A US veto is a vote against humanity. We need to end the military and the aid and the genocide and the apartheid and the murder and we demand peace now. Stop the vogs. People's dispatch right now I'm here outside a rally with many different labor unions, labor movements, sponsoring outside of the New York Public Library in New York City. Labor unions, including the UAW Region 9A, including the United Postal Workers Union, United Electrical Workers have gathered here because all those unions have demanded a ceasefire in Israel's war on Gaza. They've demanded an end to the violence in Gaza and many of them have said that we don't want our tax dollars as American working class people, as working class people from the United States, going to Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip. And so this is really a watershed moment in US politics where you have dozens of unions gathering here in New York City to demand a ceasefire and demand peace and take a very political stance in an international issue and express dissatisfaction with the political status quo here in the United States. UAW Region 9A has a strong presence here. They just came off of a massive strike nationwide where they won major demands for their members and are riding the waves of that victory. And right now they're doing that, riding those waves by demanding peace and demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. What is taking place in Israel's response to the Palestinian people with its indiscriminate bombing shutting off the food, water, fuel and medical supplies to Gaza is the most horrendous of war crimes. We are here to mobilize workers across the country to win the democracy that we need because democracy here is going to be able to bring about democracy in the most oppressed, colonized and war-torn places in the world. The bombs killing civilians in Gaza are being paid for by the hard-earned tax dollars on the U.S. working class. Every bomb that drops on a hospital, a school or a home in Gaza is paid for by the money that could instead be going to hospital schools and housing here at home. Doctors are being forced to perform surgeries and procedures to care for the injured without medication, without anesthesia. Just take a moment and imagine that pain. This is absolutely unacceptable. Going into labor and delivering their babies under rubble, they are delivering the babies without proper postnatal care.  Listening to the people that elected them, the Biden administration and corporate Democrats are cutting deals with right-wing Republicans to impose extreme, cruel sanctions on migrants at our borders. Many of whom are fleeing the legacy of U.S. military conflict in their own countries. The American people, by large majorities, want a ceasefire. We want our government to work for peace, not pour fuel on the fire. We cannot bomb our way to peace. We cannot bomb our way to safety. We cannot bomb our way to liberation. The reason the labor movement has been slow to non-responsive to hostile to these calls for peace is because we line up behind the politicians who are either too cowardly or supportive of the genocide that is occurring at the moment. We will not be organized by those politicians. You know what we're going to do instead? We are going to organize them for peace. You need to know where workers stand right now in this historic moment and if you don't understand, you're going out. We must restore access to water, food, electricity, housing and health care to the 2.2 million people in Gaza to deny the above constitutes collective punishment. A war crime under the Geneva Convention. That's right. I plead with a ceasefire because I am a healer. As physicians, we do not take life lightly. This is a chance at life so I'm obligated to speak up. To speak up with you all and stand here. I refuse to give up hope that our collective voices will not be heard. So a ceasefire now in solidarity forever. Without labor, nothing moves. We are going to stand with you until we win justice, until we win peace and until we win a ceasefire.


Hello, and good morning everyone. Welcome to our webinar about the circular economy and circular cities. My name is Kristina Martin. I'm from Stockholm Environment Institute Talent Center, or in short, ACI Talent. And this spring, we together with Estonian Association of Environmental Management have been organizing a series of different webinars around the topic of circular economy. And this is our last webinar, the spring or early summer. So the current webinar is financed by Estonian Environmental Investment Funds. We have more than 200 participant registers for today. I see some people are still joining us. I guess there will be more people coming in throughout the webinar. And we have a very interesting lineup of presenters this day. So this is today's agenda. We have five different presentations today. And in case you have questions to our presenters, please do write them into the chat box that you should see in your applications. And we from our side, we will take a look at the questions at the end of the presentations and come back to them. Or in case there will be not enough time, we will then later come back to them into the questions and answer session at the end of our webinar. I would kindly ask you to keep your microphones and web cameras switched off so that the sound of our presenters wouldn't be disrupted throughout the webinar. And the webinar is going to be recorded and during next week, we will upload it to our websites and we will share the link to the recording to the registered participants. And without a longer introduction from my side, I would now give the words to our first presenter of the day, to Fedra Weinhus from SCIS.com. Fedra, are you live? Yes, hi Christina. Hi everybody. I'll just put on my camera and say hey. I will, I've prepared a short presentation that I will share with you now. So the aim of today is I will just explain to you a little bit about what is the importance of circular cities. And then I will go into a project that we currently have funded by Vinova. I'm a senior research fellow here at the Stockholm Environment Institute and the head of the societal transitions unit. And within our unit, we focus on sustainable sanitation, consumption and cities and my own interest lies in cities, consumption and finance actually. So hence my interest in the topic of circular cities. First of all, what is a circular economy? I'm sure most of you know what it is already, but just as a quick recap. So circular economy is a way of looking at the economy through a circular way. Instead of taking a linear approach where we use resources, we produce, distribute, consume and then dispose of those resources within a circular economy model. The aim is to design out waste and pollution to keep products and materials in use and to regenerate natural systems. Provided a little graph there about what a circular economy would look like in general. People often reference the arts, whether there's five, seven or nine, it's reuse, repair, refurbish, recycle and so on and so forth. Circular economy can also be classified in different ways. If you develop circular systems, you can look at it as a micro level, so a product level. For example, how could you make a telephone more circular by using all the resources in it? A measle level, which is more of an industrial park where you look at symbiosis or a macro level, which is a city or national level circular economy. And in general, in terms of strategies, the strategies are often designed for either on waste reduction on things that the producer could do or on things that the consumer could do. For example, you could think about consumer initiatives would be going to the sharing economy or reducing food waste. For a producer, we have the ways where they can rethink their production systems and how they can integrate within their supply chain. Going circular has a lot of benefits, just two short ones. If we make the transport industry, the food sector and construction industry circular, we would reduce emissions with 48% by 2030 and with 85% by 2050 compared to 2012. I would say that is quite a big reduction and given cities and a lot of countries' strategies to become climate neutral by 2050, the circular economy would provide a lot of potential. Also, the EU has estimated that if their circular economy package is implemented, it would save about €600 billion through waste prevention, eco design and reuse, asides from additional job creation. So again, lots of benefits. There are of course downsides or things that need further investigation within the circular economy. For example, if you reuse materials, they degrade over time, so it could require additional energy to refurbish products. If you go to a sharing economy, there could be additional transportation to a pickup location. So those are things that need to be investigated, but I would say overall still the benefits definitely outweigh the costs of going circular. Now, why do we focus on cities? So this is the macro level of a circular economy because about 70% of waste is generated within the city. So just from a waste reduction perspective, there's a huge potential within the city. But we don't want to just look at waste. I think one of the things that is often said about circular economy, it's all about waste. I would disagree with that. I think it's also about energy and resource use. So if you look at what is used in terms of in the cities, 75% of global material resources are used and 80% of global energy is used in the city. So large potential there to look at resource energy and waste flows. But also finally, why is cities so important? Because it will be a political or it is currently already a political priority. Most of us live already in cities or and that will still increase. Cities are the first point of contact that you have as an individual with your government. And so, yeah, even within the EU, within the Green Deal, there is a large focus on how cities can become climate neutral. But so there are some challenges also related to circular cities. And these are mainly so circularity is not something new, but it's been something that's been picked up within Europe. I would say in the last five years or so. There have been a lot of circular economy initiatives in China, but in Europe, we're starting to do it now. And so the question there is, so what is a circular city and how would you measure that? How would you measure the circularity within a city to date? There's some frameworks. I will come back to that later, but there's not yet a uniform answer around what those could be. And secondly, for cities, so what is a transition pathway? If they want to go from the current linear economy model that they have, how can they become circular? And what are the different strategies that city governments can apply? I mentioned before, there's the discussion on the RS repair reuse, whether it is five, seven or nine. But so the question is, how can cities apply those consistently and throughout their whole city? And a final one challenge, which is something that is mentioned often within circularity, is that it doesn't sufficiently address the social consequences of a circularity. For example, if we were to move to a circular economy, so how would it affect citizens, businesses, industries and so on? And what are some of the policy instruments that would be needed to ensure that there's not so many losers or that the losers of circularity get compensated? And we create win-win for everybody. So that said, that was a little bit the background of a project that we have. So we, it's a Stockholm Environment Institute, KTH, Umeå Kommune, Stockholm Wattenhoffvall, Raden cells and WSB have. It's a three-year project that is funded by Vinova, the Swedish Innovation Agency. And so we aim to improve circularity within cities and support cities in becoming more circular. So our intended or anticipated output is an urban circularity assessment framework that is robust, comprehensive, measurable, actionable, but also perceived as useful and easy to use. So we are looking, our