DESIGNING TERRITORIAL METABOLISM

60 ON TERRITORIAL METABOLISM
“nature” into the city. 4 As a result, under the pressure of modernist urban development,
the built and open spaces—or more simply, city and “nature”—were separated
again. Discourse and practice within urbanism narrowed the focus of these
concepts to the protection of historical neighborhoods. Research and practice in
regional geography and urban ecology disappeared in favor of social geography and
human ecology that focused on urban social conflicts (Grulois, 2015).
At the same time, despite the comprehensive attention that the Brussels
school paid to urban metabolism, additional remarkable works on the metabolism
of Brussels influenced industrial ecology and the study of energy and material
flows (Erkman, 2004), thus narrowing the scope of these investigations to urban
space and environment. As an example, the collective work L’Ecosystéme Belgique,
Essai d’écologie industrielle (Billen et al., 1983) extended the ecosystem study approach
to the whole national industrial system by collecting data on material and
energy input and output on the national scale of Belgium. The study questioned the
efficiency of material circulation in six main production chains (iron, glass, plastic,
lead, wood, and food), and the results showed the predominant linearity and sectorialization
of industrial production, implicitly arguing that a more integrated policy
was needed. Even though one of the co-authors, Gilles Billen, was a former student
of Duvigneaud, outputs were not spatialized on a geographical scale and thus not
related to natural ecosystem but rather illustrated through abstract schemes of
material and energy flows. The spatial connotation of metabolism was no longer in
the picture.
THE RESURGENCE OF URBAN METABOLISM DISCOURSE IN BRUSSELS:
CURRENT PERSPECTIVES AND DILEMMAS
Recently, there has been a strong return to the debate on urban metabolism in
Brussels. In 2012, the Etopia think tank of the Belgian green political party—Ecolo—
organized a symposium on the subject in which Suren Erkman was invited to participate
in a discussion with former Duvigneaud students (Etopia, 2012). 5 Following the
symposium, Ecolo supported a first study on the application of the concept of urban
metabolism—and industrial ecology—to support sustainable development of the
Brussels Region (Calay, 2013). Although the work of Duvigneaud stands as a historical
point of reference, the study examines more recent accounting methods such as
the Eurostat method, the Baccini method, and the Climatecon method (Calay, 2013).
Since the 1990s, those methods had been applied in various ways to European cities
such as Geneva (Faist Emmengger, 2003) and Paris (Barles, 2007).
Following these trends, regional programs and policies of the 2010s have fully
embraced the urban metabolism discourse as a tool to boost local economic and
social development and to meet regional environmental targets. The Sustainable
Regional Development Plan project (PRDD, 2014) integrates the issue and deploys
the term “urban metabolism” when addressing environmental and resource efficiency
issues within a regional perspective (PRDD, 2014: 14). Similarly, the term “ecology”
is explicitly used, albeit to refer specifically to “industrial ecology” (PRDD, 2014:
156) in addressing strategies of economic development through principles such as
clustering productive zones. In the PRDD project, apart from the use of these two
terms, there is no specification concerning what is meant by ecology or about the
terms into which urbanism should actually integrate an ecological perspective. The
ecological questions posed by the PRDD simply remain vague, as do those provided
by European and national policies and guidelines (such as the EU 2020 strategy for
smart, inclusive, and green development).