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Six Theses towards the Liberation of Arts Philanthropy

Philanthropy is on the rise in the Dutch visual arts. Fat cash prizes, big-name exhibitions, large-scale renovations, spectacular public artworks, and big scandals are changing the public display of art and undermining the democratic governance of art institutions. While some have critiqued the patron's rise to power, the majority of the art world remains silent, muted by a combination of ignorance and self-censorship. How can we overcome this deadlock and start cultivating a healthy public debate?

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Managing a transition towards a sustainable agro-food system

This paper analyses the initiative AgroAgenda in the northern Netherlands. The AgroAgenda is a platform in which multiple stakeholders together stimulate a circular, and nature-inclusive agro-food system in the Dutch provinces of Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe. Stakeholders come from, among others, provincial governments, farmers’ and nature organizations, educational and research institutes and processing companies. They join forces to realize a system change, a transition, in the region, while promoting knowledge circulation, knowledge co-creation and joint learning. The platform, is a front runner of five national, comparable initiatives. The AgroAgenda has the potential to lead to a more nature-inclusive and circular farming. Several of the 40 experiments have already led to good results. However, to bring about a real system change, more attention to innovations in governmental organizations (including law and regulations), policy, the value chains (division of margins, pricing and marketing) and the educational system are needed.

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Managing a transition towards a sustainable agro-food system

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Towards a Natural Social Contract

This open access book states that the endemic societal faultlines of our times are deeply intertwined and that they confront us with challenges affecting the security and sustainability of our societies. It states that new ways of inhabiting and cultivating our planet are needed to keep it healthy for future generations. This requires a fundamental shift from the current anthropocentric and economic growth-oriented social contract to a more ecocentric and regenerative natural social contract. The author posits that in a natural social contract, society cannot rely on the market or state alone for solutions to grand societal challenges, nor leave them to individual responsibility. Rather, these problems need to be solved through transformative social-ecological innovation (TSEI), which involves systemic changes that affect sustainability, health and justice. The TSEI framework presented in this book helps to diagnose and advance innovation and change across sectors and disciplines, and at different levels of governance. It identifies intervention points and helps formulate sustainable solutions for policymakers, administrators, concerned citizens and professionals in moving towards a more just and equitable society.

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Re-Organise - The Game

This is a serious game called Re-Organise. It is a cooperativeboard game about creating closed loops in the circular economy. The game represents an agro-industrial park in which different types of companies aim to use each other's waste streams as a material and/or energy resource. To do so, the players need to collaborate and (often need to) invest in processing technologies. The game is licenced CC-BY. To use it, the supplementary materials can be downloaded for printing. We kindly ask you to cite this game according to the pure reference.

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Why Novel Sanitary Systems are Hardly Introduced?

Innovations are required in urban infrastructures due to the pressing needs for mitigating climate change and prevent resource depletion. In order to address the slow pace of innovation in urban systems, this paper analyses factors involved in attempts to introduce novel sanitary systems. Today new requirements are important: sanitary systems should have an optimal energy/climate performance, with recovery of resources, and with fewer emissions. Anaerobic digestion has been suggested as an alternative to current aerobic waste water treatment processes. This paper presents an overview of attempts to introduce novel anaerobic sanitation systems for domestic sanitation. The paper identifies main factors that contributed to a premature termination of such attempts. Especially smaller scale anaerobic sanitation systems will probably not be able to compete economically with traditional sewage treatment. However, anaerobic treatment has various advantages for mitigating climate change, removing persistent chemicals, and for the transition to a circular economy. The paper concludes that loss avoidance, both in the sewage system and in the waste water treatment plants, should play a key role in determining experiments that could lead to a transition in sanitation. http://dx.doi.org/10.13044/j.sdewes.d6.0214 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karel-mulder-163aa96/

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Why Novel Sanitary Systems are Hardly Introduced?

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Actor Behaviour and Robustness of Industrial Symbiosis Networks: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach

Industrial Symbiosis Networks (ISNs) consist of firms that exchange residual materials and energy locally, in order to gain economic, environmental and/or social advantages. In practice, ISNs regularly fail when partners leave and the recovery of residual streams ends. Regarding the current societal need for a shift towards sustainability, it is undesirable that ISNs should fail. Failures of ISNs may be caused by actor behaviour that leads to unanticipated economic losses. In this paper, we explore the effect of these behaviours on ISN robustness by using an agent-based model (ABM). The constructed model is based on insights from both literature and participatory modelling in three real-world cases. It simulates the implementation of synergies for local waste exchange and compost production. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) was used to model agent behaviour in time-dependent bilateral negotiations and synergy evaluation processes. We explored model behaviour with and without TPB logic across a range of possible TPB input variables. The simulation results show how the modelled planned behaviour affects the cash flow outcomes of the social agents and the robustness of the network. The study contributes to the theoretical development of industrial symbiosis research by providing a quantitative model of all ISN implementation stages, in which various behavioural patterns of entrepreneurs are included. It also contributes to practice by offering insights on how network dynamics and robustness outcomes are not only related to context and ISN design, but also to actor behaviour.