partnership is diverse. It's research institutes, governments and private sector, because we want to ensure that our tool that we develop or the framework, that it tailors to cities of different sizes and different functions, that we can identify opportunities for recovery of resources and energy, and that we have a good mapping of the impact of the transition. So we understand any social or unintended consequences of this, of circularity within cities. In short, this is the project structure, so we have a series of work packages. So for now, where we are at, we've just on our first workshop where we co-defined the scope. And at the moment, so we're reviewing existing frameworks, but also looking through different city strategies and how they can apply or how they have applied circularity and circular economy principles across the city. Our aim is to then do a pilot within one or two cities, potentially, and then assess the impacts of a circular transition. I will briefly share some findings. Our first workshop was last week, where we co-defined the scope. And so within that, we presented a little bit the work that we've done on the framework selection. So so far, we have found 16 frameworks that look at circular economy at macro level, so national city or national level. Eight of them look at city level, and eight of them is a national or regional level. One framework only has qualitative indicators, but overall there's 266 indicators in all these frameworks. And so I've shown a little graph there that was shared by our colleagues, Marina and Astelios from Caltihad University here that we work with in this project. And so our aim is that we will now look through all these frameworks with the partners, short list indicators and agree the scope of our framework. Just so we have a common understanding of this is what circularity looks like in a city, and this is how it could be measured and assessed. Secondly, we started listing circular city strategies. So this was more of a snowball exercise. So Jan Martens, he will speak later from the city of Leuven, but so we just started looking at what cities have a or call themselves circular. And if they call themselves circular, have they circular economy strategy? What does that strategy entail? Is there specific sectors that they look at? Is there specific activities that they talk about? And are there any needs that they identify? So so far, I would say we've looked at about 15 cities. But we've also found, and that's the screenshot I put in there, a really interesting article from Petit Bois and Leopold. And they have actually looked at 83 cities. That's a publication that came out in 2018. And they looked at different city strategies. And so I would say anybody who wants to do learn more about circular cities. That's a really good article to read. But so in our assessment, so what we're doing now, we don't want to do what they do, but we duplicate their work. But so we're looking at other cities. So they have 83. We will look at complementing or supplementing their research. So far we found that from the cities that we've looked at, so there's different focuses. So some focus on the food sector, construction, e-waste. There's different strategies within these cities. Some look at circular procurements, some focus on repair shops. Others use digitalization as a tool to improve circularity. And so in terms of what cities need, a lot of them mentioned that they need support. With identifying circular business models. But there's also others that question or that have questions around how material flow analysis could be applied within the city. And what quantitative methods they could apply to understand circularity better. So we will continue with this in the next six months or so. Supplementing the analysis with more cities and discussing what works within the partnership. But we're also interested to speak with more people, of course. Before I hand over back to Christina, I would like to say, so within SCI, so this is one of our newest projects on circularity and on cities. But we have a series of other projects that I've listed here. And once the presentation is shared, you will be able to click on all of them. So they're linked to the SCI website. So we have projects that look at specific sectors. So bonus revamp, for example, looks at organic waste streams and urban circle. There's the Baltic circular textile system, which is a project by SCI Tullin. But so there's also some that look more at strategies like Rimi looked at the sharing economy and so on. So I will leave it there and hand over back to Christina. Thank you. So currently there are no questions in our chat box. But before we go to Ian Merton, so I'd like to ask you. You mentioned in your presentation that we see one of the global megatrends is that people are moving more to cities. And currently we have this COVID crisis and it has been also told that it is actually a sickness or illness of big cities where it's very dense population. So how do you think could this actually affect how people or where are people going to live in the future? I think there's definitely going to be a lot of challenges for urban planners over the coming years. Just to understand if there's with this global pandemic, but there might be others we don't know. So how it would affect living within a city and how people move around. And so I think one of the strategies that I really like is from the city of Paris where Mayor Hilda Hugo has said she wants to do the city of 15 minutes. Where within a radius of 15 minutes cycling, you have everything within your needs.  And so I think that is a really interesting strategy. And so I think that might be one that we will see more in a lot of cities. I see that there's investments going on in improving cycling opportunities in a lot of cities, which I think is great. But yeah, so I would say people moving to the countryside, it might be an initial reaction to do so. But then once you once if there is no access or insufficient access to the services that you need like jobs, hospitals, schools, parks and so on. I don't think that will be a trend that sets that continues for a long term. So they will need to be solutions that work for people. And so whether that is, I don't know, making smaller city centers or, you know, making it more having the village within the city, for example. That might be things that I come up. And so going forward, I think for cities, it will be important that they improve their resilience. And we think urban planning. Thank you. Thank you very much. So I think we can move now to our next presentation. The young merchants, we have you on the line. Hi, I hope you can see me. Yes, we can see you and hear you perfectly well. Okay, I'll see if I can bring the presentation. Do you see it? Yes. Okay, I'll make it larger. So I'll just start. I shall introduce myself. I am Yalmirtis. I am the coordinator of the multi stakeholder platform of the city of Leuven, who is trying to guide our first urban circle strategy. First, let me introduce Leuven. Leuven is a relatively small city in the center of Belgium, close to Brussels. We have about 100,000 inhabitants and 50,000 students.  Leuven is a historical city. I'm sorry to interrupt, but we cannot see when you switch the slides at this moment. What should I do? Is this better? Yes, now we see. I'll leave it in this mode. Thank you. So did you see this one now?  The city with a, let's say, a very historical center, but the city really in transition in recent years. Because of, let's say, quick, this quickly growing, growing very fast. In recent years, we had some years that more than 1,000 people a year came to Leuven to live there. So our strategy, how did we start? We have a new local government, which is made up of three parties. And after recent elections, the Green Party entered in the local government. And well, in the six year program of this local government, we included a very big chat on circular cities. It was the first time that it was so explicitly mentioned in the city program. One of the important things for us was start from what is already there. What is typical for Leuven, we have already quite an active, let's say, citizen engagement concerning circularity. You see some images of where the some years tradition of repair cafes, as we call it. You see the picture at the bottom where people can go and let things repaired. You have, for instance, you see the other pictures, the so-called Maag Bar, which is a little shop in the center of the city where you can go to lend materials, all kind of things. So we had already quite an active citizen layer working with circularity. And it's always good to start from what's already there. What we did was after the new local government started, we started with building up a platform with some local stakeholders next to the city. This is the university, companies, a network, a repair network of the city. This was important. What is also important for our strategy is it has to be a learning strategy. I think we are in the early phases of our strategy. Other cities like, for instance, Amsterdam are much further already in their strategic approach. So our starting point was let's start to get things going and learn by doing. What would be the ideal structure on level of governance we will see in the coming years? So it has to be looked at like that. It's therefore also a pragmatic, flexible approach. I didn't want to lose time with discussions and some people really do love those discussions about governance structures. They will become important when we get bigger and, but for the time being, let's start and see what happens. What was for me also very important is that there has to be political accountability. Therefore, we wanted a formal strategy that means that the local government has to be accountable. It should not be only something of a network that is not accountable. So what do you need? I think it was already said in the previous presentation. What is common for all strategies of circular city strategies is that you need some kind of strategic analysis of local streams of resources. And I think mostly in most cities, the streams are comparable. It's about building materials, it's about food, it's about e-waste. And in some sense, more detailed or not, you have to have a look of what is the urban metabolism, what kind of resources come into the city and leave out of the city and we can give a new value. What is also important, I think for lots of cities, also for Leuven, is try to make use of all the opportunities on national and European level. Currently, most of the funding we need for our programs comes from European Union funding. There are some people working at the city level, paid by the city, but most of the money comes from there. So it's important, I think, for all cities interested in trying to have this kind of strategy, see what's happening at European level and try to get the money when there's a possibility. It's also important to build up a kind of network with other cities. And this is something we are investing in quite actively. For instance, you see a picture at the bottom of already the second strategy of the city of Amsterdam. This is one of the cities we are in close contact with. So this is how it looks like. It's not very sexy if you see the document, but we have a brochure with, let's say, a user-friendly visualization of our strategy. But mainly it's a document of, let's say, almost 20 pages. It looks like that. The contents of the strategy, we start with a general framework. What is circular economy? And we refer to the doughnuts. I suppose everyone knows the doughnut by Kate Rayworth. We start with a kind of analysis. What do we already have in Lervin? And this is, you can do it very extensively or are more on a basic level, but it's also always good to look. What does already exist in our city? And mostly you will be surprised that lots of things are already there. Then we try to describe what are the main challenges for a city like Lervin to make it into a circular city. And then, let's say, the central part of the strategy