Cities that work with natural cycles - Moein Nodehi (478)

I might repeat myself now, but I will do it because I think it's important and I think it's important to remind people over and over about being bold and being brave. Are you interested in how to integrate natural psychos into cities? What do you think about voter recycling? How can we combine systems instead of creating silos for better urban futures? Staging for answers from Moin Nadej. What is the future for cities? Do you want to learn more about them? Do you want to know how others think about them? Do you want to be part of the conversation that this is the right place? Welcome to Moin Nadej's future for cities podcast. Today I will interview Moin Nadej, founder and CEO of Biotonomy. We will talk about his vision for the future of cities, natural psychos, responsibility, combining systems, voter recycling, urban efficiency and many more. So that's that with the proper introduction. Moin Nadej is founder and CEO of Biotonomy. For over 15 years he has designed award-winning green buildings in more than 20 countries. Buildings that make their own energy, collect and reuse water, handle their own waste and grow food. He brings together architecture, nature and engineering to create homes and infrastructure that give back more than they use. His work has been recognized by the United Nations, the government of Spain and Forbes. And with that, Moin, back up to the podcast. Thank you so much for that time. I highly appreciate your appearance on the podcast. Let's jump right in. What does the future of cities going to go? There's a lot to address. This is not one magical thing that will make our cities. And it's a lot of work. We have a lot of work. We really have went in the wrong direction, I would say. We've built our cities in a way that they're disrupting pretty much every cycle of the natural world. And of course, I don't believe this was done intentionally. I don't believe that there was an evil decision taken. But more just, we came to a point after the industrial revolution that we just made so much innovation that made speed possible. Just building at speed and building cheap. And so we started to build our cities fast and affordable without really thinking about what we're doing. Because every building that you build can last for 100 years. So that decision that you took will be there for 100 years. So I don't know if you're aware of that, but from a global perspective, if you look at it, the speed of we're building our cities today is every day, the expansion of all the cities around the world is the size of the city of pirates every day. So I don't think most people can even understand how fast we're building our cities. And every single decision that is being taken for every building, for every part, for every road is still the majority of them going against the natural cycles of nature, which means we're breaking the water cycle. The way we are behaving our city is that the cycle of the water, which when water comes from the sky, it needs to go underground. But the way we just cap the city, it doesn't go underground. It just goes out to the ocean. And this has caused a lot of problem. Everything from drought to the wildfires we're seeing now, to flooding. It's all based on one bad decision, which is capping the ground of the cities. So to answer your question, the future of the cities really need to be designed in a way that they are aligned with the natural cycles of the natural world, not because it's something important, according to our climate goal lab. Because if we don't do it, we just won't make it. People are lying because of all these weather events. Cities are losing money, actually, they never expect. It just doesn't make sense financially anymore to keep building like this. So we really need to build the future of our cities in a way that they're working for the natural cycles, not against them. Does that make sense? It does, although I have many questions, which is really good for the interview itself. Before we move to those questions, I would like to ask you to base our conversation. What does the city into you? More than what it means to me is like, why did we end up putting a lot of people and companies in one spot? Why didn't we just distribute everyone all over? Because of efficiency, just because the way we trade, the way business works today, it's just way more efficient if we are closer to each other. So I understand that logic. So I don't personally have opinion what the city means for me. I just see the logic behind that work. And it's a natural thing to try to be efficient. How do we make sure that the food, the supermarket is close to us. The offices people go to is close to us because we're also limited in technology. Maybe in the near future when technology is like drones, for example, becomes more available. The idea of having to be so close is not important anymore. Now we can expand and have more nature between us because our transportation allowed us to do that. But because the way our technology today is limited to cars that can only stay on the ground. So it just makes all the sense to be as dense and close as possible. So efficiency really is, I would say, the reason why our cities exist. Then of course, there's also the community behind that people used to get that they already have the whole social aspect as well, that is important. So I personally just don't have, I've never created an idea what does a city mean to me. I grew up in a dense, I grew up in Stockholm in a dense urban area, just always moving around public transportation. And already at that stage I started questioning a lot why are things the way they are. Why is it so isolated to everything else because it's like you have a city and then you have nature. It's very, in most places, it's very divided. But it's true that every city has something unique as well. When it comes to the culture and the history, it's beautiful, it's a beautiful thing to go and visit different cities. But the one thing they have in common today is really bad quality buildings, really bad quality streets. I'm all about finding ways of improving those. And we get back to those opportunities in improving our building stock, for example. But did you just say that efficiency is natural? If I look at myself, if I look at people around me, yes, I see that very natural in people, that people are always looking for ways