? In per capita terms, right? So, we'd learned something there. I can't remember what my second point was gonna be. That was about policy. I know we're talking about, yeah, exactly, about universality or context specificity. Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe this is moving on to some of the last work that I've, more later work I've done on cities where it's not really doing full metabolism studies, but just sort of drawing upon the learnings of 20 years working on cities. We did some work for the Wood Resources Institute on called Shifting Currents. It was about electrification of cities. And that's, you know, that's a big topic on, you know, big strategy for dealing with reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. And we were able to look at, you know, the whole planet of cities and say, you know, electrification is a major strategy, but it doesn't necessarily apply everywhere. And, you know, one of the two key variables that we should look for in understanding which cities are really good places to electrify. And, you know, one is the carbon intensity of electricity, which, you know, we use a lot in the greenhouse gas accounting, which is something, it's an addition to the metabolism, but it's an important part of the impact of the metabolism. And the other is just to what extent is a city using electricity? What percentage of the population actually have access to electricity? Because when you're looking in the global south, it's, you know, you can't sort of start professing that everyone should drive electric cars if only 10% of the population actually have electricity, right, it doesn't, it's just, it's social equity right grounds. This just doesn't make sense. But we were able to pick out a whole number of cities across the world and in different countries where actually electrification was a really good strategy for reducing emissions or growing without so much large emissions. So that was a, I think that would be an example of something that's useful for policy people in a very simple, you know, two very simple measures nicely displayed on a map of the world with some tables in the back, which really came out of the understanding of metabolism, you know, I think. Yeah, I remember, I think it was perhaps in 2017 or in one of the conferences you said the future of cities is electric cities or the future is electric cities, something like that was the title of your presentation, I think, and you had like a nice futuristic diagram, I think, or neon signs, I don't remember, yeah. I think there's a rock band called Electric City and I think I stole their logo or something. Might be that, I'll go have a listen, yeah. But, and how do we get to electric cities? Is it the, so we electrify all of the appliances, I guess, and electrifying all of the needs of energy into electricity, that's the main, or is there something else that I can think of? Yeah, and you're on the right track. I mean, the main ones are electrification of the vehicles, which is here today with automobiles, obviously. It's a bit harder for freight and larger trucks, but also the building stock, the, you know, in the last 10 years, air source heat pump technology has really progressed. 10 years ago, ground source heat pumps, you know, what people would talk about and there's always challenges with the unknown geology and, you know, going underground, but the uptake in air source heat pumps means that electrifying buildings is a major strategy that is and can be pursued, right, or can and is pursued. What I find interesting about that is though is, and again, this comes out of, I did some work with David Bristow in his PhD thesis on resilience of cities and we quantified energy stored in cities as a measure of resilience, right? So it's a slightly different angle, but it's actually had some really important insights for the strategy of electrification. The challenge is if you electrify your city, then you're going from, you know, most Western cities have maybe five or six predominant forms of energy, your diesel, your gasoline, your natural gas, a little bit of coal where it's still used, wood a little bit and electricity, right? If you go from six down to, you know, to just one, then you're much more vulnerable to shocks, right?  So it's important when talking about electrification of cities to also think about local generation, building scale generation versus the larger scale, external wind and solar plants.  So I do think there's some important subtleties in how you go about that. And I think, I don't think that's been necessarily well well written on or I don't think I don't see it getting into policy very much. I don't think that the utilities or the people who govern utilities have really caught on to that yet. And they need to, that's really important. Yeah, you're right, because I've never thought of this of, you know, homogenizing or going to one vector of energy is actually a risk, of course, of resilience. And of course, seeing how the grid today is vulnerable and we're all freaking out with blackouts how this risk gonna increase in the future. So it's a, it must be quite daunting for grid operators, this type of electrification of cities. Yeah, no, actually I think I'm going back to the, to the sort of the comparisons between cities. It's interesting actually, I always remember looking at Bangkok's energy sources and it was much more diverse than any of the Western cities.  And in a sense, as they become more developed, they actually become less resilient in some respects. I mean, there's a bit more to it than that, right? But it's, so yeah, no, I think it's an angle that I'd like to see more work on. I'd like, yeah, so. We, you mentioned briefly your book, The Evolution of Great World Cities, which you kind of wove through how big cities happened and how they made wealth back in the day and how the old cities that were wealthy are not the new cities that are wealthy and how this wealth moved around. I guess, of course, when we translate wealth into flows, wealth into flows, of course, there is, or wealth is, or there is capital and then there is money flow. So of course, it's very metabolic as well. So I'm wondering how, why did you, was that the culmination of engineering and the economy that's brought you to write this book or what did you have before writing this book? What was the rationale that you had in mind? It's funny, you should ask that. I was reflecting on that, not so much because of the podcast, but I'm doing a book review of some of a latest book by John Arenfeld, who's such an amazing leader of the field of industrial ecology going way back. He's the founding executive director and his academic work is fabulous. And John had, John was helping me arrange the 2007 ISIE conference in Toronto. He was one of the four of us, very much the steering hand. And I learned a lot from him. And he was him that really got me interested in complexity and was big on looking at complexity in industrial ecology. And in some respects, it's only the second last chapter where I look at cities as ecosystems. And I bring in a bit of the complexity theory where John's influence comes in. That book, Evolution of Great Well Cities, really relates to my work on metabolism of cities and industrial ecology. The rest of it is really another me. It's that guy that didn't wanna study civil engineering and went off and studied economics. And yeah, but there is a weird, I mean, there's a weird story to it too, because I, after I finished my first seven years as an assistant prof or, I guess the six and then I got my tenure at University of Toronto. I went off in my sabbatical year and I went to Switzerland, which is where you are now, right? Actually, I went to Oxford first. I had six months in Oxford in the geography department. And then I did six months, I actually attended up to before because my son was born, so I had to go. But complex these here. But anyway, I reached out to Peter Piccini, who of course was just