is the six priority goals and 28 actions. Then we have a short part on means of implementation. It's short because we do not have lots of means of implementation. We will try to build it up in the coming years. Then concerning governance, I explained already, we have a basic structure with the platform. And of course we have the strategy itself that has been adopted by the city council unanimously. So this is important. Some things about communication, follow-up, timing. What is important for our strategy is I think we work in two steps. So our main issue was try to get the things going. At the end of 2021, we will make an update of the strategy. This means that by then, we hope to have more scientific information on the streams in the city. We hope to have more detailed indicators and goals to have a more focused strategy afterwards. So it's a two-step approach. Well, the first priority is circular entrepreneurship. What can that mean? There are some projects in Leuven where we will try to have circular business parks, which means linking the streams that are now waste streams. Try to give them new value. There will be a big business building and let's say the more industrial part of the city that will have a new purpose that will be built based on circular principles. There are already some local startups. You see a picture at the bottom of a startup working with natural materials. You see an image of a workplace where it was started by some young people who would try to give, let's say, new use to old materials that were waste until then. I hope, and this is something that was mentioned in the previous presentation, that this will help us to provide for more sustainable jobs for further people. Maybe that will lose their jobs due to digitalization and those kinds of things. It is important for a city like Leuven that we can invest in the economy of the future. And the Leuven University is also the center of the materials research in Flanders, and the big specialists are here in Leuven, and it is very important for us to have some partnerships with the university. The second priority is circular construction. What does that mean? I hope we can change the way we built currently into something completely different. You can look at the city as a library of resources, and this change of perspective does also change how you look at the city. If we build our buildings in a way that they can be adapted, that all the materials that are in it, like, let's say, like Lego, can be used again. This changes the culture. We are looking for new opportunities for resource streams, and there are already some projects in preparation, also with European money. One of the interesting resource streams is wood, and we will start in the coming months with the materials bank, as it's called, and you see the two people there at the right. They are looking for new things out of old wood, and at the bottom you see a picture of... Jürgen Merzow is enormously popular in Flanders. He's a famous television cook, and he works from Leuven. And what we are doing, you see the wood thing he's holding in his hands. It's to cut your vegetables. This is one of the city products that we will make available in the coming months. It's made of old wood collected from an old building. So this is the second priority. The third has to do with everything with repairing, sharing, and reusing. We already have an active repair ecosystem, and it will be complemented also by a European project called Share Repair. And with Share Repair we will try to have, let's say, a digital basis for this repair ecosystem. You see the picture of Markbar, which is a local platform network of all kinds of citizen and more professional initiatives. You see at the bottom at the right we already have a map of Leuven with indicated all kinds of initiatives you can go to. In the center at the bottom you see a new website. You can put your question on the website. I need someone who can repair my whatever, and you can find those people by this website. The fourth has to do with consumption, and the focus there will mainly be circular fashion. You see some examples of... We already have some shops in Leuven working with fair fashion, circular fashion. You see, for instance, at the bottom picture of a shop where I bought my circular jeans. I hope that we have something, what you see on the right-hand side, that is already happening in Hint, that we can have things like fair fashion or circular fashion festivals. The fifth has to do with more developing knowledge. That's the first thing. I hope we have a meeting next Monday. I hope we come to an agreement for a scientific package to give the basis of our strategy. It has mainly to do with data collection. As was already mentioned, there are several frameworks for indicators, but our experience also by the people from the university is that we also need better data collection to feed into the monitoring framework. What we hope is that we have functioning or good enough functioning monitoring framework by the end of next year. We also try to change the practice we have of our policies, for instance, procurement. This does not seem to be very sexy, but it is very, very strategically important. As a city, the things you buy, when you can change the way you buy things, it can be very, very important. All the kinds of procedures, for instance, when you want a policy of urban mining, you have to change the procedures that are existing for demolishing buildings. What we hear from people trying to recuperate all kinds of things that can be used is we do not have time enough to go into the building and make an analysis because it is demolished very, very quickly.  The sixth has to do with policy coherence. What Lerven is concerned, for instance, food is not in our circular strategy because we already have a local food strategy. You see the picture there, and it's important for us to have, let's say, at the horizontal level check whether the other strategies are also coherent with what we are doing in our circular strategy. For instance, in the next weeks at the city council, we have the presentation of our new climate action plan. We checked that the circular principles are in this action plan. What we did also with our strategy, we made up a timing. As you can see it on the left side, we need to start with this action in this year. At the right side, you see I make this kind of schemes every four times a year, four times a year. We have a platform meeting, and then I prepare this kind of Excel scheme with explaining what have we done in the last months. This is it, I think, if we can go back. Thank you very much. Am I within time? Yes, I am. Yes, of course you are. Okay, I have one question. What is the opportunity for circularity in smaller cities? Let's say around 30,000 people. Well, I think it will not be that different. You have to start with analysis, what do you already have? In our case, the university is something very important. If you are not a university city, it will be different. But everything happening with repairing, I think it will be popular in all cities. I think in all cities you have citizens trying to start with repair workshops. And this can be an interesting starting point. Trying to change, that's another example, your procurement rules can be interesting. But then you have to work together with other cities because to start with, it is all sometimes difficult for public servants working in local government. If you have a very small service, you need information from others. And I think food is also very popular and we all need food. And one of the effects of the current corona crisis is that people have become more aware of the importance of local, sustainable food. So this can be a very interesting starting point to think about circularity. And construction, of course, the principle is quite easy. Implementation might be more difficult, but trying to make use of what will come to us through the European Green Deal can also be an interesting starting point because the Green Deal will be central in the European Recovery Program. And there will be lots of attention to circularity and renovation of buildings. And when you combine those two, that will give lots of opportunities and also money possibly for several cities to try to think about new, innovative projects. And we have another question. Are sustainable building certifications doing enough to promote circularity? Oops, I am not really a technical expert on this issue. I know the discussion, but I don't think I can answer it. I suppose not, but I should direct this question to someone else who has really the technical capacity to answer. Okay, then we can take another question. Can you describe the process you have undertaken for engaging with residents, businesses, other stakeholders when creating the circular economy strategy? You involved those, various? Yes, it depends a little bit. It's quite easy to engage citizens. There is already a tradition in Leuven of citizen engagement.  So this is already there. It has been built up for years now with all local stakeholders, circularity, something else. It is quite easy with citizens. I must admit, for the moment, it is more difficult with companies. I don't know why. In some other cities in Flanders and Belgium, it seems to be easier to involve local companies into your strategy. What we are trying to do for this group is we are preparing some more information activities in the coming months. Try to explain them what might be interesting for your company. One of the things we are hoping to work out in the coming years is a kind of... I don't know which format will have an institution or a sort of company that can really help small companies within their company to look for opportunities. This kind of material in your company can be useful to think of some kind of circular strategy and that we really can help them on the spot. This is one of the dreams we have. Concerning construction, I think that that will be easier. One of my dreams is that we can have, at the end of this year or next year, when it is again possible, a big conference at this local level. With, for instance, people from the UK Union with all the large construction federations and explain to all the people why it is so interesting to think of circular projects. It depends a bit from group to group, I think. Thank you very much. Also to those listeners who joined us a little bit later, please do write your questions into the chat box and then we can come back to them later. So thank you Jan Mertens. We are now moving on to our next presenter. We have Ralf Martinsua from Daltec. Yes, hello. Very happy to be here. Great, we hear you well and I think you can take over now the presentation. Yes, so I will show my slides as well. So I'll put it to the presenter mode. And if I choose, if I change the slides, can you see them? Yes. Okay. It works sometimes. So I just wanted to make sure. Yes, so I'm Ralf Martinsua from Finestvin Smart City Centre of Excellence. It's a new European Commission on the Stone and Government initiated Centre of Excellence focusing on Smart Cities. So if you heard from the previous presentation that the city of Löfven has a lot of development projects funded by the European Commission. So this is very similar to cities in Estonia and also in Finland that we are collaborating with. And we ourselves, the Centre of Excellence has received significant funding from the European Commission and the Estonian Government. Yes, so I will briefly give introduction to what we are doing and what is initiative about the VR cross-country and cross-city and cross-university. New Centre of Excellence meaning that we have been founded by Tallinn University of Technology and Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications from Estonia. We have a website jointly with Arthur University from Finland and Forum Wirum Helsinki Innovation Company owned by City of Helsinki, also in Finland. We have four founders with whom we are targeting the joint goals and we were openly initiated as a Centre of Excellence last December. So we are like