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.
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.
I’m working on temporary use of empty space in delivery trucks.
It almost sounds like a conspiracy: the vans and trucks in your neighbourhood are mainly moving emptiness around. And in doing so they take up quite a lot of parking, pavement and public space. Luckily an insurgency of cargo-deliverers, pooled deliveries and drop off points is rising, releasing less carbon, liberating space and often making less noise (singing cargo-biker notwithstanding).
Fast delivery complicates consolidated trajectories
Logistics providers, and their customers, prefer speed over volume: they don’t wait for a truck to be full before they embark on their journey. So, more trucks than necessary leave the depot, leading to “unproductive milage” from the providers perspective, or “ghost traffic” from the neighbourhood’s point of view. It adds to the already countless claims on social space in dense urban areas. Can we reduce delivery traffic and still get people what they need when they need it?
In the Marolles, narrow congested streets mean wheelbarrows are still among the most efficient ways of transporting medium sized articles. The steep slope of the neighbourhood makes it less attractive for bike deliverers, though Urbike for instance, has become part of the landscape. Consolidation, combining multiple small shipments into a single load, is organised in the neighbourhood by local residents themselves: they collectively buy large quantities of meat or olive oil, which pushes down prices, but also reduces journeys. Patrick Wauters proposes pooling kitchens and cooking. Instead of consolidating journeys. Reception points can also be grouped, which is the case for delivery points like MaxPost, or BPost’s proposed Bbox Boutique. Finally, projects like Nanohubzone try to simplify the shift of mode of transportation, while BinnenstadsserviceNijmegen developed consolidation centres outside the densely populated areas to reduce heavy traffic.
Over its lifetime a shrimp covers about 40 Km. But once caught in front of the Belgian coast the journey begins: it travels to Liège where it takes a plane to Casablanca to get peeled and flown back. Three days and 5,000 Km later it lands fresh on a restaurant plate, often at the Belgian coast. Beans are treated to similar extensive travels to be trimmed abroad. Your “made in Italy” shirt could start its life as raw materials from China that is turned into cloth in Turkey and assembled in Tunisia before being shipped to Italy.
Processing is cheaper abroad
Before reaching a shop, food is often processed and packaged abroad and clothes can travel half the world. Cheaper labour in other countries, advances in the quality and cost of transportation and the lifting of trade barriers certainly play their part. Yet, consumer demand for out-of-season and tropical produce also play a role, alongside the accelerated production cycle of ultra-fast fashion. Are there ways to shorten or at least make a goods’ pre-shop trajectory transparent? Can fast-fashion be slowed down?
Inspired by the conscious consumption of the Slow Food movement, the Slow Fashion movement emerged in the first decade of the 21st century. It focusses on ethics, slowing down consumerism and respecting the environment.
In the Marolles, atelier-boutique Cyclup is a combination of a clothes store, a clothes alteration shop and a custom tailor. Other projects emphasize the possibility of local food by making it more accessible like Gasap, Capucines, Vrac, In the Belly, Frank Nevens, LinkedFarm and E-Farmz.
An avalanche of small parcels killed my newsagent.
It seemed like a good idea in 2016. Newsagents were selling less because news became more e-based than ink-based. The freed-up space and time could be put to use by accepting and keeping parcels for a recipient who showed up at a more convenient time. They might not have anticipated they would be storing bicycles, matrasses and cupboards, practically transforming their shops into warehouses. On the other hand many of them have become central figures in their local community.
Storage makes goods cheaper
It is considered a central point of friction in urban planning: expensive real estate makes storing goods very costly, yet without storage goods can only be delivered just-in-time and become unaffordable. Households as well as shopkeepers experience this tension first hand. The more stor- age they have the more then benefit from large volume or discount purchases, without storage they depend on the fluctuation of the market. Can space be added, used more efficiently, or pooled?
The Marolles Flea Market is in itself an experiment in optimising use of space. Some stalls are not much larger than a table cloth, and the market goods are stored overnight informally in unused houses or even in vans parked nearby. As informal storage goes, customers tend to treat their delivery point as storage by picking up parcels late. Maxpost has evolved from just a parcel shop to a community hub. VRAC tackled the storage issue by selling in bulk, but also by requiring pre-order, allowing them to only bring what will be sold. Often there is large amount of empty unused space in the neighbourhood. Consolidation hubs like BinnenstadserviceNijmegen provide a more radical solution of moving warehousing outside the neighbourhood.
At the rise of cities in the 19th century, shops sold one item or one category of goods: hat makers, glove makers, butchers, bakeries. They were first challenged by department stores where you could still find a specialist in each department. From the mid-20th century, supermarkets offered convenience at lower price with attractive marketing, but with- out the expertise or social interactions. Increasingly though, shoppers appreciate the added value of community.
Efficiency comes at the cost of personal connections
There is still much debate over the causes. While some point directly to e-commerce, others mention out-of-town shopping centres and supermarkets, the high cost of inner-city real estate or the parking paradox. The point is, the traditional town centre with its local stores and specialist shops is in decline. One by one, specialist shops are turned into trendy coffee bars or other hospitality facilities. How can we change the flow of goods through the neighbourhood to combine the convenience of online or supermarket shopping with the social role of a local shop?
Inspired by market towns in England, the Marolles’ High Street gets its name from its function as the central business and shopping street of the neighbourhood. Increasingly, multi-generational businesses shut up shop and are replaced by coffee bars or cafes, not all of them catering to the local community. Initiatives like BinnenstadserviceNijmegen could help to reduce the traffic impact of moving stuff around and enable the creation of pedestrian zones. To counter competition from e-commerce, there is a shopkeeper in the Marolles who encourages clients to send him a picture of their shopping list on WhatsApp, which he then prepares and for less mobile ones delivers to their door. In a more structured way Wij Leveren in Leuven offers a basic online platform to connect local shopkeepers with residents.
Inability to choose between different chocolate spreads almost killed me.
In economics, the “jam study” is an experiment in which shoppers get to choose between 6 types of jam, and between 24 types. In the latter case 10 times less, purchases are made compared to the first. The reason being “choice overload”. Still, supermarkets confront us with a choice of different brands and sizes and colours of the same item. This requires more storage space, adding to the price, and if the goods are perishable, it also increases waste. All in the name of freedom to choose.
Hyperchoice has a cost
Supermarkets are expected to have a variety of the same product almost always available. This comes at a cost: it requires multiple daily deliveries and increases the shop’s footprint which both add to the price and increases the risk of waste. The over-availability also inspires over-consumption. Pre-order systems like click-and-collect are a way to mitigate these downsides, although it makes the shopping experience even more impersonal. What can bridge the gap between easy and varied shopping and limited space and purchasing power while causing less waste?
3 of the top 5 supermarket chains have an outlet in the Marolles’ High Street. They claim to cater to different audiences, which goes to show that consumers get to choose on every level. Not only is a product provided in different varieties in a single shop, in the same street that gesture is multiplied 3 times, each with its multiple daily deliveries and shop footprint, not to mention the waste. Luckily initiatives emerge that recover the unsold goods. Catering services like Capucines, Alpaca and Dream transform what others consider waste into something new at a more affordable price. Others like Gasap, VRAC and informal collective purchases manage choice better, offering only what can be made available. Troc Radis actively challenges overcompensation and waste. In terms of restaurants, Stalem aims at facilitating waste management by coordinating the choice of purchases so waste processing becomes easier.