a fabulous writer, all the things he was doing. And it was all because he just finished his professorship and he was working for the Swiss Science Foundation. I probably not got the correct term there. But he said, you should come anyway and you can mix in with my old group. So I still went and I, and so, and on my sabbatical, I'd written that I was gonna take, I used to teach a course called Infrastructure Economics. It was a graduate level course. And I was going to write a book on infrastructure economics. And the infrastructure economics had sort of all the economics and then engineering needs to know not just the micro-economic stuff or the cost benefit, but to understand economics and its broader context and macro and those kind of things. And after one month of trying to write this book, I said, this is boring. I wanna write something on cities instead. And so I started, at some point, there was some ideas came together that, it'd be way more fascinating to talk about the economies of cities at these different levels from micro to macro rather than just infrastructure for engineers, right? So that's probably the genesis of it. And so I just started writing a different book and it took me another five years actually. But it was an adventure.   But then, I got to know Richard Florida when he came to U of T and he read it and he loved it. And so he really went out, encouraged U of T press to publish it. So yeah, no, it's a... That's a big second matter, having Richard Florida as well, pushing your book, so... Yeah, no, Richard was great. Yeah, no, he was a really good colleague at U of T. It was a shame to leave the... There were some great colleagues doing work on cities at University of Toronto. It was the right place for that type of work. It's not... Victoria is a very different type of city. So I don't quite have that same kind of group of people around me here. But... That's perhaps... So now you work on biophysical economics perhaps. So Victoria has something to do with the biophysical element of this? Maybe. That's a nice theory, but no, I mean that's... I mean, my main, really the last five years in Victoria have been about building this green civil engineering department. So I've been hiring professors. I've hired a dozen people. That's a lot of work and just building a department. But the biophysical economics actually has come out as something else. I mean, I've... I've long... For a long time, I've read broadly across industrial ecology and economics, ecological economics and other similar types of fields. And... Actually, I mean, I don't know how long... It's a little bit off-way from the topic of cities. So we can do this maybe concisely. But I actually started writing another book. Again, without a publisher, and I've actually stuck... I've got this other book that's been written, which is all about Malsusian struggle. It's a very big picture. It's sort of a 250-year look at sort of... Not just a population problem, but the whole package of environmental challenges that the globe faces, right? And in this book, I go into the roots of industrial ecology and I go and explore the roots of ecological economics, including the whole chapter on the roots of thermodynamics. So it's roots of roots of roots, right? And one thing that I... In that process, I went back and I read a lot of original writing. So I read Georgesco Rajan's work. I read Daily Steady State Economics. I read similar types of books. So I really... And it just kind of occurred to me that Georgesco Rajan had this whole thing about the entropy law and the second law of thermodynamics that was kind of what all the ecological economists and some industrial ecologists to extent, sort of go back and draw upon it. And I thought, you know, it's a bit of a red herring because it just confuses everybody, right? And really, you should just stick to the first law and think about, you know, energy plants. There's a connection back to metabolism in the cities there. And I think I saw a different way of interpreting with what Georgesco Rajan was trying to say. He was just trying to say economy is a subject to the laws of physics. I think that's what he's just trying to say. And of course, I also all this stuff on de-grows and steady-state economies. And I just thought, and Hall's work on biophysical... Well, he called it biophysical economics. He's really looking at energy return and energy investment. Basically what I did was I've come up with a method for replacing general equilibrium models of neoclassical economics, using an equilibrium between capital, labor and energy. So I've got working on this method and I applied it to the Industrial Revolution as a way of developing it. And now I'm applying it to 20th and 21st century North American economies, really as a way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions. So I got pretty excited by it and it's pretty much my main thrust of my work, at least, you know, just now. Things change, but just now it's really where I'm at. So this model, could you elaborate a bit? How does it work? I'm a bit aware of CGE in general, how they work, but now you have, so capital, stocks and then energy flows that you combined the three together to kind of see what was the outputs attached to these three? Yeah, let me elaborate a little bit more on that, for sure, I'd love to. So the CGE models basically, this is going back to Walrus and the idea that economies can be described by this general equilibrium where prices and outputs, you know, the balance of supply and demand for multiple products in all markets all can sort of come into this great big general equilibrium. And it really has no physicality to it at all. It's very much, it's a social science model, derived from physics, right? But without using physics, if you use a mass of the physics, right? And various people have actually built CGE models of the industrial revolution, which was, I chose as my target period or era because it's a relatively simple economy. There's a bit of data, and it's not too contentious either, you know, there's not a lot of people working in the space. It's an easy space to develop new ideas, I think anyway. I've got some interest in that area, but, you know, you come across these people who've written these, come up with these general equilibrium models, and one of them in particular was a researcher at University of Chicago, and what she had done is she'd put energy into the model. But energy was just an intermediate variable, you know, energy was just something that was used in industry and energy was dependent on capital and labor to generate the energy. And that's, and there's more to energy than that. Energy flows through the entire economy. You need energy to produce capital. It's a two-way interaction. There was a feedback loopy there, yeah. Yeah, and so I said, well, and I'd rest, I mean, and Bob Erz has written a lot on, you know, Bob Erz has got some great work on, on the role of energy in putting it into neoclassical production functions. But I went further than that. I actually, I wrestled with the neoclassical production functions for the Industrial Revolution and they don't work. And I was reading this guy, Alan, who's a great scholar of that, he'd found the same thing, right? They don't work for the Industrial Revolution. So I kind of had to throw them away. So then, so then here's the story of how capital, labor, and energy come together in the Industrial Revolution. And actually cities comes into this as well, which is kind of neat. So we can tie it back to the pod. We're not getting too much of a detour, right? So what happened in the Industrial Revolution is you've got these great increases in agricultural productivity. So I'm looking at, you know, Great Britain from 1760, actually up to 1913. So I'm going up to First World War. So it's actually two periods of the Industrial Revolution. You've got an increase in the productivity of agriculture, which frees up labor. You've got, you've got more people