academic or research and innovation start-up, so to say, that has received over 30 million euros as an initiation grant. We are in a very fast pace of getting the team structures and our activities kicked off and the most interesting part I want to introduce you is our large-scale piloting programme. This is why the presentation is called as well, Co-creating Smart Cities via Experiments. Yes, so we are working on in five streams, so ranging from smart city governance to mobility to built environment to energy to urban analytics and data. And obviously all kind of environmental questions are horizontal to most streams we are working with and from European Commission perspective and also from Estonian Government's perspective. We are expected to contribute to the climate goals as well, so this is something which is very important to us and also will be in the evaluation metrics when we are selecting our pilots. So we are on our hand from early on we have promised and we want to contribute to digital single market, so making services cross-border between the cities and that means that if we run our pilots we do it with several cities at the same time if ever possible. And yes, so our goal is that even though we are funded as a project or even two projects for the next seven, eight years we need to show that we will be financially sustainable in the long run and that means that we are developing those capabilities, how to initiate more research and innovation activities. And this is progressing surprisingly well. Yeah, so on one hand as a research center we are very keen and interested in all kind of smart city research that also is related to new project that is financing this research. So we have promised to deliver research publications on ideas for several pilots and then later based on empirical evidence as well results of those activities and then as said that we need to show our financial sustainability through access to competitive funding. This is like for rise in 2020 for example, or rise in Europe. And then we also are engaged in a smaller scale with PhD education. And the innovation side may be more interest for broader community that we really aim to contribute to offering joint smart city services for cross-border citizens and we will deliver 10 large scale pilots that are involved also researchers, companies and want to contribute to like the broader internet or things or urban platform of how to exchange data between different coming from different devices and departments within the cities as well. So the idea is to deliver those street level pilots and I'm sorry if I have some background noise. And already now there is quite good progress in Estonia regarding the robot vikiles pilots, 5G pilots and also several zero energy or even positive energy buildings. So we have quite good proof of cases and we have several agreements with international players that are not updated at the moment but we have been negotiating with several companies on how to trigger smart city rise scale pilots jointly with private sector as well. And so this is how we function that we have five streams and we have we are developing this urban platform and we are initiating then large scale pilots. So the logic there is that the center of excellence is one initiative and everything comes together later but in activity wise streams are more research based so a lot of researchers from from Malta University and Tallinn University technology are doing basic research in those research streams. An urban platform is something which is a technical development of actual integration of databases and then we are initiating a large scale pilot jointly with cities which is more like applied or implementation activity. This is the core of our activities. And what we what we mean by pilot is that it's a research based solution to an urban challenge in five weeks starting from mobility energy built environment governance and data as you saw in the stream description as well. And when we have Estonian cities as test base for pilots but at the same time we clearly are interested in in the cross border aspects of of of our solutions. So we are open and interested in selecting non Estonian cities firstly from Finland but then later from from Europe and then beyond as well to be part of these activities. And currently we are working with several partners towards initiating a similar piloting program also like in Africa for African cities. So so just one example of what we are currently working working on under the lead of you inhabitant and their smart city unit. So as like the timeline and budget wise our pilots in a smart city are very substantial. So one pilot is expected to be approximately one point half million euros and and and and we will deliver at least 10 pilots in the next seven seven eight years. And this part of activity is funded by Estonian government. So that means that that there's interest obviously to involve Estonian cities into this as well. And and and we can finance activities and tasks of cities in Estonia as part of this this activities. So a little bit as well how we are selecting those those large scale pilots. So it is really a challenge driven approach. And there already in June we are starting question airing the cities and later we will have more in depth interviews and joint workshops as well as cities to list those main challenges what we are facing. In terms of future goals and in terms of their actual development plans as well. And then as a second step we are opening a call for the pilot ideas. So this is open call. We are interested in having the best ideas for the best pilots to be implemented. And then in the third phase and this comes in the fall session and outcome is that that that we will have a priority list of ideas. And then the third part is the hardest part that that starts actually implementing those those piloting ideas in cities. And this continues throughout the next seven eight years starting from next year. And then also based on the challenges based on the ideas that we get. We might start with one pilot starting from next year but we can also start with five pilots if you get like very strong ideas and that also are realistic enough to be implemented. And then the fourth section is when scaling up the solutions that really like to work with cities and to come up with new smart city solutions. So a little bit more about those steps as well that mapping urban challenges as I mentioned that we are doing the questionnaire interviews and workshops as well. And this process is just just started. So our main interest is that what are the main urban challenges what the cities are facing in the next five to 10 years. We're not that much interested in knowing what our urban challenge is today because we really want to target our approach more to future and be more research based in that sense. But if cities are saying that they have pipes that are leaking or that some cities want to build a bridge or so on that they have specific development needs and this is something we are also interested. But this is not our key focus point but our key focus point is still to introduce new technologies to cities facing actual urban challenges what they are having. So jointly with cities we will come to consensus what are those 10 top challenges as input to our next stage which is the call for violence. So the call for violence is really follows the logic that we are firstly stream based so we're interested in getting input to ideas mainly in streams we are working in. And then we are selecting ideas by the evaluation committee or jury and we are giving some prices to the best ideas as well and our approach is to have this call as open as possible. And so we are selecting or our selection criteria is still in the development process and it is related to the urban challenges face as well. But the main logic there is that we want to see research excellence. We want to see innovation potential growth potential but also very important part is feasibility. This pilot activity actually feasible and this is very critical because all of us have several demands and ideas what could be done but can we actually put in practice is another thing. And then importantly impact on urban environment and also contributing to UN sustainable development goals and European Commission climate goals as well. And seeing actual impact to inhabitants. So I won't go too much into detail how we are evaluating this but it just covers that logic that we have evaluation method and members of the jury. And then it's based on consensus that we need to reach consensus which piloting ideas are the most promising ones. And then the third step starting from next year is when getting those pilots actually kicked off in city environments. And for that we will have a piloting plan with tasks and budget for each pilot. And as mentioned that we need to involve at least one city to that as well. And then as a follow up step we want to see replication as well to our cities globally and then we are opening up our blog as well. Research and innovation blog where we give progress updates on the piloting status. And even the piloting plans as well. So this is our time table that we are currently mapping those urban challenges jointly with cities or starting the process developing the questionnaire. And then spreading it to the cities and then having interviews them and consensus meetings as well. And then we're opening this open call and go to the piloting phase starting from next year. And we still as said we are a new initiative started only six months ago. So in a way as a structure as a center of excellence we have been initiated from scratch. And we started pretty much at the same time when the COVID-19 virus started to spread. So we hope that when the word had one very big negative challenge to be faced when there were several positive ones as well including our center of excellence that was kicked off December. And that means that we're still working on the evaluation criteria when talking about pilots. And still working on the measurement of the impact of pilots. And also like the climate part here is very important that our environmental point that how to measure the impact of our pilots that are research based. It's it's it's quite the tricky challenge. So I would conclude this brief introduction here now. But I didn't do here is I didn't go too much into depth into our research activities and urban platform development as well. As I assumed that the broader audience might be more interested in the piloting program. But if you're interested I can give some introduction to our strategic research and innovation agenda and the urban platform development as well which maybe are more like a center of excellence specific. So thank you and and maybe you can have like quick discussion on this as well. Thank you. A question from Federer just to confirm to the cities who are part of the pilot. Do they have to be from Estonia or Finland or when will you start to including also cities from other European countries. So we are so there's like two approaches but first of all we are very much interested in working with with all European cities. That's our key priority. And we already now have several cooperation projects with with other cities in Europe as well. Approximately five to ten cities are involved. And we are also actively participating in in initiating joint projects with all cities in Europe because we are European smart city center excellence. The limitation we have regarding the large scale pilot sees that that that that Estonian government wants to see each city in each pilot one Estonian city involved. So this is a strong limitation and and but on our hand we are able to provide financial support as well to those cities. In terms of our cities we have said and agreed with Estonian government that that that that that we can do cross border checks and cross border pilots with external cities from Estonia as well and involved them. And to piloting activities outside from from Estonian cities which is something we really want to do. But we cannot