Over the past year, Palette has been examining the small but continual tasks that fill our days: picking up food, finding clothes, fetching essentials. We noticed how much time and personal effort goes into these rou- tines, and how that effort is reflected in every price tag.
We talked to residents from the Marolles, to shopkeepers, barkeepers, traffic wardens, waste collectors, market vendors. Hundreds of them. And they began to notice it too: we spend a lot of our time moving stuff around.
We decided to share these insight, keep the conversation going, and consider possible ways to intervene and act on what we have learnt.
Based on these conversations, we have distilled seven observations. They highlight sometimes ironic, at other times tragic mismatches in the urban logistic system. However, it is exactly in the places where things don’t run as smoothly as they should or could, that opportunities arise to try something else, do things differently, maybe together.
We translated these observations into 7 Dioramas realised by Colin Delfosse. Using humour, they stimulate us to pause and reconsider how things move around.
The following lines list the 7 titles of the Dioramas. The context in which the observations took place is described and then connected to existing alternatives.
[1]
The road was blocked, the train got stuck, but a boat got me there.
Even a donkey knows that often the shortest route to bring an item from A to B is not a straight line. You would prefer a level path or one that is slightly sloping downwards. Rivers agree, and so the river Senne cut a comfortable gateway to Brussels from its Southern hinterland. Its valley is now used by motorways, railway tracks and a canal. Yet, while motorways are often jammed, at off-peak hours trains frequently run half-empty, and the canal is unfit for smaller freight. There are current- ly really clever people already exploring a better use of the existing infrastructure.
Logistics require heavy infrastructure :
Supplying a densely-populated city with goods and food requires heavy utilitarian structures on an industrial scale. Often this is far from efficient, takes more space than needed, and rubs up against the human-centred fabric of urban life. Can we reconcile the large quantity of supply needed for the demand with the delicate grain of human settlement?
How to feed everyone is among the biggest urban challenges. Sources dating back to the 11th century speak of farmers loading their cart and coming into Brussels to sell their produce straight to consumers. Even today there are farmers who circumvent much of the logistics chain by loading their van, driving into town and selling to grocers or at the market.
Experiments are ongoing with how to use the existing infrastructure more efficiently. For example, In the Belly tries by their own boat on the canal, or Frank Nevens is creating the possibility to use vacant space in trains. Others try to shorten the chain from farm to fork as part of a fairer relation between producer and consumer, like GASAP and VRAC; by taking over several steps in the supply chain, such as Dream, or by electronically matching supply and demand, like LinkedFarm, E-Farmz.
Discover more in the Online Repertoire for Inspiration here
[2]
I was offered money for my bin.
Depending on how you see something, it can be waste or worth a fortune. Farmers knew early on that green waste can be compost, and second-hand stores give a second life to clothes that have lost their owners’ affection. The more we learn about materials and the stuff things are made of, the more we are able to recycle and recombine them. For instance, spent cooking oil can be refined into a biofuel that can drive an engine. But what about the parcels I return? Are the clothes I send back tried on by someone else, or are they shipped to a desert at the other end of the world?
Waste is a resource
For every item we consume there comes a moment when its value becomes negative and we call it waste: rather than paying to get it delivered to our door, we need to pay to get rid of it. On a neighbourhood scale, circular economy initiatives collide with spatial reality. Where to find the extra storage in homes; and where are the local spaces for low-profit recycling activities that are often dirty and noisy? How to organise the reverse logistics that take goods out the same way they came into the neighbourhood?
The Marolles has a history of reviving products that appear to have reached the end of their life. For over a century and a half goods that others considered waste found a new owner here, giving birth in turn to new crafts and expertise in the form of antique sellers, furniture restorers and vide-maisons.
Contemporary initiatives like Troc Radis and Troc&Brol follow this tradition. With food as another source of waste, and the built environment not lending itself to urban composting, several attempts have been made to save food from the bin, such as Alpaca, Capucines, or Loco, collectivising recycling, as Stalem does or Patrick Wauters imagines. The next level is getting money for waste, as the Institut Gheude does for its used vegetable oils.
Discover more in the Online Repertoire for Inspiration here
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