Christoph Herrmann
11 Technische Universität Braunschweig, Institut für Werkzeugmaschinen und Fertigungstechnik, 38106 Braunschweig, m.juraschek@tu-braunschweig.de
2 Technische Universität Dortmund, Fachgebiet Städtebau, Stadtgestaltung und Bauleitplanung, 44221 Dortmund
Keywords: Urban Factories, Urban Production, Sustainability, Ecotones
Kurzzusammenfassung. Die Produktion erfährt in Zeiten von Digitalisierung und Personalisierung der Produkte einen grundlegenden Paradigmenwechsel, welcher es der Produktion zunehmend ermöglicht, wieder in die Stadt zurückzukehren. Das urbane Umfeld wird in Zukunft der wichtigste Standort für Wertschöpfungs-Co-Kreation sein, da es aufgrund seiner hohen Dichte an Wissen und Kreativität, Arbeitskräften, Infrastruktur sowie Verbrauchern und Prosumern viele Potenziale bietet.
Dieser Trend trägt auch zu einer verbesserten Zusammenarbeit und einer Dezentralisierung der Produktion bei. Fabriken in städtischen Gebieten werden häufig mit negativen Auswirkungen assoziiert. Heutzutage können jedoch veränderte Produktionsformen und technische Entwicklungen Emissionen verringern. Darüber hinaus kann die urbane Produktion positive Impulse für ihre Umgebung generieren und eine Grundlage für neue Geschäftsmodelle bilden. Für die Beschreibung der urbanen Fabrik und deren Verknüpfungen mit der Stadt wird das System der Ökotone adaptiert.
Ökotone sind Übergangsbereiche zwischen verschiedenen Ökosystemen. Mit einem interdisziplinären Ansatz sollen mit ihrer Hilfe die unterschiedlichen Ausprägungen der Übergangsräume zwischen Fabriken und urbanen Räumen beschrieben und analysiert werden. Ein eingehendes Verständnis der Fabrik-Stadt-Schnittstellen soll eine ökologische, wirtschaftliche und sozial vorteilhaftere Wertschöpfung ermöglichen.
Abstract. As manufacturing is experiencing a major paradigm change in current times of digitalization and product personalization, production and factories are able to move back to the city.
The urban environment will be the main future location for value co-creation as it offers many potentials due to its high density of knowledge and creativity, workforce, infrastructure as well as consumers and prosumers. This trend also contributes to collaboration and decentralization of production. Factories in urban areas are commonly associated with negative impacts on the urban environment, but today a factory can produce fewer emissions due to technical improvements and at the same time offer positive impacts to its surrounding and thus even create new business models. To describe the urban factory and its connection with the city, the concept of ecotones is adapted.
Ecotones are transition areas of different ecosystems. With an interdisciplinary approach ecotones are used to describe and analyze the different manifestations of the transition areas of factories and urban spaces. An in-depth understanding of the factory-city-interface allows a more ecological, economic and social beneficial value creation.
Introduction
Cities are probably the world’s most complex and exciting ecosystems. Their large spatial extension and the high number and diversity of its inhabitants are outreached only by their creativity and inventiveness. People are connected to each other in many different ways. In the city they can reveal their diverse links. Despite the associated high conflict potential of the residents, due to limited space and density and the high price of land, the urban space, especially in lager cities, is regaining an increasingly attraction for large segments of the population [1]. As a result, cities act increasingly as economic engines and centers of knowledge-intensive economies. Thus, they are in spite of an
interconnected world, even more attractive for manufacturing companies that are part of these knowledge-intensive value chains [2].
While up to the beginning of the 20th century production and urbanization were closely interlinked, production, living and leisure were separated from the mid-20th century on. The poor living and working conditions of the 19th century, when industry was virtually inseparable from the city, had triggered a paradigm shift and hence the moving away from the mixed city. Emissions, high urbanization pressure and high building and population density had created inhuman and unhygienic housing conditions in the industrial cities of the time [3]. As a result, in Germany this led to a separation of the functions of living, working, recreation and leisure and thus also to a displacement of manufacturing to industrial areas on the outskirts [4].
Currently, however, signs of a return of manufacturing companies to the city become apparent.
New forms of production and improved filtering techniques allow for conflict-free and low-emission production. At the same time manufacturing companies rely on innovation and knowledge. This know-how can be found especially in highly skilled and knowledge-intensive clusters in urban areas.
Furthermore, better technologies enable to reduce emissions and thereby facilitate the integration of production into the city.