finance the cities directly so we can finance the activities we are doing there for example if they outsource some companies doing some pilots in other cities that we cannot involve them into the project due to financial restrictions. On our hand said that that we are continuously developing several joint proposals with cities around Europe. So I think we have had proposals with most cities or I have had so the center of excellence. Most bigger cities we have we have been involved or we have been involved with signing joint proposals. And the second part is that important to mention as well that City of Helsinki through its its innovation company forum Helsinki is one of our initiators and core founders. At the same time they are initiating mini pilots as well which are open and and and and do not need to be restricted. But the mini pilots are significantly smaller in their initiative. So like yeah our test bed main test bed is Estonian cities. Okay thank you and if anyone is interested in some additional information can they then contact you. Yes yes yes. Okay will you also stay with us as a discussion at the end. Yes I will stay. Perfect. A few some other questions. Thank you for now. And let's move to our next presentation. By Sile Fihlach from Estonian Academy of Arts. Hello everybody. You can see me right. Thank you very well. Perfect. I will test the sharing as well. Okay. And it's all there right. Yes works. Okay. I'm very glad to be in this lineage of super interesting presentations as as Rob Martin was showing a larger scale. I will be definitely now scaling down into the scale of buildings and installations. And so and as Jan said previously I would be dealing with oh I would categorize myself really like this hands on doing learning by doing a method. So basically constructing them and different demonstrators and then so prototyping those demonstrators and then protocol in them. Like what did we learn and what we need to change in order to truly jump the scale. But this is sort of a sequence of my five year practice in part that I co-founded with seem to some. And these are some of the projects that we have investigated. They're all in different scales. Some are constructed. Some are still in the process. But to be honest only a few of them are or will be constructed out of wood. So I guess I would be discussing today also this kind of failure projects or the projects that have maybe less of success in terms of what how they're done but maybe more and more knowledge to learn from them. So and yeah and let's keep in mind the question I raised in the beginning that the piece process. What are those processes that should be sustainable in in architecture. Maybe we can answer it in the end of this presentation. So to quickly introduce this topic that I see in contemporary architecture is the idea of the fact that for the longest time the design methodology for digital architecture have been from sketch towards the parts. So if I borrow a designer or a sketch from Teoman Dosburg the diagram shows the lineage of abstraction of a Russian dance. Even though it's it's not really what's happening in contemporary architecture. This kind of thinking or abstracting towards parts is maybe more in still constructing the hand sketches. So if one would search for a contemporary architecture you would see maybe more of inhabitable sculptures and napkin sketches. Or I would even say that the crumbled papers that turn into concert halls and culture cathedrals. And there's much less of an idea what kind of materiality is and what are those parts that it consists of. So in our office we're questioning like what if it's time to stop crumbling the paper and start crumbling the polygons instead. And those polygons are then related to the construction technological possibilities that are material driven and they have certain design parameters that could be embedded already in the beginning of the process. So in a way we would also could say that let's turn this bottom up method. Let's start defining the element or the panel or the building block and then scale up from there and what kind of structures would be coming from this. So this is bottom up and top down methods I would be now discussing in the lineage of my work. But also the second really important idea in this research is the materiality. And it seems to me that this ongoing greenwashing in architecture is dealing a lot with translating. Translating the concrete precast panels into timber preassembled panels. And that's something that I think I think that's the wrong direction to go. Because what has changed in those 50 years of construction is also the need for different kind of spaces and different kind of architecture. And the most if we are reintroducing timber into an urban scale or into architecture. I'm saying reintroducing because for Soviet times it was not really allowed material to be taken as a serious construction material. So it's literally meant to be reintroducing it. Then I'm happy not alone in this process. So there's young emerging group of architects who are actually tackling this problem. What does the material want? What are those capabilities of CLT plywood timber? And what kind of new components of architecture could be resulting from there? And those components here are nothing to do with the previously seen panels. But what are dealing with reinterpreting the ceiling, changing the idea of the apertures, the openings and changing the idea of how we move in the space. But of course these are installations. If you're critical I understand that now and have little to do with large-scale construction. So that's why I would quickly try to like to show also the scale jump that we are now dealing with. So this is one of the latest works that we are proposed as a result of this methodology that we're applying in our design. A four-storey apartment building. But we will get into that in detail for a second. So this development of methodology and how it has been emerging. The early lineage that I believed for some time in my career was that if the architect has this design sort of completed or understood what it should look like. It's been then handed over to the engineer who makes it stand and then to the manufacturer who makes it physical. When tracking my own workflows I realized that there's a lot of design protocols embedded that are already possible in the early stage of the design. And there's also this kind of prototypical understandings coming out of those workflows. But the central position here is this common platform, the common platform where the manufacturers and engineers are as important as a designer and can insert their own knowledge and information about the material, the technology available and other structural limitations, for example. Again, once being critical you could ask like, hey, so if you're going to have a common platform with a lot of designers involved, let's say like almost a design by committee, you could result with the aim of designing a horse but resulting with Camel. I would like to try to prove and otherwise. In this common platform, for example, this is the electricity pilot, 43 meters high, designed for Estonia that at the moment under construction. That's the parametric common platform that we're using where an engineer can insert their information. That these are these red and green lines at the moment, the pulling and pushing of the pilot. And also consequently it's running the material information, like how much materiality is necessary for this. So we are keeping the geometry constantly alive but the geometry is framed by the parameters, the design parameters that we're inserting. And then having the form or the body of it as we actually intended but running to 10,000 different possibilities. Working with live material and I took all timber or live material that properties are constantly in the flux. These, for example, is an installation that we constructed in 2015 where few days before the construction, you can get the phone call before getting the elements to CNC. And these are not just few elements, these are 374 unique elements that the material, the lumber is actually much smaller than discussed before than a few millimeters. But few millimeters in the timber joint means a lot. So we needed to adapt the whole geometry super fast to new CNC files that happily was possible and due to the idea of parametric common platform. So if I would say that this is, we are not getting a horse out of it, we are neither getting the camel out of it, but we are actually ending with a unicorn. And the unicorn is much more fitter to its original design, the design that the architect had in mind. But this design is now not anymore a sculpture or a fixed units, but it is protocols or framing regulations of the design. And so there's been three stages before we reach what we reached the peace box structures where the elements where we started defining the overall gesture and I'm again borrowing those work but I'm now expanding this diagram where there's an overall gesture and and then we result with the detail. And these were the sculpt demonstrators in urban scale of potter building installation and and also working with students for various installation where actually for students introducing this fluid hammer as I call it because it is doing what it was necessary but it's still remaining flexible and adaptable. And the students could then design this red geometry and then by applying this, this new tool we result with with the structure of it. And there's been a lot of this kind of installations, but installation is one scale now jumping to infrastructure scale. And as I said, there's going to be some failure products then then this was definitely a pilot that we won in 2016 that immediately after that was asked to and we designed it out of timber right. It was asked to consider reconsider this in other materials without changing the geometry of it. So we tried to argue with co2 emissions and we tried to argue with with lower costs that really didn't work out. So something that was the initial geometry logic came from Cluelam timber construction methods resulted with those pictures from from Romania at the moment where where they're actually mimicking the those chambers and fillets of those mega component. With with actually decorative methods. Also with tackling the urban scale and and considering bringing back the roof chips that we traditionally used to cover roof and said like hey what if in in a tunnel pedestrian tunnels we could bring back those this relatable scale. And with variable colors as the ones that are more exposed to the UV. That means on south facing elements would of course lose their color quite fast so we said like maybe it is already gray outside and then being translated into the warmer honey colors in the interior of the tunnel. But of course that was also then due to the fire regulations that are not yet really adopting to the sustainable needs. Transated into bricks and those bricks are something that is now again under construction in Tartu the second big city of Tallinn of Estonia. So basically what you can see that the people system definitely had this experimental and formal values. But there was also a lot of complexity involved and those labor intensive fighting them finding the elements and combining them resulted with understanding that if we want to jump the scale with timber construction we really need to start changing understanding between. The elements we use so it resulted with the aggregated structures and then these are much more dealing with defining that element before the whole and then assembling out of those elements by repeating them. Structures that where the connection detail could be as in the size of a seat but also in the size of a small element and sometimes we even produce our own connection details to to get installations with with a hand luggage to Venice architecture panel that we did in 2018. So the workflow also split it up so we had a common platform actually designing the element or the detail and then the overall. And that's something that you can also