in what they're doing to be more efficient, to be better at. Interesting, that's not my personal experience. I appreciate that you have this experience with people because that could be a very unique and a really good benchmark. They are living lives becoming more and more efficient. I'm saying this because neither people nor nature, necessarily in my understanding or in my experience, is becoming more and more efficient. We sometimes try, but that's not necessarily what is natural for people. That's why I was curious. If you just go back and 100 years, 50 years, and just look at how we used to move. We used to move by using our legs, and then we used to use the horses, and then we added a wagon to the horses, and then someone came up with a bicycle, someone turned that into a motorbike, then someone invented the car, and then someone invented the train, and then I came to the airplane. So what used to take years to move by feet is just happening in minutes now. So that's what if you look back from where we come from, wherever we are today, it's a lot based on just being more efficient. So I'm looking at it from that perspective, not on a personal level, just as humanity. We do have the aspiration of constantly growing and constantly improving when you look at it as a, and I think it's a good thing. I don't think it's a bad thing. The only thing is you can do that, you can grow in a very destructive way, you can grow in a very constructive way. I completely agree with you on that, but that humanity is trying to improve ourselves, and the way we live, and creativity is one of the biggest things we can lean upon. I would like to go back to the natural cycle, as you mentioned, as we are getting further and further away in cities from these natural cycles. cyclists, you highlighted water specifically. What are these natural cyclists are you talking about? Is it specifically just water or are there other natural cyclists you would like to highlight a spot of the city in the future? There's a lot of natural cyclists. I do mention water because it's so important and unfortunately it's getting very little attention. If you look at the conversation of sustainable green cities for the past decades it's been the majority about this important. I completely agree but there's no life without water and we don't understand water. That's what we understand energy. Well, so we talk about it but we don't understand water. Most designers from urban designers to architects don't understand water at all and it's not their fault. It's just the educational system. I've did many years of engineering and architecture in school and way we were taught about water is ridiculous. It's just ridiculous. We don't need a UI even understand. I haven't heard one person in this world be able to explain what water really is. Don't have a good understanding of it and we especially don't have an understanding of the cycles of it. That's why I come back to what I said earlier. When we have the ground of this city is like it's so destructive to what we're doing because the majority of the water that we consume is underground, right? We keep taking. We've learned how to take water from under the ground but we never learn how to put it back, right? So we keep taking it and every year it just goes into an emptier and because we cannot see it we don't understand how problematic it is. We have cities around the world thinking because they've emptied the water underneath the ground so fast that the city is moving downwards because of that and this is the linear thinking you take and you throw away, you take you throw away and if you don't rebuild the cities to keep filling the ground water you're going to come to various severe problems and we are what we're seeing now is nothing compared to what's about to come if we don't fix it. It takes time to refill these air prefers. So it's very important that we address it now. When it comes to the energy, when it comes to the pollution, what we're doing, I think solutions that exist today are very feasible. If we really go large scale on solar and renewable and out of that and pollute less and bring more innovation, we can really solve our air pollution and out of that but water still is very behind. It's very behind because most people are not aware of it. I meet with high decision makers from different cities around the world and I'm so shocked about how little they understand about good water management. There's a lot of people taking very dangerous decision for their cities still without understanding what water is and how it works. So that's the cycle of the water but then you have many other cycles. You have the wind. How the wind enters and move through a city, ancient cities used to respect that. They used to use it in a way to cool their cities naturally. So they would never block the sea front. They would always create corridors so the wind could enter deep into the city to cool the city. But what do we do today? We build at the coastal because there are more the most expensive plots. We build skyscrapers. What that does is when the wind, the cool breeze is trying to enter the city, we block that wind. So now our cities are overheating. The buildings are overheating because we simply didn't understand the cycle of how the wind works. So that's what the urban designers today, the fact that they allow us to build in those spots is because they don't have the understanding of the natural cycles. They have a very good understanding of the economic aspects of building those spots. In the short term, yes, you will make a lot of money. But in the long term, you would lose a lot of money because your cities are overheating and no one wants to come to your cities anymore. So you're losing all the tours. You're losing what's very important for your long-term finance. So that's one aspect as well. Another aspect of it is food. Food comes and goes in cycles. And if you look at how the human being is designed or all the creatures are designed for us to really function really good, we're supposed to eat what is in season. That's why every season, there's different fruits and vegetables and things produced because in August, nature knows what you should eat. And then in March, you should eat something else. It's designed like that. But the fact that our cities are now importing food from all of the world and you can buy a mango whenever you want, it's also not