Due to the closer proximities, the reintegration of production in the urban space is able to intensify the reciprocal relationship with other urban uses and functions. City and production can both benefit from a more intensive exchange relationship between businesses and the civic society, for example by a lower consumption of resources or improved value.
Urban Production
Urban systems. To understand the integration of production into the city, both systems as well as their interfaces are considered. At which level or interface an exchange occurs will be explained below. Similar to the ecosystems in nature, the city is a complex network of relationships with material (nutrients), energy, and residents' knowledge flows. These exchanges take place at different spatial scales: within the quarter (movement area of residents, local heating supply chains), the city region (commuting, waste cycle) up to a global perspective (ventilation, water cycles, knowledge).
Our consideration of the city focuses on the exchanges of people (commuters), material and energy flows as well as information flow on the quarter- and city-regional level.
Our perception of urban space in the context of urban production is a multifunctional settlement area with complementary uses for production entities in close proximity to one another. Urban spaces inhabit multiple functions and utilization such as housing, social infrastructure or commerce.
Therefore, monofunctional industrial or commercial areas without any direct connections to other uses cannot be regarded as urban factories. The specific urbanity of these multifunctional areas cannot simply be classified as urban and non-urban areas, since urbanity itself is a complex concept with different dimensions. Even smaller settlement units can provide significant urban functions for manufacturing and therefore provide different and unique levels of quality. Urban areas are open environments containing elements of the urban system. The presence and intensity of these resources define the level of urbanity in the context of urban factories and the efficiency potentials of the different urban areas. In the context of urban production these elements are:
Knowledge / humankind / urban society / education / know-how
Water / air (Emissions)
Energy
Raw materials
One of the most important parts in the city system are the inhabitants, i.e. humans living in the city. With their basic needs for housing, work, care and leisure time, humans have the most intense exchange relationship within the city. From an urban perspective, humans mainly occur as workers, as consumers of goods and commodities and as residents who are exposed to emissions. Humans produce flows of goods by consumption and energy and material flows from electricity and heating.
All these goods, materials and energy must be produced and transported, whereby traffic is induced.
The essential material exchange between the systems takes place via the interface of infrastructure.
Goods, waste and commuting routes principally rely on the common transport infrastructure. An exchange of material flows such as heat, electricity or data requires technical infrastructure. The exchange can be carried out within the environment of the city as well as with the surrounding region of the city. Another interface is the natural environment. Especially the factor land or land availability and the air and water work as an exchange interface. The city with its different land uses is the main consumer of the resource soil. Air and water transmit emissions, which are produced as by-products of energy production, commodity production and traffic in the city and which integrate into the biogeochemical cycles of the city. The urban production system with material and immaterial exchange flows is displayed in figure 1.
Knowledge and innovation especially takes place in urban areas, in educational institutions and urban quarters [5]. The exchange and propagation of knowledge are intangible currents and circuits, which are not necessarily linked only to cities, but can have an origin here.
Figure 1: Urban production system with material and immaterial exchange flows
Factories in urban environments. Manufacturing is an important sector of the economy in almost all countries. In 2014 for example manufacturing contributed 22,3 % of the GDP in Germany and 15,3 % in EU [6]. The importance of the secondary economic sector is underlined by the recent movement towards a more balanced economy in developed countries with an overemphasized tertiary sector. Factories are the places where manufacturing and thus value adding processes happen. They are commonly associated with negative impacts on their surroundings due to the manufacturing processes, creating noise, emissions and traffic.
However, production technologies are becoming energy and resource efficient as companies are pushed and pulled towards more sustainable business models [7]. Applying these new technologies factories can offer positive impacts to their surroundings and become more city-compatible [8].
Moving factories back to the city allows to unlock new business models with a strong focus on product-service-systems. There are several advantages of production sites located in urban areas from a companies’ perspective: e.g. worker satisfaction, customer vicinity and infrastructure, as well as from a cities’ perspective: e.g. less commuting traffic or social activity offers (see table 1). Looking at major trends like rising urbanization, digitalization and product personalization more factories will be located in sensitive urban areas in the future. But also a number of challenges can be identified for urban factories, e.g. the previously mentioned noise and pollution caused by production processes or conflicts with city planning goals. Additionally, a great number of factories is currently situated in urban environments which were initially not designed for this situation mainly due to historic reasons.
These include production sites historically founded within the city’s boundaries as well as those initially placed outside the city limits, but then subsequently reached by the city’s growth [9].