see in the T1 shopping mall installation where it consists of three ports and type two ports and has no vertical reaching up to 18 meters but without any vertical pillars. So these were the shipyard workers who did that and this is the assembly process basically showing that we needed really small elements to be able to do that inside of 30 meter height shopping mall atrium. So one could even say that the detail became more important than the overall but of course once when you do those aggregated systems that the biggest disadvantage is the idea that you start constructing space screens instead of those formal gestures and geometries that was also an initial design idea. So we needed to find something. Sorry, it's not a somatic modularity is what we what I call it. And the somatic modularity is something that combines the both ends and brings back the variable scales so the large scale building components to the small stairs scale. So in a way you look at the facade and if you need to scale or change the facade. These are all these understandings of the window to the pillar are defined in those parameters and the other way around the stair is something that is closely connected to the human relatable scale that what we also tried. We did our first tries in those in this installation in T one consisting of various scales components but they all have the same logic and same angularity of connecting. Just to finalize there's some more projects that are dealing with and the workflow is is expanding and the common platform is getting greater and greater. So the last project I would like to show is this private house with apartment building that has a sort of aspiring gesture meaning that it can create a stepped flooring with different room heights. And this is a 40 square meter patch pattern in Tallinn where we are really tackling this idea of a stair being in the same system than the facade and instead of then buying the square meters you buying the the lineage of like how many meters. You want to buy out of this building because the thing between walls are not any more necessary as it's spiraling upwards and we look at this in other scales as well. So the somatic modularity is is helping us to again reintroduce the primitive geometries translate what the pitch through for example means but it also it's a perfect combination of this cause the automated industries that we have in a timber. Timber Industries in Estonia but also combining it with sustainable architecture. So this is combining the bottom up and top town methods and and hopefully also resulting with some large scale examples. So if I get back to the beginning if the jeopardy question is these processes must be sustainable in architecture. So what should be the answer. And I think it is in all those scales that we are tackling it is from the design thinking to dismantling of the element and we need to once we are calculating the. Once we are calculating the energy efficiency of the building we have to deal with the whole lifespan of the building where the materials coming from how they're transported how they're manufactured how they're put together to the idea of the final resulting and like how we actually dismantle this building. So thank you very much. Sorry if I ran out of time but I hope I didn't. Thank you very much. We will maybe come back to you with one or two questions at the end during the discussion time. Now we will move to our last presenter. Nikolai Akobi from E clay. Yes hi can you can you see me. Yes. Check whether I can share my screen. I assume you can see my screen as well. Yes we can see it. Okay. Well yes my name is Nikolai Akobi and I work at E clay European Secretariat as a project officer dealing with local resource management climate topics resilience and well thank you very much to us as I tell him for the opportunity to present here. We are going now a little bit back to a more macro scale. Now from the previous presentation it was dealing very much with the with the build infrastructure and build environment. And I hope this is fine for you and I hope I don't have too many redundancies in my presentation of things that were said before but I hope it's going to be interesting for you. So just two slides on E clay. For those who don't know we are a global network of cities active in around the world actually on each of the continents with around 80 hundred local authorities regional authorities as members active as I said on each of the of the world's world's continents with with bigger secretariat offices but also with country offices etc. With a coordinating sort of headquarter if you will in Bonn and the European secretariat where I'm based in is located in Freiburg in Germany. We work with five pathways transformative pathways so we cover everything from social innovation to to resilience climate change food systems etc. In relation to sustainable urban development and our pathways are those obviously with one of them being a circular development. And of course as as you might think or as this suggests already this is very much related to the UN sustainable development goals and focusing on the circular development pathway. I think a good starting point is to to look at it at an historic perspective and to look at the material extraction at global resource use in a longer time sequence. And this graph shows you a global resource extraction from the in the 20th century until today more or less as well as GDP which is our most used measure of of of wealth. And you see that that for for most of the century both has been moving really alongside each other with only a slight sort of decoupling starting here. Let's say in the 80s or 90s and but still today and you know both is growing in parallel. And the point here is that that this decoupling effect that's between resource use and our economic activity is not really is not really occurring. The decoupling effect that is that it was promised that was talked about by researchers that is still sort of the the idea behind the circle economy also at the European level is to achieve that between risk between activity and resource use but also between resource use and and the environmental impact that that use is having and and and because of that we argue for for for systemic solutions for solutions which which look at the at the problem before it occurs and and solutions which you know go beyond mere efficiency gains which you know would bring about this this kind of decoupling between between the between the resources but also going beyond what is called end of the pipe solutions which which you know tackle toxicity and so on of of of our resource use. So holistic solutions are needed and of course they occur locally or the local scale plays a very big role and another point that was also raised before is that of course in doing that looking at at or understanding the resource flows within your territory be it national regional local is of is of high importance and not only that but also we would argue that that looking at what those flows are are used for with those flows where those flows are going is very much important rather than relating those those flows with with GDP and so on but rather looking at at societal services at societal needs that those materials satisfy and and I think that perspective allows for a sort of a socio ecologically centered let's say policy or discussion or debate on the circular economy. And I think that's important because there are also other angles and other debates which for surely have their their right to be. But I think this is when when when the goal is to put people and the environment at the center of the circular economy which cities do often then I think this is a good angle. And of course cities are key for this transition in general I mean cities as opposed to regions or or or states because because of the the the tremendous material use and and throughput that cities have simply because of their consumption patterns because of the built environment and so on and here are some just some figures that you know sit that that describes these drivers we have organization happening. I mean this is projected to grow a lot in the next 30 years even more today there are around 55% of people living in in the urban areas. Consuming disproportionately or a disproportionate amount of energy and associated CO2 emissions the same counts for material use but they also generate a lot of GDP of economic activity. And this is why cities are really you know both the problem on the one hand side but also part of the solution because of their innovation potential. But they're also especially in the global south very much affected by by by the adverse environmental impacts of this resource use. And at IKLE we try to or we are currently sort of building a we have several activities that concern circular cities I'm going to mention now another one or two. But we're also trying to to put those things together to actually come up with a sort of a support package for cities and and a part of that package is of course sort of a vision or an understanding of what a circular city could be. And and this is this is what is on that slide. And those pillars are well number one is concerned with the with the functions of the cities and that the circular city would need to sort of horizontally integrate circular principles or circularity considerations in everything they do. And a second one is of course retaining value and utility of materials through circular business models through using things more extensively and longer and so on. And a third pillar would of course concern the material side of it closing loops where possible. Of course that is not so easy on the city scale because of because of the dependency of the city towards the surroundings. And lastly the impact of course you know with this wanting to achieve a low carbon emission city with a low carbon footprint regenerating natural systems and basically providing a healthy environment for for the citizens. That is kind of at the macro scale and cities have several ways in which they can engage in this. This is sort of aggregated of course and it tries to support on on these on each of these elements really. And the first one is of course vision development strategy development that is something that we talk about today a lot and lovin has presented theirs. Of course the city can also act or should act as a facilitator of of a dialogue on on circular economy with other stakeholders that being business and civil society but that business is also very important. In their territory so the city can really push that the dialogue. The city can of course utilize circular principles in their own dealings, meaning asset management management of city owned buildings, public procurement and so on. Very very key one. The city can to to some extent put in place economic incentives, financial support grand subsidies and so on. And of course it can also to a very were rather limited extent I would say engage in regulation, although I want to stress out here that will sit while the city has a limited power in this. What is I think very important is to to engage in a sort of a multi level collaboration with regional partners with national partners. And this is a I mean a buzzword from the climate debate currently, but I think it very much applies to the circular transition as well and I know that some cities are already doing this or focusing very much on this. And now I will just mention two activities that are I mean we are we have several projects, European projects, also other initiatives going on but I just mentioned two that are quite key at the moment. One of it is an is an horizon project horizon 2020 project innovation action called city loops where we work with around eight cities in Europe that are listed up here you can see them here. Rather small cities actually small and medium sized cities to develop a number of of demonstration actions that the city are demonstrating in the area of construction waste but also organic waste. That being from, you know, a software tools to optimize a collection and processing