than you need to produce your food, right? So you've got this labor. And the labor, I had a simple sort of four sector model of the British economy. One sector is agriculture, which I've just described the key thing of. The other sectors are coal mining. And then the sector for construction and materials, or it's construction, but it's got materials layered into it. And then the four sectors is production of goods and services, which is obviously a very big sector, right? But it's sort of a last down the line, right? And textile would go there, I guess, right? Because there was a lot of, yeah. Yeah, so the textiles are under the goods and services, yeah. So I don't really focus on, obviously, you know, textiles, the cotton mills is a big part of the Industrial Revolution, but I'm more interested in the energy side of it, right? And so the idea is that you've got this excess labor and they could go and work in any one of those other three sectors. But you can't, they can't get a job until there's a capital infrastructure in place. You know, there has to be mines for them to go do the coal mining, you know? And there has to be factories or shops for the goods and services. So you need to build the capital and obviously the construction of material sector is the sector that does all the capital construction. And there's no IT in those days, right? So it's all structural and mechanical engineering, basically. But then to build capital assets, you need energy. So you need the coal miners, right?  So that's, I mean, the math is actually really, really simple. It's almost embarrassingly simple, but because actually it's a very different way of looking at how economies function. And I've since, I mean, the beginnings of applying it now to the more complex economies of today, which is an interesting direction that I'm headed just now. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because as soon as you said that in the agricultural sector, we had surplus and thanks to that we could do all of the other things. That's how cities were born. I mean, we need the surplus from somewhere else to have cities, right? I mean, that's kind of the social and spatial surplus that we need to make cities, they don't exist elsewhere. So I'm curious to see how that would fit in as well. Like we need extra space outside to make cities happen. And then to make cities, we need, you know, more material. So yeah, I'm curious to see how that would evolve.  And yeah, cities are this things that emerge, it's emergence, right? The complex systems that emerge. We free up the labor, people need jobs and cities are actually a creation of higher order structures. There are this complexity and with creating complexity, there's roles of people, there's people to fix potholes, there's people to work in gas stations, there's people to build buildings, there's people to fix buildings, you know. And that all comes about, and you need an energy supply to do that too, right? So it's the combination of the labor, the excess labor from the countryside, the ability to access energy sources that creates these amazing entities, these cities that we, the many of us or more than half of us these days live in. And again, just a connection to this was, I was really fortunate to supervise the PhD thesis of David Bristow, who again is another industrial ecologist and he did his PhD on sort of the sermon dynamics of cities and he was so far ahead of me. I didn't understand what he was doing. I came out of his first defense. I worked closely with him, but I came out of his first defense. And I said, oh, Dave, I finally got, I finally understand what you're doing. You know, and he had seen this idea of the role of energy and the emergence of cities. It was in his thinking. He needed a little bit of help to kind of pull it out, right? But I find the penny dropped for me at what he was getting at, right? And so it's all buried in his PhD thesis. So that was something that I really felt like I was learning about cities through that work and that perspective. But again, metabolism is in there, right? It's the role of energy. Is it really critical? Yeah. So you have these two current projects like biophysical economics and global infrastructure. What is kind of your small secret project that you're working now for 2021, 2022? Is there something that you really want to explore? Is something that you want to discover still? Something new that you want to embark on? Well, on the city's line, I did a recent conference paper looking at this question of jurisdiction for responsibility for electricity supply tied into the question of resilience. I was looking at British Columbian cities and just pointing out that we really need the building codes to have PV on the roof of every building, I think. But the building codes don't say that. Building codes don't touch electricity supply or storage, which is important too, right? The rules governing municipalities sort of say that there's lots of things pointing to the fact that municipalities have a responsibility for the well-being of people and provision of infrastructure and almost worth light resilience. But they're superseded by the utilities, the electrical utilities, right? The electricity utilities have this power to sort of put their poles and their lines wherever they want or sort of telling the municipalities that who's in control, right? And so there's, I think there's some tensions to be worked out there. I'd love to see some more work done in there. I'm not sure I will do it, but it is something about cities that's interested in me a lot. I'm mainly working on a biophysical economics model of the United States just now. I was an old colleague from WRI. That's one thing. I've actually got a new postdoc starting with me today, which is really exciting, because we're gonna, you know, he's gonna do some of that work, but he's also just come out of a PhD with Peter Victor in ecological economics. So he's got some really great talents. I'm looking forward to seeing what he produces. And then again, I've got this other book that I've been beavering away on. So we'll see whether I find a publisher for that. I don't know where that might be. It might still be a few years away before that sees the light of day. Is the topic also something in between civil engineering and economics or? No, this is the one on the Malthusian struggle. Ah, yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, no, it's got, it's actually way too ambitious. It's just, that's the problem with it, yeah. So. But you know, I mean, you need something ambitious to get excited to write it. And then when it's too ambitious, it's difficult, I guess, to see where it ends or? Yeah, and actually that's just something about what you just said, which is sort of almost like my learning in life, my learning as an academic, that I found myself about 20 years ago when I was transitioning from groundwater into sustainable cities, that I was looking at the advection dispersion equation which describes solute transport, right? And I was looking at its inability to describe tail effects. So I was looking at a tertiary phenomena. What is this pollution to that it goes along and it spreads out? And three, I'm looking at as deviation in how it spreads. And it was like, maybe this is just like way, way too fine a detail. And my world almost turned upside down. And I started working towards larger and larger scale, a larger phenomena. And this is the whole realm of interdisciplinary research. And what you discover when you start saying was, well, how does this whole realm of ecology relate to economics or physics, whatever it is? And you find these chasms where there's so much to learn, right? And it's such an exciting space to throw yourself into and work out connections between things. It's not reductionist science. It's something else, but it's fabulous for learning about the way the world works, I think. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So we generally have a last question, which is we want to recommend other people to, well, we want you to share something you would recommend other people to read or to watch or to listen to, probably in your work of writing this new book, you probably have encountered many interesting readings. So do you have anything that's really kind of shook you and you want to share that with everyone? Oh, yeah, there's a lot in that book. Well, I'm going to reiterate something I just said, actually, because it's very much top of mind just now, but it also is very impressive. And readers, listeners or readers can't actually read it yet. But again, John Ehrenfeld's new book on flourishing. He's got one already out on flourishing. So maybe his old book on flourishing they should go to, but he's got a new book coming out. I'm looking at the pre-proof copy just now to write my review of it, but it is an amazing piece of work. I mean, it's got brain science and philosophy and sociology and business and ecology and spirituality wrapped into it. It is a really clever, sophisticated deep look at humanity. And our challenges, right? So I'm in awe of John Ehrenfeld just now. So there's a pretty good plug for his book on flourishing. I'm not sure I can top that. With this level of ambition, yeah, I can imagine it's difficult to top that. Yeah, yeah, no, it's a fabulous, I mean, yeah, in terms of the stuff I've been writing on in my other book.  I mean, it's been interesting to sort of look at the history of discovery of global warming by, you know, the challenge of diversity, biological diversity globally is something that I worry a lot about. And there's a new Tuscupta report which maybe people should look at if they haven't. I think that's worth looking at. I mean, you know, some of the foundational stuff on thermodynamics still interests me a lot. I'm just trying to remember the name. There's a researcher who moved back to Germany from Maryland whose work is Clyden, Axel Clyden. Yeah, so Axel Clyden, he's, I think he's at Jena in East Germany now, but he's done these wonderful workpapers on understanding the whole of systems through non-equilibrium thermodynamics, not too deeply technical or not too deeply mathematical, I should say. His writing is really good. There's several papers in pretty prestigious journals that I came across in the last few years. David Tillman's work actually, I mean, he gave a presentation at a Gordon conference not too far away from you probably, I don't know, 10 years ago, but his work on understanding the future challenges of biodiversity loss to provide food for a growing and more affluent population is really quite hard hitting. And I do think it's almost scary, but I think he's a very accomplished academic too. So there's just a couple of names I could throw out. But yeah, that's probably enough to wear the appetite of listeners to this, I would imagine. Yeah, they'll be covered for a couple of months, I think with his list of, because you need to digest them as well. It's not just reading them. You also think there is knowledge to be understood and then linked with each other. So thanks so much, Chris. I think we covered many things. I learned a lot from this renaissance. I learned a lot from what are some interesting topics to also start researching again, some others to rediscover as well. Thanks so much for taking your time, Chris. And I think we, I hope we're gonna meet very soon in another conference and discuss this over. I'm really looking forward to reconnecting with people again. I've had my jabs. It's been fabulous to talk to you, I see there's a lot of fun. Yeah, and kudos to you for doing this part. It's great, you know. I hope you can edit that down and have a really good, some good insight from our conversation, so thank you. I always enjoyed, thanks a lot for sharing all of these insights. And thanks everyone for listening until the end. We'll see you at the next episode. Cheers.


So here I want to introduce a very typical case in Beijing, that's Beijing Aforestation Project. This project is launched for create a more wealthy city. Before we start, I want to introduce why the Beijing government launched the inner city Aforestation. So the plant area in Beijing, that's include the entire city center. And most population, they are focused on this area, nearly like 16 million people. But for the urban forest, they have limited urban forest. So in 2011, the plant area has like more than 30% less than the forest coverage in mountainous area. And also there has a very big problem about the forest patches, that's more and recommended. And also all these status of forest or urban forest and trees, that's filled to meet the citizen's demands in Beijing. So in 2012, the government in Beijing have launched the Beijing Aforestation Program. So with the aim of create nine green veggies and also create green belt, two green rings and also multiple green corridors, they start the Beijing Aforestation Project since 2012. And until now they are still doing this project, implement this project. So I would focus on the main actions the government they already implemented. The first one is reconnected the pre-existed urban forest patches. For example, along the roads and the rivers, they create, they plant more trees along them. And also the restoration, they're restorating the wetlands, centipedes and also some wasteland in the urban and peri urban area. The third action is they're turning green to green. For example, they planted trees in high urbanized area, like the city center or city core. They have created their pocket urban parks and also some very small urban green space or green gardens. The fourth action is to create more forest wetlands parks in peri urban area. Because in that area they have bad background of cheese and also forest. So they just construct more parks in the peri urban area. So this can help to create more recreation space for the citizens. The last action is the recycle of construction waste, such as they use the construction waste to create landscape accessories and also to the waste the construction waste is used to create the path in the parks. And here I want to show the spatial distribution of the new forestation. The red color is the red color shows the new forestation that was planted in 2018 to 2020. And the green color shows the previous forestation sites, that's from 2012 to 2017. And here I want to say in the past nine years, the government in Beijing have created, have planted new forestation. The total area is 1.78 million hectares. So you can see the new forestation area they include, the new forestation area they include every year. So I also want to introduce the key outcomes for this project. For example, the first very impressive outcome is increased the urban forest area in high urbanized region, especially in the plant area in Beijing. You can see the data here for the Beijing city, the forest coverage has increased more than 6%. And in the plant area the forest coverage has increased like more than 15%. Another side, these improve the ecosystem surveys provided by the urban forest and trees. For example, it can help to mitigate the urban heat island and also create more space for the citizens for their recreations and also improve the citizens awareness. And then it also can help to improve the biodiversity conservation. So our field work has shown that the number of the butterflies and also the birds has increased in the last nine years. And also the last one is restoration the soil quality. Another side, the urban forest also help to promote the social economy. For example, they create more green jobs. For example, the new forestation, they need management. So more people they can to help to do some management, forest management work and some there in the, and also for the tourism. For example, our speakers invited our speakers also mentioned that the green call, the green care and also the nature school, all this has promote the local tourism that's provided by the