working within the cycles. If we would also respect that and the only providing what's in the cycles, people would eat that. You would also see a much more healthy population because when we bring things from long distance, we also need to add a lot of chemicals to them to make them last. And then we consume them and then we get sick and then we cannot go to work. And now, financially, it doesn't make sense because we have all these people that are working but they're positive times sick. And that's also not efficient. Interestingly, you haven't mentioned green spaces. Green spaces when we come back to the water cycles is a fundamental part of rebuilding natural waters. By putting asphalt wherever you tap, you don't allow the water to go under the ground. So you need to replace it with green. That's as simple as it gets because greenery absorbs the water, holds the water and then eventually let it go down. It's a fundamental part of future cities. But in many terms, in terms of the water cycle, but in terms of also reducing the temperatures and ensuring we have natural comfort in our cities. And so many other aspects as well, of course. So it's just because I take the greenery for granted in the future cities. Which is completely fair and hopefully it will be granted in the future of cities. You mentioned how architects urban planners should know more about these cycles, but due to our education, because I'm an architect, so I can also this digital architect, because I want to see more and better solutions from architecture. So the education itself doesn't provide us with the tools we need. Whose responsibility is to include these natural cycles into the future of cities or the current cities, because it will be lovely to include them into current cities. Is it the responsibility of the designer? Is it the responsibility of the place or a policy maker or decision maker and developer whose responsibility is to include the natural cycles? I have two way of answering this. I can answer this like the way it should be, or I can answer it like how reality is today. The way it should be, yes, it's like your parents, where your kids, where your parents should make sure that the basic understandings are set. The basic standards are set that when you grow up, you are kind to people. You don't molest people. So that should come from the, if we see the policy makers, the governments, as parents, they should set those standards for the city. We should make it very clear for all the developers who come to build in their city and say, "Hey, you need to be kind to nature." You cannot molest nature, which means that when you build your surface, you need to build the ground that can absorb the water, because that's very important for the, it's a condition you have to do it or else I won't allow you to build. So that would be the right answer. That's how it should be. But let's look at reality, okay? Our governments, our cities, they are just so complex that trying to get them to implement these policies at the rate that is needed is very complex. I wish we could say, "Yeah, we just put policies, but then the politics behind that, the lobbies behind have their own interests, it's very complex." So my reality answer would be that it's the freaking responsibility on every single developer, every single architect, every single home builder, everyone who is contributing to development is their responsibility to educate themselves and understand that they need to do the right thing. They shouldn't just follow the mask, because it's very clear that following the mask doesn't work, just pounding from profit, building low quality and cheap is bad. It's bad and there is a better way to do it, and there's a lot of people who have already demonstrated how you can do it. So it should be your responsibility to go and educate yourself. and something. It doesn't have to be perfect, at least use your next client, your next project, your next local developer, something that to get there. Because if we just wait for policies, it will take decades. But they both can happen at the same time, and they're important. Because I see this in our own projects. It's like a project we use. This just came naturally. It wasn't figured out. We did fight for many of our projects that no one wanted to give license. And eventually, once we got them, simple projects such as we wanted to reuse the waste water of a building to irrigate the entire green walls and the green roads. And no one wanted to give us license because it's a dangerous thing to do. There's no policies. There's no standards. Anyway, we did it. We did it. And when we did it, then the city came to us and say, Hey, this works. What if we would create a policy around this? What if we would create standards? So I believe more in that and doing things and then show people, Hey, look, this worked. And then you create that awareness. And then they come versus knocking, trying to knock the door of the government in the city with a 200 page report and be like, we must recycle water. I'm not saying that shouldn't be done. Whoever is going that way, I bow down for those people who really are pushing forward from that end. Then you have people like us who are just pushing it on the ground, building, showing real world and creating awareness like that. So it's like, you just have to approach it from all aspects. But the most important thing coming back to is doing. It's just executing, doing. We've developed this. It's very unfortunate, really. The whole sustainable development or sustainable construction, green cities. There's this culture of so much talking, so much events, so much Congress, so much conferences. A lot of reports, but very little actual real world projects. And I think that's what we need to change that ratio. We need to wave more real world projects. And then the reports need to come out of those real world problems. I love this. And I assume that this talk and thoroughly the election is accumulating the future of cities. But what are the three biggest fears or concerns regarding the future of cities for you? I come back to water. Again, water. I've worked. I had the opportunity of working in many different cities around the world and doing projects. And in the quality of water, people drink. It's part of it. It's really heartbreaking for us who live modern cities and we open our tap and we have access to clean water. The majority of people