of these wastes to material passports to demonstrating, you know, higher or possible higher recycled concrete content in producing new concrete, which which is not certified and cannot be done in large scale projects but in on a smaller scale when the risk, you know, is covered by the city itself that is possible so these are these are some of the actions. The project has started now in last October so it will run for a while now. And we also try to establish or focus very much on replication I mean that's that's quite usual for these projects. But what is interesting is also that we are together with metabolism of cities that is a, yeah, sort of a research think tank in Brussels that might some of you might know, we're developing sort of a circularity assessment methodology for for cities at the city scale but also at sector scale, ending up with a sort of an open access dashboard that that will be that is being built on in the project but will also be built on after the project that is usable for cities later on. And we'll also do a lot of work on procurement as a key enabler for the circularity transition. And now I'm very, very different initiative. I'm just mentioning it because I will later come back to it is is the the green circular cities coalition that is an inter regional kind of cooperation with between Europe and and East Asia. With the aim to to support cities in in in barking on a circularity transition from strategy to implementation and so on, focusing on these six areas and I think that aligns with a lot of other strategies as well. We have water food nexus, urban spatial planning, buildings construction, resource management, industrial symbiosis and green circular procurement. And what this coalition is intent or intends to do developing still or at the beginning still is really to in those thematic areas bring cities together with solution providers that are that could be technology providers, innovative small enterprises and so on, and knowledge partners to do that. So the platform facilitates this this triangle dialogue here. And one of the recent outputs of that is the is the circular strategy from the city of Turku in Finland, and that has, I think, came out recently was developed with with the finish innovation from Citra and and and us and of course the city of Turku. I'm just going to highlight quickly this strategy and then another one, just to show the difference and show what strategies, you know, can tackle. And what is interesting with the tool case is that it is really meant to be transversal and meant to be to be integrating different policy priorities in the city. That is, of course, the energy and climate debate. It looks at the sake up integration master plan energy efficiency agreement land use transport and so on. So this is really sort of an cross cutting document or process. I need to reduce, of course, environmental impacts, but also and that relates to the multi government multi governance aspect, aiming to influence national and EU governance. And I think that's that's very, very key. Of course, also aiming to achieve socioeconomic impacts and scale up across the region. I think that's clear. It focuses on on the food value chain, on nutrient cycles, energy systems. That is, I think a particularity, as I mentioned, building a construction that's clear and water cycles as well. And and of course, you know, having having a certain certain focus on on on on leadership on integration. Meaning integrating those objectives with broader sustainability objectives. They focus on a bottom up approach seeking support from from actors across the regions and placing a special emphasis on on social inclusion as well, which I find also interesting. Amsterdam was mentioned before in comparison is quite far already. While the two core strategy is sort of the first step, I would say, towards a strategy that also provides, you know, a methodology for monitoring and all this. Amsterdam already has that. And it's composed of, let's say, four pillars of four strategies. And one is the this donut model that you see here in the end slide as well. Then you have the strategy that outlines the whole process. You have an implementation plan and a monitoring document. I think that is has not been released yet. And with this strategy, what I find interesting here is that they use the planetary boundary aspect. So you have here in the donut model, you see inside of the circle, you see societal needs. Again, going back to the slide that I showed before. So what what are societal services that materials should fulfill in the inside. And on the outside, you have planets, something like planetary boundaries, not the same as the famous ones, but similar. And this is and the circular economy basically is should help fulfill those needs, you know, keeping being inside of the circle and not trespassing any of the boundaries. So I think that's a nice, very nice way to put it. And they focus on also on food and organic waste, consumer goods, build environment and so on with a number of of ambitions of goals. They're not going to go through all of them. But I think what is I mean, what is important when reflecting about strategies is I think that is recognizing that this is still a quite a new endeavor for all actors who are who are in there. Not only us, but everybody else as well. And I think most of the strategies can can can really be clustered, you know, along this, along this nine R model that you see here in the on the slide in terms of what their, you know, what their primary primary means of implementation are. Is it a strategy or is it something that that looks at completely changing the way we we produce, we consume, etc. Or is it focusing on, you know, recycling, let's say, more, more or less. And on the other side, you have you have the this whole debate on the objectives and whether they are weighted or how do you deal with trade offs. And I think that something has as a good environmental impact, but is economically, not, not good, and not not wise to do.  The existing strategy strategies that are there, but also organizations like us and others have to sort of position themselves in terms of, you know, how, what do we recommend, what is what is there. And we are currently in that process and and of course having a having a vision already but yeah, so that's, that's I think the end of it. If you have any more questions, maybe you can address them now. You can also contact me. Yeah, back to you, Christina. Thank you very much. So now we will have a quick questions and answer session. I would like to ask other presenters to come also online, switch on their microphones if it's possible. And I would firstly ask, since Nicola we just had your presentation question to you. So, so we've taken account the experience of other cities and other governments, what is think what will be the first steps for a city to start transitioning to more circular to who was that directed to you to Nicola. Well, I think I think the first step would be to to to mobilize stakeholders to look at what kind of political situation we have what kind of political political commitment is possible. And then to to to go on to set up sort of a co creation process. I think that or gets the opinions and needs and so on of the stakeholders involved. Thank you. I would like to have a few questions about discussing some of the barriers when we talk about transitioning to more circular cities. So, Fedra, what do you think? What are the in your experience? What are the main barriers and for starting a circular city? Well, I would say main barriers. I think I think young refer to it also. I think the first starting point is to get the political will to become a circular city and to frame it in an overall sustainability view. I think the moment you get the top on board in general, there will then be a lot of initiatives. So I would say for me the barrier would be ensuring that there's political will to join in. And then I think once you have that that it becomes around finding mechanisms that work for everybody involved. So this would be for me the next step would then be to ensure that you do a proper mapping of the circle level potential current initiatives that are being taken, I think, and see whether you can build upon them and like strengthen them or replicate them in other areas. I think we are, well, I think ultimately what it comes down to is still its people. And so I think if people have the will and interest, things will happen and move forward. So I think that would be for me what I think is the biggest barrier at the moment. I think business models we will find them, industry will follow. As long as there's a, you can create a win-win for people, it will happen. So, yeah, I don't know, whether that's also in your as a from a city perspective, whether that's also your your impression. Yeah, I think it is. I have to admit what we are doing is is a bit exaggerating the way we are. But I cannot say that everyone at the city level in all departments is completely convinced. So it also has to be in a flexible way. So for me it was very important to get the strategy through the city council, get political support. So we cannot go back. And I'm not interested in starting with large debates with all administrations. What we do is we invite people from several departments to our platform. And then it starts. It started with the people working for the sustainability department. They were convinced. They didn't always have all the models and materials, but they were convinced. And then we started to invite someone from the economics department. It was a bit difficult. When we start was, is it really economy or is it something only of the Greens? No, step by step, we got someone from the the spatial development development department. We got someone from the, the, how do you call it? It's a kind of city company for development of the city. They were involved and step by step in a flexible way. We are convincing people to work on a horizontal level because circle economy is not, has to break with the culture of silo thinking. And at the city level department, it takes some time. Some of the people in the city council, in the city government are convinced. Others, when we had the negotiations for the new program for the city, some of them think, well, it's about waste, isn't it? But we are doing that already. So it takes some time. And when you have a strategic framework where everyone can find themselves and you, and you follow the framework by doing step by step, you go third, I think. Thank you. Ralph, I think you mentioned also in your presentation that you're currently starting to map different challenges for cities. What can you maybe, what is your take? What would be the main challenges in the future for a city of talent? Yeah, I think here we, on the very broad level, I think meeting the actual climate and then environmental goals is something which is the main challenge on the broad level. On the micro level, if you go to the city departments and you start asking them, there are very many other questions as well. And another challenge is, so two broad challenges, one is related to environmental goals, because city of Thailand contributes 50% of all emissions in Estonia, and the emissions are quite high. And if the government has agreed to lower significantly the emissions by 2030, then the city of Thailand or the environment in general, maybe it's not like the municipality of city of Thailand who is responsible for everything, but the urban environment of the city of Thailand is the main contributor to that and needs to take the most actions as well. And the second part is definitely has been at least related to urbanization. So the city, even though the population of Estonia has not been increasing, the city has been increasing all the times and more people are moving into the capital. Thousands of people every year over the last 10 years and that basis and that gives very many problems related to environment, energy, mobility and so on. So these are the main challenges that I think we are pretty universal to our cities as