urban forest and trees. The last one is this big inner city forestation also encourage more public and private investment because they can invest in the tourism. They can build more like restaurants or hotels or some other infrastructure in some big urban forest parks. So they can also get some money back from this kind of project. Because our topic is about real estate city. So for me, I think the real estate city is not only focus on how to improve the GDP. It is more, it is to be include more like help people to improve their life quality and also how to use urban forest and also urban forest and trees as a way or a tool to create more values, economic values. So in our future and also in this meeting, I would suggest some more actions that we need discussion or maybe we can add more in our future. The first one is complete the governance system for inner city forestation, both bottom up for government leading system. The second one is more research actions are needed for the whole cycle of such kind of inner city forestation projects. Oh, we say we set the urban forest as nature-based solution projects. For example, we need to multiple guidelines for all standards for for different for planning and the design and also for implementation as well as management. And also we need use friendly models or universal models to evaluate the ecosystem surveys or ecosystem or values that provided by the urban forest and the trees. The last one is we also need some tools to use citizen science, for example, use citizen science to monitor the urban forest to monitor this kind of such kind of inner city forestation project. The third one is just as similar as that, how to convert the urban forest to a project that we got as an investment project. Now when we say something about the urban forest or forestation, most people they will consider about, it will cost a lot of money. So we need more like these business models to promote such kind of inner city forestation project. The last one is we can see when cities there can they can impact each other. So more cross-city or cross-region cooperation on the urban forest project are needed in our future. So all of these, that's all I want to introduce to you all. If you have any questions, just feel free to connect me. Thank you.


So there are a few secret paths in Elden Ring, some of these are just more efficient to make life easier, some are needed to progress certain quests and some are hidden which ain't needed but help a ton of you guys to how we play this game. For today guys I bring you all hidden path secrets, portals and entrance points to hidden areas I think you need to know about. How's it going guys? My name's DPJ and if you do enjoy the video leaving a like really helps out and if you like what you see and want to see more be sure to subscribe. Okay so secret paths, portals and areas, let's get into it guys. So with no real particular order here, first up guys let's start with a hidden portal to best your sanctum. So this portal is located behind the third church of Mocha and it is great, it's a great spot to go to, to use this portal for earlier players to avoid danger heading to that best your sanctum. This is a great area for lots of early players to earn tons of runes and it's a place, I mean it's a portal that a lot of early players like myself did indeed use to avoid a lot of danger going through this massive area here.  Okay so next up people we have the pureblood knights medal. Now this is actually an item you can use to teleport yourself to one of the best early farms in this entire game, in fact the best farms in this entire game are located in said area. But if you are a relatively new player guys you can make use of this medal, this quest reward and come to the south east of the sea off the river. This place here guys and all these grace points behold incredible ruin farming spots. Some even consider these exploits, well a couple of them really are. Now you've probably seen some of the ruin farming spots on this game, a lot of them are taking place in this area and if you want to come here early on guys you can. What you need to do is people firstly beat, Godric the grafted, he's the second main boss I believe. After margit the foul omen you then have to fight Godric, once you've done this guys come back to the very first point in the first step. Upon loading in here to your left there will be a glowing rock on the floor. Going into that with this rock this will start off a quest with a white faced vario I believe his name is pronounced, I in certain I in French. But this quest will then take you to the rose church located right here guys. Now the quest is quite short to be honest, it involves you invading other players, three other players doesn't matter if you win lose or draw, after you've done that he will give you a cloth, you have to take the cloth to one of two said areas to get it soaked in blood, relatively straightforward guys and then once you come back he will give you this medal. As soon as you use the medal guys it will teleport you to this area right here within the seaworth of the river so make use of it if you can and that quest is still available for you. If you haven't guys the only other entrance I know of to this area is located within another secret area, the hidden path to Hallig tree. So firstly guys how would you get to the hidden path of Hallig tree, well initially you will need to get the dectus medallion, once you get the dectus medallion I mean search a guide on youtube guys there are hundreds of them, relatively easy to get but once you get it you can activate this lift and come up to this area here. Now then you have to progress around here guys through this capital, take out a couple of main buses in the phantom god tree and the almond king then guys you'll gain access to the forbidden lands allowing you to come up to this lift, the gran lift of the road. Upon activating this guys you can come all the way up here which you will need to do to castle soul. Right at the top of castle soul guys there is a boss called commander Nile, when you kill him you will give you one half of the Hallig tree medallion, the other half guys is going from an NPC located right around here right next to this grace.  But yes once you clear this dialogue guys exhaust this dialogue and you'll give you a lot of a half of the hallig tree medallion. Then guys you need to come back up to the lift of the road, the gran lift of the road. Once here guys press right or left on your d-pad and it will give you access to the hidden path to the hallig tree.  So guys another well secret entrance is to the capital and that's without needing the dectus medallion now to actually get access to up here guys if you don't have the dectus medallion which you can get pretty easy anyway but I thought I'll just add it to this list either way is to come up here so I'll say you're at a sorcerer's aisle come up here to the ravine follow this path all the way up here guys and you'll come to this small village now if you climb all the way up to the top guys you'll end up I believe about there now this is the magnum world boss you can beat the boss guys you actually gain access to this path right here and you can come up this way or is it that way either way you gain access to this whole area guys without having a dectus medallion and you're seeing that on screen now. Next up guys we have a hidden path to an area within a volcano manor it's basically the depths of volcano manor and to get here guys you need to come to the Veilucaria Academy once you are here people where if you come here and the door is sealed as a massive seal on the door you need to come to this spot on the map right here there will be a sleeping dragon you need to come behind it and get the key once you get the key you can go to either entrance within the academy and the seal will be removed then you can enter this place now once you progress through this place you'll come to this spot on the map right here