Table 1: Main advantages, challenges and major trends of urban production
Advantages Challenges Major Trends
Innovation and symbiosis (Emission) conflicts Urbanization Infrastructure synergy Limited space Digitalization Attractiveness (e.g. work & living) Traffic Decentralization
Customer vicinity Personalization and prosumers
A factory can be seen as an ecosystem of its own, as it is a confined community of different organisms (workers) acting in conjunction with the non-living environment. There are different kinds of actors to be found in the factory specialized on their individual tasks. The productivity – a key indicator for natural ecosystems among others like diversity and resilience – is in the case of a production site linked to abiotic product creation utilizing natural and non-biotic resources. One could even extend this view to analyze the penetration of innovative technology in analogy to invading species in ecosystems creating dynamic changes in the system. The main interactions across the factory boundaries in urban environments are displayed in figure 2. To further investigate the potentials of urban factories it would be helpful to better understand the different forms interrelation between one or more factories and the urban environment.
Figure 2: Selected impacts and benefits of the urban factory elaborated from [5]
Ecotones
Ecosystems are a major focus of environmental sciences. Research in this area has a long tradition.
An ecosystem is a more or less clearly defined area in which communities of living organisms exist together with an abiotic environment in a stable status [10]. At the turn of the 20th century the border or transition zones between different ecosystems came into focus. Examples are river banks, the edge of a forest or cliffs rising out of the sea. LIVINGSTON described a “zone of tension” between biological societies in 1903 [11]. This concept was extended by CLEMENTS two years later as he described “[…]
accumulated or abrupt change in the symmetry is a stress line or ecotone” [12], with the term
“ecotones” subsequently finding its way into the scientific lexis. Ecoclines in contrast to ecotones are more stable zones of transitions [13]. The concepts of ecoclines and ecotones are discussed controversially [14].
Ecotones are transition areas of different ecosystems. In these areas of change a high diversity of species, great activity and dynamic vitality can be observed, as ecotones can support species
belonging to both adjacent ecosystems and even some only existing in ecotones (see figure 3). Here, a high level of biological diversity can be supported and ecotones act as sources of high primary and secondary productivity concentrating the flows of water, nutrients and other materials [15].
Figure 3: Species distribution across a transition zone or ecotone between communities A and B (I), (II) shows greater number of species in transition zone than in two adjacent
communities, recreated from [16]
PRENDERGAST and BERTHON have summarized four major characteristics of ecotones that can be observed and utilized for definition [17]:
1. Ecotones are a zone of interaction between two or more adjacent ecosystems with mechanisms not existing in either of the ecosystems. Interactions are driven from the outside.
2. Ecotones are a zone of transition overlapping the ecosystems. The boundary has one or more observable variables.
3. Ecotones are typically richer in species as they can support species natural to the neighboring ecosystems and those unique to the ecotone.
4. Ecotones are subject to external forces and mainly influenced by these changing the shape of ecotones over time.
Appearances of ecotones. Ecotones can be empirically divided into reoccurring yet unique shapes connected to the natural conditions at the border of two ecosystems. The distinction of ecotones and their extent is usually derived from the identification of ecosystems and their boundaries. Numerous approaches can be applied for this purpose varying in time effort, cost, accuracy and intended purpose.
These methods can stretch from visual assessment of maps and aerial images, manually counting the appearance of certain species in regard to their position [18] and automated image processing up to quantification from drone-acquired data [19]. The concept of ecotones was transferred e.g. to marketing [17] and sustainable product-service-systems [20].
Depending on the actual functional and spatial bioturbation between ecosystems ecotones as their transition zones can adopt numerous shapes from sharp borders (cliffs in the sea) to unclear, flowing boundaries (edge of a forest gradually thinning). A structural representation of some of the observed shapes of ecotones is summarized in figure 4.
Figure 4: Different types and appearances of ecotones, recreated from [21]
Applying Ecotones to Urban Factories. The application of methodology from ecosystems and ecotones on urban systems allows an analysis of the common transition area between factories and surrounding cities. The variety in appearance and diversity in function of these areas can in certain cases reach a similar complexity as in the biological ecosystems themselves. Ecotones can be used to describe and analyze the different manifestations of the transition areas of factories and urban spaces.
An in-depth understanding of the factory-city-interface allows a more ecological, economic and social beneficial value creation. Aligned to natural ecosystems which reach without external disturbances a self-sustaining, sustainable state the same state of sustainability shall be transferred to the city-factory-system. With the symbiotic connection of the factory to the city the value creation in the factory can take place in more sustainable ways.
The observable key indicators for “Urban Factory Ecotones” are – corresponding to the biological ecotone parameters – activity and liveliness. Activity aggregates all actions leading to value creation including research and development as well as supporting processes and manufacturing itself.
