Brussels Urban Forest: working with complexity
By Jean Boulton
Complexity theorist and School of System Change contributor Jean Boulton shares her experience from a recent field trip to the Sonian Forest in Brussels, as part of the Basecamp course. This story provides an example of working systemically in a complex world — and the way hearts, minds, imagination and passion come together to bring about systemic change.
Establishing a local circular economy based on wood as ‘urban commons’
There is an area of forest, the Sonian Forest, that has been managed, but never been laboured; its soil is unchanged since the last Ice Age. It spans the district of Brussels (38%) and the two adjoining regions of Flanders (56%) and Wallonia (6%). In total there are 4,421 hectares of mainly beech trees, and, since 2017, this is a Unesco World Heritage Site. As Stephan Kampelmann [1] began by telling us, these forests go back centuries to the early Middle Ages, the time of Charlemagne, and have a rich historical and cultural significance. They were used as hunting grounds for the nobility. The part of the forest we visited within the region of Brussels was bequeathed to become a public park — the Parc Duden — by a wealthy businessman in 1895; he had made his money through trading lace. His beautiful house sits overlooking the woodland and looking down towards the city.
At more than 100 years old, many of these trees are now coming to the end of their lives and need to be culled. The authorities are committed to this undertaking, but the issue is what to do with the wood. Currently most of the wood is sold and shipped to China [2], from where it is subsequently transported thousands of miles overland to be made, primarily, into sticks for ice lollies, or toothpicks. Beech is good for these uses as it does not splinter. Much carbon is used in this transportation, amounting to around 10% of the carbon sequestered in the wood.
Stephan, an economist with the Laboratory for Urbanism, Infrastructure and Ecology, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, initially came to this story concerned about carbon footprints and felt there must be a better solution for the felled wood other than to ship it across to the other side of the world.
He started to explore if there were ways in which the wood could be used locally. The supply is substantial at, typically, 20,000 m3 per year. He found that the public authorities in Brussels (who did not see this as a significant commercial venture, as it was only a small part of their budget) felt very differently about the resource compared with Flanders, who were more concerned with the commercial potential of the felled wood. So, the strategy for engaging with each region needed to take these differing attitudes into account.
With respect to the Brussels region, local people were brought into consultations. The parkland is much loved and its legacy to the city much valued, and there was local resistance to felling the trees at all. Even with those citizens who understood that older trees are dangerous and falling branches could kill, there was a desire to leave felled trees as part of the landscape to enrich the ecology. Rather than ignore the concerns of the first group, some parts of the forest were fenced off so that trees could die and not be dangerous to visitors, whilst in other parts, felling commenced.
For those people focused on the local ecology, there was a need to extend the thinking into a wider context. Wood is needed for many uses — furniture, floors, building construction — and is a more benign material than plastic or many other manufactured materials. Does it make sense from a holistic perspective, to import wood from Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and other faraway places, when there is wood available locally? Does this wider ecological perspective suggest that using local wood commercially, rather than leaving it to rot in situ, make more sense, even if the local ecology is slightly poorer as a result? The wider ecological perspective can be integrated with the economic perspective (we do need buildings, furniture and so on) to give a broader systemic overview and lead to different strategies than if the ecology of the forest is viewed in isolation.
When it came to influencing the Brussels constituency, Stephan decided to use local television to put pressure on local politicians to act. He merely had to make it clear that wood from these important forests was being sold abroad to create enough local outrage and political pressure for politicians to take notice and support the project — its importance to them was political rather than economic.
This was in contrast to the approach with the constituency of Flanders where there was seen to be significant commercial gain to be had from the wood and the issue was that local companies could buy wood on the open market at a cheaper price. The strategy here was to undertake cost-benefit analyses and argue from a commercial standpoint. They showed that, despite the fact that local wood could be slightly more expensive to buy than on the global market, wood was a relatively small part of the cost of manufacture, and so was worth exploiting. In addition, the unique cachet of using local wood enhanced its value. Burnt-in trademarks were developed so that people would know, in perpetuity, that this was local wood.
Stephan was interested in the idea of a circular economy (Kampelmann, 2020). This term is often applied to circular business models within individual companies but, if applied to the creation of a local value chain for wood, it requires cooperation across a range of actors — public sector, politicians, local business people (lumberjacks, sawmills, wood merchants, furniture and floor manufacturers) and local communities. To provide a missing link in this value chain, Stephan, with others set up a cooperative to buy the wood and bring it to the local market. They developed a narrative of ‘wood as urban commons’.