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Actor Behaviour and Robustness of Industrial Symbiosis Networks: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach

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Re-Organise

Professional and academic education increasingly use realistic, rich, safe and interactive tools such as serious gaming. In our case we have used a serious game to teach students how socio-economic and technological opportunities and challenges could shape sustainable businesses in a circular economy. In this paper, we specifically show how local symbiotic networks in a city can be created through a serious game called ReOrganise. Symbiotic networks consist of a heterogeneous set of socio-economic and technological elements. Both types of elements bring forth and undergo multiple complex and dynamic interactions. These involve social interactions among actors and physical exchanges regarding materials and energy products. Economic motivations for actors engaging in symbiosis can be selling waste as by-product or avoiding waste disposal costs. In addition, symbiotic networks often create broader environmental and social benefits, such as resource recycling, or job creation. Every specific case, however, leads to subtle differences in behaviour and outcomes. It is therefore difficult to teach students about the intricacies of network emergence in a strictly theoretical fashion. Serious gaming can be a powerful method to comprehend such intricate dynamics of forming and operating symbiotic networks. Re-Organise, a serious game that we have developed for this purpose, is based on practice-oriented action research, and developed with symbiotic network participants. By adding a case description, Re-Organise can now be used for educational purposes. Re-Organise players represent the actors in an urban agriculture area, such as farmers, restaurants, gardeners, allotment garden communities, etc. The goal of the players is to find as much local use for their waste as possible, while maximizing the fulfilment of their own needs and motivations. We have played Re-Organise multiple times in different education activities at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and at the Delft University of Technology. The learning goals of the game play were comprehension of specific technological solutions and boundary conditions, comprehension of different perspectives and goals of the various actors, and application of the aforementioned sociotechnical insights to develop network concepts. In order to examine whether the gameplay would indeed meet our learning goals, we have set up a pretest-posttest experiment. In the experiment, a group of students that played Re-Organise, and a control group that did not play the game, but only learned about theoretical notions of symbiosis, were exposed to questions regarding the learning goals. We found that, by playing the game, the student’s comprehension about the relevant technologies had increased. They learned hands-on about different motivations of stakeholders to engage in symbiosis. In addition, students applied technological knowledge, and behavioural and motivational aspects to co-create new local supply networks. The experience accelerated the learning process, and gave more intricate knowledge and insight into shaping and sustaining symbiotic networks. This paper provides evidence about the positive effect of interactive learning through serious gaming on learning goals in sustainable education. Re-Organise provides a safe and rich learning experience for students, and enables students, and practitioners alike, to display creativity around the shaping of circular networks.

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Creating circular, efficient and symbiotic cities

The ‘Grand Challenges’ of our times, like climate change, resource depletion, global inequity, and the destruction of wildlife and biodiversity can only be addressed by innovating cities. Despite the options of tele-working, tele-trading and tele-amusing, that allow people to participate in ever more activities, wherever they are, people are resettling in cities at an unprecedented speed. The forecasted ‘rurification’ of society did not occur. Technological development has drained rural society from its main source of income, agriculture, as only a marginal fraction of the labour force is employed in agriculture in the rich parts of the world. Moreover, technological innovation created new jobs in the IT and service sectors in cities. Cities are potentially far more resource efficient than rural areas. In a city transport distances are shorter, infrastructures can be applied to provide for essential services in a more efficient way and symbiosis might be developed between various infrastructures. However, in practice, urban infrastructures are not more efficient than rural infrastructures. This paper explores the reasons why. It digs into the reasons why the symbiotic options that are available in cities are not (sufficiently) utilised. The main reason for this is not of an economic nature: Infrastructure organisations are run by experts who are part of a strong paradigmatic community. Dependence on other organisations is regarded as limiting the infrastructure organisation’s freedom of action to achieve its own goals. Expert cultures are transferred in education, professional associations, and institutional arrangements. By 3 concrete examples of urban systems, the paper will analyse how various paradigms of experts co-evolved with evolving systems. The paper reflects on recent studies that identified professional education as the initiation into such expert paradigms. It will thereby relate lack of urban innovation to the monodisciplinary education of experts and the strong institutionalised character of expertise. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63007-6_43 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karelmulder/

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Creating circular, efficient and symbiotic cities

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Developing and understanding design interventions in relation to industrial symbiosis dynamics

Symbiotic Urban Agriculture Networks (SUANs) are a specific class of symbiotic networks that intend to close material and energy loops from cities and urban agriculture. Private and public stakeholders in SUANs face difficulties in the implementation of technological and organisational design interventions due to the complex nature of the agricultural and urban environment. Current research on the dynamics of symbiotic networks, especially Industrial Symbiosis (IS), is based on historical data from practice, and provides only partly for an understanding of symbiotic networks as a sociotechnical complex adaptive system. By adding theory and methodology from Design Science, participatory methods, and by using agent-based modelling as a tool, prescriptive knowledge is developed in the form of grounded and tested design rules for SUANs. In this paper, we propose a conceptual Design Science method with the aim to develop an empirically validated participatory agent-based modelling strategy that guides sociotechnical design interventions in SUANs. In addition, we present a research agenda for further strategy, design intervention, and model development through case studies regarding SUANs. The research agenda complements the existing analytical work by adding a necessary Design Science approach, which contributes to bridging the gap between IS dynamics theory and practical complex design issues.

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Six Theses towards the Liberation of Arts Philanthropy