Liveliness accumulates the intensity of the different urban uses. These are mainly influenced by the density of the population and the degree of mixture regarding the different urban land uses.
For the development of the presented methodology these indicators are not yet quantified. In the case of activity, product and service diversity (related to species diversity), the number of produced goods and services (related to the quantity of creatures) and the generated turnover (related to biological productivity) could prove as functional measurable parameters. For the purpose of transferring to “Urban Factory Ecotones” the before mentioned major characteristics of ecotones are to be adjusted:
1. Urban Factories have a zone of interaction between the adjacent urban and factory system with mechanisms not existing in either of the single systems. Interactions in this transition zone are driven from the outside.
2. Urban Factory Ecotones are a zone of transition overlapping the urban and factory system.
The boundary has one or more observable variables.
3. Urban Factory Ecotones are typically richer in interaction and innovation as they can support activities from the neighboring systems and those unique to the ecotone.
4. Urban Factory Ecotones are subject to external forces and mainly influenced by those changing the shape of Urban Factory Ecotones over time.
Similar to ecological ecotones the transition zone between factory and urban area is shaped by the cross-border flows of energy, resources and information. If there is an impenetrable spatial border between the factory and the surrounding urban area the activity and liveliness of both systems will not interact as shown in figure 5. Thus there will be no innovation driven from the mixture of both
worlds. Nevertheless, numerous impacts can still influence the adjacent system. In the case of a sharp boundary, these impacts are usually considered negative and include noise emissions or spatial limitations.
Figure 5: Distribution of activity and liveliness with resulting innovation and interaction for a sharp boundary between factory and urban area
Transition zones that are spatially and/or functionally shared between factory and city can result in high interaction and through diversity in activity in high innovation for both sides (figure 6). It has been shown by several studies that diversity in companies leads to higher degrees of innovation [22].
The diversity in Urban Factory Ecotones enables new business models for the factories, can foster research as well as innovation, adds living value to the urban district, if positively set up, and strengthens the possibility for implementation of product-service-systems (PSS) or even factory-service-systems (FSS), e.g. a factory becomes a place where people from the neighborhood can use some of the facilities for own value creation or innovation projects.
Figure 6: Distribution of activity and liveliness with resulting innovation and interaction with a high mixture in the transition zone between factory and urban area
Both systems are dependent on another as they both rely on cross-border flows of energy, resources, people and information. The systems themselves can be observed in different resolution – an ecotone can also be found in between neighboring factories or urban areas as well as between several factories aggregated in an inner-city industrial park and the outside. A common species to all ecosystems in the urban area are humans. Derived from the ecological appearances of ecotones five exemplary Urban Factory Ecotones are described in table 2 with their characteristics, opportunities and weaknesses. Furthermore, examples are given for each type.
Table 2: Main advantages, challenges and major trends of urban production
Urban Factory
Ecotone
Characteristics
Very low interaction between factory and city
Isolated production, but impacts on surrounding
Factory seen as obstruction in urban district
Mainly city influencing the factory
Demand for products and services from the urban area
Mainly factory influencing the city
Production of products for urban population
Highly personalized customer goods
Factory offers service
High degree of exchange up to collaboration
Formalized communication
Urban Product-Service Systems as well as Factory-Service Systems exist
Shared spaces and/or functions
High diversity
Symbiotic exchange
Mixing of city and business living
Mainly informal communication
Network establishment
Opportunities
Higher utilization of infrastructure
Safe, isolated production
Low emission in urban areas
Short lead times and innovation cycles
PSS
Short distances to work place
Highly attractive
Use of surrounding urban infrastructure
Sustainable production of highly personalized products
PSS
Targeted collaboration for defined goals
Highly innovative
Better customer relations
Good opportunities for new PSS &
FSS
Highly innovative
Positive social impact
Urban- industrial-symbiosis
Weaknesses
Low innovation from diversity
Overload of infrastructure
High conflict potential factory-city
Very low opportunities for new business models and PSS/FSS
Economic liberty of factory may be limited due to the vulnerability of the
surroundings
Acceptance
City planning liberty may be limited
Potential emission conflicts
Administration costs and delays
Demand for mutual consideration
System open to external disturbances
High demand for mutual consideration
System open to external disturbances
Examples
B2B
manufacturing
Automotive supplier
Shoemaker / personalized running shoes
Optician
Factory sale
Guided tours
Brewpub
Production with high emission level
Public-private-partnership
Joint research projects
High-Tech business park
FabLab
Open canteen
Events/think tanks in factory building
SME in mixed-use districts