The cooperative found customers for the wood — education departments were interested to use the local beech in new schools for furniture and floors. The cooperative was also interested in what could be done with single felled trees. It was too expensive to move them singly, but they could be sawed into rings onsite and turned for salad bowls. There was crowdsourcing to get the cooperative going and these salad bowls, and cheese boards in the pentagonal shape of the Brussels district were given to crowd-sourcers as recognition of their contributions. They also noted that they were setting up a commercial venture which had limits to growth (in that only a certain maximum level of wood would be available each year).
Much attention was given to the heart as well as the head, to the way this story felt to people, to the place of these forests in the hearts of local communities, to the sense of these trees as unique and individual. For example, the cooperative developed the idea of recording the DNA of each tree so that people could trace the source of their table or floor in the future. Fabrice Samyn, a local artist with international reputation, came forward and suggested that transparent slivers of wood from each tree could be mounted into the windows of public buildings, so that trees would be remembered and honoured as living beings not just as items to be exploited.
Stephan made one more point. That the project captured people’s imagination and pulled in support from all over. As he said, ‘I didn’t always know what was needed, what to ask for, but people would contact me and say, for example, ‘you need some support in writing a constitution for the cooperative, I can help with that’. Or, ‘you need help in maintaining interest in this project into the future, incorporating wood slivers into windows in public buildings can help support that and I have contacts who can help.’’ The ‘strategy’ then, is better thought of as an intention which pulled in support, than a rational plan which needed resourcing.
Another interesting aspect of the story was how it began. Stephan had known that the wood from Brussels was exported to China, but a report commissioned by the regional government had come to the conclusion that nothing could be done in light of global economic market forces. Then he was invited to spend four months at University of Montréal. He said, ‘I was interested in the urban economy of Montréal and started visiting interesting projects and talking to entrepreneurs. It was by accident that I stumbled upon the company Bois Public who organised the local value chain for the ash wood in Montréal. When I came back, I knew it was economically feasible to do something similar, and indeed felt it would be even easier in Brussels where the wood was not diseased and there would be a regularity of supply over a number of years. So, I rolled up my sleeves and got the Sonian Wood Coop going.’
Stephan then started to dig further into ‘urban wood’ and recognised that that the ash borer disease created a massive supply for ash wood all over North America, not only in Montréal, leading to an urban wood movement in America. He even came across an #urbanlumberjack Instagram hashtag. He then found out about Stadshout in Amsterdam. As he said, ‘curiously, everyone seems to be surprised that urban wood is happening in other countries. The people in Montreal and Amsterdam had never heard about similar initiatives abroad; I have the impression that we are all re-inventing the wheel’. Slowly, the connecting of these differing projects as an international learning community is starting to happen.
Discussion
The project illustrates many aspects of working systemically in a complex world (see Boulton et al, 2015).
It shows how systemic thinking — linking the environmental with the economic, or the ecological with the political — allows more impact and better solutions.
It demonstrates how the underlying narrative of the history of the forests was important in understanding their legacy and value and in providing motivation and context.
It shows how desire and imagination (to tackle the urban wood situation in Brussels) then puts us in a position to notice relevant information (e.g. in Montreal) which strengthens intention and resolve.
The story also illustrates that strategy can emerge as things become clearer and that weaving clear intentions (to sell local wood locally) and holding clear values (to retain heritage, to sustain a solution into the long-term, to reduce carbon footprint, to work collaboratively with the community) can pull in many solutions (e.g. to preserve wood slivers in windows) that could never have been developed in advance.
It shows the importance of recognising the contribution of emotions (the love of the forests) as well as rational thinking.
The approach required the interplay of many actors and stakeholders and sometimes the focus is on how to bring these together, how to slowly ‘knit together the system’. And yet, equally, change is often catalysed by seizing opportunities or seeing ways to pierce through the status quo — like going on television to shame politicians into acting or taking advantage of friends and contacts who can help in unanticipated ways. Change is not always about rational planning and overarching solutions; it is often particular to circumstances and context.
The story is a wonderful example of the value of systemic thinking, and of the way hearts and minds, imagination and passion, need to come together, and of the differing ways we can approach systemic change.
References
Boulton, J. et al (2015) Embracing Complexity: OUP
Kampelmann, S. (forthcoming) Placing Cities in the Circular Economy: Neoliberal Urbanism or Spaces of Socio-ecological Transition?
[1] Stephan Kampelmann works at the Laboratory for Urbanism, Infrastructure and Ecology, Université Libre de Bruxelles. His research focuses on urban economics and, more generally, on the link between urban economies and physical structures. He currently holds the Chair for Circular Economy and Urban Metabolism at the ULB’s Faculty of Architecture La Cambre-Horta
[2] Asia is the only continent in the world that consumes more wood than it produces (FAOSTAT database 2019)