well. Thank you very much. And a question to you, Sila. So I think all can agree that architecture or building design or even sustainable building design is a very important part when you talk about circular cities and more sustainable cities. But how do you feel yourself as an architect? How would you say is the level of awareness or knowledge about the architects in Estonia when it comes to circular economy? I mean, if I wider the circular economy even more to the sustainability in general, I think the awareness is getting there, but the implications are maybe not there yet. So that's why I think there's still a seek for those understandings like tackling the whole lifespan of a building instead of the calculations of the final result with the energy efficiency categories that is being implied. So I think we are still in the need and vast need for for acknowledging it and educating architects on those topics. I think the local architectural association is working hard on this. It's one of the biggest tackles or biggest aims at the moment to change the understanding of what is sustainable construction that it is not only about putting. I call it the sticker architecture where you just apply the sun panels on the roof or make a two layer windows to triple layer windows. I don't think this is the sustainable architecture from my point of view. I think this could be seen as a design understanding that you start from, not that you actually cover your initial design into. I'm sorry, I think we have lost Sille. Okay, there sometimes happen technical issues. I'm trying to think from from certain point onwards, not from not from the end of the design. Okay, thank you Sille. We lost you for a second, but I'm pretty sure we got your message. We have one question from the listeners from the audience. It's about city center circular economy strategies. So how much is the diversity among the strategies? So are they are going into difference that have different approaches or is there more similarities between them? So maybe Fetra or Nikolaj and either you. Yeah, I don't mind answering. So Edward, thanks for that question. Well, I think afterwards Christina will share the presentation. And so in the presentation I mentioned a paper that says two researchers, they've looked at 83 different cities and they've mapped all the circular economy initiatives. So that will give you a good overview of an assessment of what's been done. And so they've classified the initiatives into initiatives that tackle infrastructure. So anything to do with buildings and so on. They've tackled, the second part is a social consumption. So they've done looking at sharing initiatives, food waste and so on. They have one that looks at urban planning and then I can't remember the fourth category. But so that said, a lot of the initiatives, they focus around the, well, I mentioned six hours. So there's a discussion around how many there are. But so a lot of them, they focus around the same and I would say the city strategies are even though there's different focus. I think it depends on the size of the city, where they're at in what sectors are in cities and so on. But I think there's some activities that everybody can implement, whether it's around recycling, reducing waste. And I don't know, in terms of building and construction would be for me. But while we will be looking with our project also to come up with the publication, but that may be maybe in a year from now. Building upon the Petit Bois and the Leopold paper, but adding more cities. So to be continued, I'd say from our side. Thank you. And if I could just make one addition to what Silo was saying on the architecture. So I think one of the interesting things that is going over one of the interesting facts that I heard at a presentation in December was that about 50% of the buildings or the office buildings are empty.  I think now going forward with COVID, maybe we will all work more from home. So I was wondering whether there's any new business models around office buildings that could be invented or, you know, whether we move away from owning your own apartment to, I don't know, leasing it more, not necessarily renting, but whether there's anything that could be done with commercial buildings as well. I don't know whether anybody has some inputs into that. I have heard actually that in a governmental level, they are already tackling that idea that the biggest focus of sustainability goes into renovation and re-inhabiting. And it's not that much about constructing or starting from zero. So it doesn't really make sense as there's already availability and so basically making existing constructions more energy efficient. But then the other side also trying to create more flexible space out of it and adapting it to other kinds of programs and functions. I think that this split between home and office is getting even more vaguer. And as a trend, homes are getting bigger and we will see more homes with home offices as a trend. And people will have even more difficulties when not working from home. And this is something which definitely is already reality we are all facing and it is like already behaviour aspect that people are now used to it. So I think this process will continue. I would like to add from my side that I think I came across one startup that they promote leasing apartments for temporary offices. Basically they pay by the hour because we have all these great co-working spaces but in current COVID situation not many people want to work there. So and I know at least in Estonia I think we are it's part of some legislation that in an office you have to have dedicated spots for workers. So we have also some legislative barriers which need to be changed in the future. But thank you everyone. I think that was we don't have more questions. We have a little bit over the time but I want to thank all the presenters for very interesting and also inspirational presentations. It was very interesting to hear about different projects initiatives. I really hope that maybe there's some collaboration opportunities in the future and maybe some ideas will reach also those who are searching for them. So thank you for my side. Thank you Christina for putting it together. Thank you Christina. Thanks everybody for joining. Yeah, thanks. Bye. Bye.


I tell you, if there is another title that I'm going to get for DJ Nix, is Mr. Kujichochaman. Ya ni, akuna kitu angainata tu evo, it has to be Kidogo, you know, Spice Tops, jivipipipi. Anyway, we thank God for him and we are just so grateful that he is part and parcel of J.C. Sackleshow. Karibusana, if you have just joined us, this is J.C. Sackleshow right here on Y254 where we play Kenyan music with our passion, without holding back. And more so here, we celebrate Christ to the fullest without holding back. This is J.C. Sackleshow, Netmawpromis' new music segment and new music, you know, our artist. Because why? We have a newbie, a newbie mone tundu amingi akua industry. And I'm sure you can relate because if you are not there now, once upon a time you are there. So, what you are going to do with her is to see who she is and to see who she is and what more. You will find out who she is, especially where Christ is concerned. Karibusana, ladies and gentlemen, let us welcome Cirilo right here in the house, Karibusana. Thank you. So, what is your boldness here in Nadmaya? I'm very confident. So, you are a newbie here? And you have rehearsed before? I have rehearsed, fresh and new, hot and new. Thank you. This is J.C. Sackleshow, and thank you for joining us. Thank you. So, maybe you can just tell us, you know, just briefly introduce yourself. My actual name is Siri Liswa. My stage name is Cirilo, which is just a nickname of Cyril. So, anthemist, my title is Lepata after recording follow you. And my anthem is called Whimbuna Patriots, what with a common goal. So, as a gospel artist and as Christians, our common goal is to get salvation and serve God. So, every song is produced as an anthemist. So, Christians follow Christ, so follow you. All right. So, you're not specifically targeting at you. So, it was mainly for, you know, Christians who are believers, you know, when they let kuchanta long na we were as the followers of Christ. Ya, ya. So, nijenregani un na kwa comfortable na, now that sasa omengi ya kwa uli mwengu amziki? Dancer. Dancer. Okay. Ya. So, so that would lead us to the next question.  The likes of Hope Kid at Kona J Farm, who has just released a new track, Pia. Ya, so those are the guys in Angalia, Pia kina DJ Raph. Ya, they are mentors in my music. Okay. Ya. Ya, ni powasana. Haya. So, I love going deeper spiritually because you cannot, you know, hold Jesus banner if you do not, you know, really know Him intimately. So, um, how long ume kwa kwa jwaniya Salvation? Hap and, you know, like, paka hapa pa lume fika sasa? Ya, so, I've been brought up in the church, I am saved. So, since birth ni me kwa, ni me kwa just brought up in the church. That's why I've been motivated kabisa in singing gospel. So, uh, I have a praying mom, my family church going. So ni le, ni me grow tu ni kijua.  Salvation ni me kamivo, ni me grow, ni me grow in the way of the Lord. Nasa gospel music, ni, it's another way of ministering to people. Ya. Nini li kua inspire, wingi e kua imba? Cos you could have done something else and still preach the gospel. One thing, ni li kwa na imba tangumu toto kabisa. Okay. So, na jwa zile Sunday school, I was very confident. Ka tu bila umesema. So, I performed before people and one thing, ila appreciation aso me ni onesha tangu. It has really uplifted me na imen patia confidence ana. Because una get, never at one point did I ever perform alafu ni kwa downgraded o something. People just appreciated. Ataka na ila utoto and the, with everything, ni le, ni le, ni le grow ni kijua. People like what I do. And people appreciate. And I have the talent. So, even don't me grow ni kikam ni kikam. Hadia pasai. Wow. Hi. So, vision ya, you know, ya ko, let's say in the next two to three years. So, kwa na takaku shukuru mungu for 2019. It has begun so well. Na na shukuru sana. My vision, let's say, two, three years from now. Top gospel artist in Kenya. Who really ministers. Una get. But just as you know, atua na hanzo. Then wana hanzo kupotea. Namambu ya niya slowly kidogo kidogo. You know, fame and money changes people. And that's something that must come. It has to. So, when you are performing and recording artists, na usepi ya manza kukuju a fame and money will come. Because you are, apart from ministering, you have to find your music yi piya bure. Because we must eat, you know, tuliperent and such things. So, I mean takaku wa artist mwenye haba diliki. Ile humilitini manza na yotangun kuem dogo. Adisa ni kakam. And people are appreciating what I do. I want to remain like that. Humble and serving the Lord. Amen. We want to speak a special blessing upon your life. Amen. And especially where your ministry is concerned. You have said a very important thing. Humble. Because pride comes before a fall. And God does not like pride. At the end of it all, you have committed yourself. You have sacrificed to actually choose to serve the Lord. I can tell you for free it is not an easy journey. I can tell you for free it is a very, very tight rest. Tukwa posi wate. But you know we are racing against the world. Because we are not of the world. The minute you accept salvation you choose to differentiate yourself from the world. So kawkijwa you'll be going against the grind. But be rest assured. The fact that you have committed yourself before the Lord. And this is his calling. He will see you through. Amen. Do not waver. Do not doubt. But focus your eyes on the cross. And at any given point call on his name. And he'll be faithful to see you through. We'll stand with you. In a way we can be able to. Including kwomba nawewe. But we wish you all the best. Thank you. May you soar. Na ukia nile uko kipatengine. Una jawia tunok. Karibu kuja upakulia apa. So right now let's hear what this song is all about. And who this guy is. Sincisa satu me sham jawa. DJ Nix Anguja Kibao.