like a giant lift contraption I don't know what this is why this would be here I have no idea but either way if you ride it to the bottom you'll see one of these mechanical mothers that's my nickname for them who try and pick you up and put you in there well microwave bellies should we call it yeah microwave bellies sounds good and actually guys that's what you want them to do because upon you dying with inside their stomachs their bellies their microwaves whatever it is I don't know you will actually spawn back in your reappear underneath volcano manor and more importantly as part of their quest in the game the temple of Igley so if that's an area specifically looking for this is actually how you get to it okay so next up guys is a quest item you get from running so upon doing run his quest she eventually gives you an item called the carrion inverted statue now though this isn't a very important area and I've probably don't even need to include it in this video let's follow wood anyway now upon getting this item from running come to the study hall right here on the map upon entering the study hall guys you can place this item on this table upon doing this it inverts the study hall and from here guys you can actually find a pretty unique area and there's a couple of items in here guys you definitely don't want to miss namely a talisman which gives you five three extra intelligence points and also an item which can have an effect under ending so keep that in mind guys but yes the carrion study hall secret area I thought I'd include it for the heck of it because it's a cool place I'm talking about a running quest there is a part of it guys where you need to come to the deep root depths the Ansel River more specifically this area right here the Ansel River main for me I'm not sure what happened but something didn't trigger in my quest because other guys I saw on YouTube they showcased an actual portal but for me that didn't happen so I had to find an alternative route down to the Ansel River and the Ansel River main now you can get down to the Ansel River by going to the Ansel River well right here guys but that spawns you down at the bottom side of it where you're free to explore all this area but you actually can't get up to the Ansel River main and if you want to progress around his quest you have to be here now the only other way I found was via another secret path and this secret path guys requires you to take out a few bosses firstly Radhan who's located in this big area here guys that quest is triggered and started the you come to the impassable great bridge then come into the red main castle and starting it there once you take out Radhan you get a new area open up which you access via 4 height west called Nakran upon coming to Nakran guys you have to fight your way past the mimic tier boss and go to the twin gargoyles now the twin gargoyles ain't an easy fight but if you're skilled enough you'll take them out they definitely don't need to be two of them though but hey from the stuff where I just thought we needed a challenge I don't even know what was going through them might as well but hey but once you take out guys the twin gargoyles when you come to the back of the room there will be a grace there for you to activate but just right at that grace there will be a cuffing now if you enter that cuffing guys it takes you up to the deep root depths mainly the great waterfall crest grace point from here guys if you follow the path I take on screen now and follow all the way to the very northwest of this area there is another tomb for you to get inside upon getting the side of this tomb guys we will actually spawn in at the Ainso River main where you need to be the Rani's quest there's also a few other cool things in this area too guys so you may just want to explore even if you ain't doing Rani's quest yet but yeah once you've had a playthrough answer with a main if you come down here guys to the lake of rot shore side and you make your way across the rut and down to this grace just behind this point guys that is another tomb getting in this tomb guys will take you down to a bus called Estelle natural born at avoid which is a great bus fight by the way okay so next up guys we're going back to the hidden path to the Hadid tree if you come very north at this place you'll come to this area right here the Ordina rhetorical town within this area guys is actually a portal which takes you to the hidden Hadid tree area which I've only recently just found out about so there's no doubt people watching this they have no idea about this so within this little town guys if you come through you'll eventually come to this platform where there's a glowing blue symbol on the floor which you can stand on now if you stand and interact with this thing you'll be teleported to another dimension within this dimension guys you need to light four candles which you'll see me doing on screen now just speed it up once you've lit all four candle guys they seal at the top of these stairs will break and you'll be able to access this portal which will take you to the secret area right here guys which beholds many more secrets and there we have it guys there are a couple of more I could cover there's a couple of chests that teleport you to different bosses but nothing of spectacular importance in my opinion I mean if you're an early play you can come down to the tower of return you climb to the top of this there will be a chest which will teleport you to the capital and if you run past this giant on your right hand side there will be a chest which beholds a great talisman for you if you pull up your map and it seems as though all the graces across there it's because you need to activate the grace that's here and you should be good but yeah guys if you know of any more hidden locations spot secret portals whatever be sure to let me know and everyone else know down below within that comment section but on that note the end of the video has arrived if you enjoyed it leave a like really helps out feel like what you see and want to see more be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video upload can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button but guys thanks as always for stopping by and hopefully I will see you on that next one


Hello you guys and welcome to the Lone Fox final apartment tour This is a little bit of a bittersweet moment. I'm not gonna lie This is where the Lone Fox channel kind of came to be over the past two and a half years And I am moving out of here And I'm sharing with you guys a walkthrough of everything I did to this space from start to finish going through every single room The first thing you might notice is a mirror which everyone needs one in their entryway And I just happened to have this vintage brass peacock mirror Which I love so much and then working our way up the stairwell It is a little bit dark But I did paint the banister black and I added a ton of framed artwork all the way up Just to give like a visually interesting look and kind of like a little moment as you walk into the apartment But let's head into the living room So the first room what we are heading into is the living room which I spend so much time in the living room I love this room because it gets the most light in the entire apartment The first area in here is actually our little media section I got this media console from article and I love it It just goes so nicely with the space now right here is my simply safe You guys probably catch us in the background of my videos all the time It's my home security system and I absolutely love it This box actually arrived at my doorstep a little over two years ago when I moved into this apartment from simply safe Now if you've never heard of simply safe I have featured it so many times on my channel because it has kept me in my apartment so Extremely safe over these past two years Actually moved from a larger complex into a smaller duplex on a main street So I want to ensure that my apartment was safe and they have sensors for absolutely everything So you can set up your entire apartment or home to be completely secured by simply safe Whether it be windows doors motion sensors, they have it all you guys So make sure to click the link in my description box below Simply safe comm slash loan fox to save 20% on your simply safe security system When you sign up for an interactive monitoring plan and get your first month for free and then work your way over into this area I love this vignette. I just like the large art piece with the two smaller ones This olive tree and then I picked this actually up at an estate sale And recently I found this bust at a yard sale for like 20 dollars now working our way over into the living room This actually was originally a sectional So the sofas here are Oriented in a sectional but I actually kind of turned them into two couches directly across from each other because I felt like It made it so much more conversational and the flow of the living room kept the fireplace introduced as well Because before I just kind of blocked it off So I love how the fireplace is now a part of it And I also painted the fireplace black as well to match all of the window trim Which I also painted black and that is val spars tricorn black if you guys are curious Now I love these couches so much there from article the leather cigar sofas And this table here is from zara home and working our way over back here This light is from article this tree. I made myself believe it or not This is actually a diy that I did for like under 30 dollars I found a big branch outside glued some leaves on I will put a card for you guys up above And the fireplace I love the black fireplace It just created such a focal point in the living room It's like literally what your eye is drawn to when you walk in the space And I did actually a tonal black art piece on top Which is just like a spackle checkerboarded piece and some simple styling And then the last thing in this living room is actually this bookcase here Which I designed for architectural digest. It was such a fun video I absolutely loved working with the team on this project And it turned out so much better than I expected but the room that we were heading into next is the dining room We are making our way into the dining room, which this space has transformed over the years of living here I first painted this wall section here a navy blue color, which I loved and that was in my last tour But this time I actually painted it this copper color called copper kettle by venju and more And this actually just used to be a big cutout in the wall And I think it was for a china cabinet So I added in two pieces of mdf with some brackets and turned it into some larger open shelving Where I can just display a bunch of my like thrift finds and some of my favorite decor pieces And then down below is a media console i di wide in a past ikea hacks video Now believe it or not this table is from the 1800s It is the heaviest thing in my apartment and it is the most expensive thing in my apartment But I love it. I think it has so much character It was actually constructed from vintage shipping cargo crates working our way back here I have this terra cotta urn that I put some olive branches in And just some plates for you know when your friends come over and you want to serve them something I honestly just put those there for the video and then over here in the back We have this vintage mirror. This is actually my great grandpa's mirror And then I have two candle sconces from world market on either side and a diy bench and this new rug here I love it. It has like the sage color way which goes really nicely with the terra cotta And I almost forgot about the original chandelier. I love this. It's so pretty. So of course I kept that intact over here It's pretty interesting spot. This is well known on my channel as the horror movie room It's originally it had this wood paneling in it and I actually painted it all white And then I changed it to this color called black fox And right over here is kind of like this little bar area with an ikea bar that I created And just some you know bottles and glasses on top and then we have a speakeasy vibe over there And some extra storage over there, but let's head into the kitchen Making our way into the kitchen slash breakfast nook area We're going to start off with the breakfast nook, which is my favorite makeover in the apartment I love this space so much. It just seems so much light and I love sitting here working on my computer taking zoom calls It's just a really really nice space in the place and I also created this table Now up here. I have just glass face from target with some Faux florals in there always add water to your faux florals and make some look real And just some artwork over here. I did some picture frame molding which was fun Now over in the actual kitchen space. It is not a bad kitchen It's like a decent size kitchen for a rental apartment, but it is pretty bland.  So let's go ahead and head to marie's bathroom Which is just past the laundry room here Surprise you guys you have actually not seen this makeover I did this just on instagram and I painted marie's bathroom pink because before it had the crazy graphic Print that I did on the top then it had white board and baton on the bottom But I painted the entire thing so don't a pink by bear and I love it I think it's just such a moody fun look in here and this is a vintage art piece I got back at my parents house. It's hand painted and I think it's just such a beautiful piece with the pink And then over here. I just added some faux florals a really large arrangement when marie actually utilizes this She swaps it down here and then puts the candle up there And I also spray painted all of the hardware in here So the faucet the light fixture the mirror and the shower I spray painted all with a bare spray paint And I did it like very proper though so that they're gonna stay for quite a while I just love how the gold plays with the pink. I think it's a really nice look And the vanity is october sky by benjamin moore. And yeah, that's this bathroom. It's really small, but it is a cute space Marie's bedroom is one of the most asked about rooms on my channel and I feel like one of the most watched rooms as well I love what I did in here So this was my first ever space where I painted all four walls And I decided to paint all four walls with a lime wash and do picture frame molding Which is just like so daring But I went all out for it And I love it because it kind of created this moody peresian aesthetic And I really wanted to channel that with the furniture as well So I did this ikea dresser and added these like french-style knobs just to make them look a little bit more of an Authentic provincial piece and then some simple styling up here I love this big huge jug from anthropology a while back I actually did a really great anthro collab and they sent so many beautiful pieces for this space So a lot of the items including the curtains all of the bedding is from anthropology So we did an olive tree in here I felt like it just fit the vibes for the space and the night stands are actually from the thrift store I painted them black. They were originally like a walnut wood and the lamps here are from amber interiors But I love this space so much It's one of your guys's favorites as well and I can see why because it's just such a unique space, but let's head into my bathroom So here is the bathroom space and shocker I did do bored batten in here as well But I love this one because I did it a really deep green color This is called backwoods by benjamin moore And I love it I also brought it up on the window trim too so that it kind of framed out the windows And I did new mirrors above the vanities So the landlord mentioned that he wanted to have both vanities kept in the space because they were just replaced So I kept them as is I just swapped out the hardware and did some simple styling But I do love how the mirrors add just like a fun element to the bathroom I feel like they're really interesting and I also sewed my very own roman shades Which was the first time I did it and it's a lot easier than you would think And really this side also mirrors the same exact thing. It looks pretty identical And then we have the bathtub and the bathtub area is here and the shower is actually behind the bathtub That's behind the door, but we don't really need to go into there because it's kind of boring I don't love the dial in here. So let's head into a very very interesting space, which is the lone fox studio This is the room where all of the magic happens. So this is my lone fox studio space It's where I store all of my supplies all my crafting and diy objects So literally this entire wall here is absurd. It's so crazy, but I know where everything is I have all of my paint cans down on the first shelf. Then we have spray paints Yarns and rolls. I call this the roll section And then all the entire top and this right or I guess left side here is all additional decor So I have pillows on the bottom and then we have candles here Bases and just other decor that I want to use in future makeovers or projects in the middle of the room Is my filming table and I got this from amazon. I like it because it's really deep So I'm able to work on like large projects and I have my lighting equipment up top So I just set my camera up here if I want to actually film like at nighttime or What consistent lighting in the video that I'm working on and guys I still do have my leather painted chair This is the most asked about diy that I've done and I love it It still works amazing and I kind of just choose whichever chair I want to go with for the day I like this one because it goes up and down and then over on this wall is a diy dresser that houses a ton of fabric and wood items And then I have like an artwork wall. So this is just a bunch of frames artwork thrifted finds lamps Curly willow branches. There's just a plethora of items over here The door leads into my closet But I never access the closet from this door So in front of it I have all of my faux florals because I'm constantly Restyling when seasons change and I just use them as props for photos and then this corner is my tool corner So I have this little pegboard that I created Leans up against the wall and it has a bunch of my tools that I can just easily, you know grab Grab if I want to so yes pegboard tools just easy access I have my tripods in the corner and then this is just for smaller items So if I want to you know, like sort out all of my embellishments or even wood stains I like having this small drawer just to organize all of those items and some more tools on top But that is the kind of craft workshop space and the last space we are going to touch on is my bedroom So let's head in there. So this is a little area before entering my room I wanted to share it with you guys because I don't think I've ever shared it It has like a little ledge and I put this lavender in an urn This is actually the simply safe camera that I have it's a live feed camera Which I love because we're able to see if anything's happening in the apartment And it kind of just keeps track and keeps a live feed on everything And they also now have a wireless outdoor security camera as well Which is perfect to make sure the outside of your home stays monitored, of course And this actually looks up to 140 degrees in different angles to make sure really every single element of your home is watched after It has a digital zoom and so much more So definitely make sure to check out simply safe if you're in the market for a home security system And then these are just a couple of vessels down here, but let's head on into my room Okay, so I might have lied at the beginning when I said the living room got the most light because I think that my room actually gets the most light It has five windows in it, which I absolutely love. It is magical you guys I really do feel so sad that I'm leaving this room because my favorite element is the arched window I literally have it tattooed on my arm. That's how much I like this room So I'm gonna miss it, but you know, I had an amazing time here So in this space, I actually ended up doing a board and baton wall on the back And then recently I added in some shoe molding to make it look a little bit more french and I popped a new headboard in here I actually got this at a thrift store for 20 dollars and I love the bedding I really love this like warm brown rusty tone It's just so pretty and I invested in a quilt from amber interiors, which I'm very happy about and both my nightstands are from Anthropology and Justina Blakenly, but they're a really old collection.  I love it. It is so unique It's from cv2 and I actually found these chairs believe it or not on facebook marketplace I got two of them at 90 dollars each, but these are from the studio McGee target collection And this here is a bird bath. I actually painted this bird bath It is from home goods and I turned it into a little side table And then another olive tree we have over in the corner. I think it's like a nine foot one from Wayfair It's faux and I popped it in a Lowe's vessel that I kind of antiqued a little bit And then over on this wall in my room is my tv So I actually have the tv in a frame, which is pretty unique. This is from tv frames unlimited I believe I will link it below for you guys if you are curious and I got this dresser on etsy It's an authentic french provincial dresser and the girl actually redid it into this black tone for me And the last thing which you guys have probably all seen The most recent makeover on my channel is my office nook space, which I did with etsy and I love Love love this space. I work in here all day every day. Like I spend so much time in this area I love how there's a window in here too. I think it's just such a cute little vibe And that is the office space you guys and that's really my entire apartment tour I feel like I want to do a proper outro.  I actually have to start packing soon Which is why I did want to get this apartment tour out before the empty house tour Just because I do have to start taking things down converting the space back to how I moved in And I do want to mention a lot of you guys have been asking if I'm going to be doing a Unmaking over my apartment video which I did in my last space and I'm not a thousand percent sure yet Just because my landlord did let me make a bunch of changes up here So I just want to run those by him first and I actually want to ask him If you would be interested in being in a video where I share with him the space you guys because he is older He's probably around I would say 80 years old and he lives under me And we only talked to him every once in a while when we see him in a window or something So I was thinking of potentially emailing him and seeing if you'd have any interest in coming up and seeing the space Which I'm a little nervous about. I don't know why It's just like, you know, he owns this so he's gonna see what I have been doing in here for the past two years But make sure to subscribe because that could potentially be a video and we have the empty house tour coming out next you guys Which is next week. Um, and there's so many more videos in the works I've been doing so much behind the scenes So make sure to also follow along over on instagram and tiktok both are just lone fox home I'll put them right here and I want to thank you all so much for watching And I don't even know what else to say like This is the last video. Well, it probably isn't the last video in this apartment I'm still gonna do some moving vlogs and some other content within here And I will catch you guys all in next week's video Which is going to be the empty house tour So make sure those notifications are turned on because you are not going to want to miss that one It is um, it is a major major video. Okay. Bye everybody