don't have that still. And we forget about it. We still think, but now it's also coming to the modern cities that where I live, they'll now shut the water. When we're in extreme drought, they shut the water. They make it illegal to irrigate green areas because there's not enough water. So it's becoming very clear. I live in a very severe droughted area so I can also tell you a real world that it's happening. So water is definitely number one, I would say. And number two is the heat as well. The amount of people who are dying from heat, you know, we it's like, more people are dying from heat than car accidents. That's how bad it is. Most people, but it's difficult because a car accident is like used to be and like someone gets hit by a car and die. It doesn't work like that. It gets to you slowly, especially old people, vulnerable people. It really makes them become weak. It's very difficult for them. And once again, not every building have air conditioning today. Not because I'm saying air conditioning is a good thing. Every building should have it. But like many cities still today, people don't have that. And their cities are getting like 45 degrees. So heat is becoming a huge problem because just the amount of surfaces of concrete and glass and steel that we've put in our cities are all just absorbing the heat and reflecting that back to our streets into the buildings. It's a huge problem. It's then evil circle about most people don't think is by putting more air conditioning. And the way air conditioning works, this is like most people don't understand this. Air conditioning doesn't cool your space. It just moves the heat. It takes it out of your room and then it puts it back into the city. So that hot air goes back to the city. So the more we cool our buildings, the more we heat our cities. So it's this evil circle that we created with the heat. And just as water with very few architects today know how to build buildings that can cool themselves naturally. Most of them are educated just to build a box and use an AC. And it's a huge problem. They are the one designing, as I mentioned before, something that's going to last for a hundred years. And that one design decision creates problems for the next hundred years. Do you have a sense or these two are big enough to continue the conversation? Maybe just to add another aspect to it is human well-being. This idea that we completely isolated, just removed nature so much from the city, the effect is having on human well-being. I think it's also beyond people's understanding because most of us, including me, we grew up in a city and we thought that is life. But our DNA, the majority of the human history, we've been living very close related to plants and the natural world. Our DNA is coded to function together with it. What they released, we need to inhale. Do you see that? That's the way it's designed. So we should not separate those. And it's not just oxygen, but it's also, they released certain substances that we need to read to improve our new system. Right? So it's really designed in a way for us to work together, for us to be able to stay strong and well. But because we've done this disconnection, so many people today are suffering mentally. And most of them don't even understand why. Most people I speak to, they think it's dead. And this has now become an actual thing to do. I need to go on vacation because I need to recharge myself. But where do people go when they go on vacation? It's also interesting. But often they go to nature, which is going somewhere there's mountains, there is beach, there is some nature activity, you go off many chances. And we need to recharge ourselves. And then we come back to the life in the city, which is completely disconnected. And then we get drained again. And then we have to go and find and recharge. It's ridiculous. It's not supposed to be like that. We need to design our cities that are constantly being recharged because the streets you walk into the offices, you go into the libraries, you go, they're all designed. It is always nature around you. It's just a natural thing. So this removing nature at the pace we have from the natural world. And it's so funny because so many people we do green buildings and we vegetation on the facade on the roof. And so many people, their first question is, what if there's bugs and insects in there? Does their first concern? There's bugs and is that question just do you understand what happens to this world? If there's no bugs and insects, full ecosystem collapses. It's thanks to them that the ecosystem is still working. You remove humans from the ecosystem world will thrive. The nature will thrive. So there's this fear, but there's bugs and insects everywhere. And every part you go to, they don't just attack you just because you showed up in the park. They don't have their life. So there's only this fear. What if I get attacked by a bug or bear an insect? It's like we're so disconnected that nature even has become a fear. This also takes time to change. It's people's mind is way more difficult than changing water cycles. And the technical aspects is always easy, but changing people's mind complex. So the third one is definitely human wellbeing. Such small fears and concerns. Now I would like to ask you to let's look at the other side of the same coin. So what are the three biggest opportunities regarding the future of cities? But good news is that the solutions are way easier than the problem. They're not complicated at all, not also financially either. They really make sense. You really implement these solutions that we talk about us bringing the water back, recycling the water. You can save a lot of money by doing that. These are not solutions that you implement and you make a lot. It's not like that. And then there are existing solutions. There are a lot of references of how to integrate nature in different ways. That's not about paying. Let's just destroy our cities and build them from scratch. No, that's just doesn't make sense either. So how can we take what all of the exists and improve it? And there's so many people, so many pioneers who have put their life into bringing solutions, that work, that exists, that have been implemented. in scale as well. There are people who have done projects where they've shown that you can treat the entire wastewater of a city by using plants. You don't have to use chemicals and energy to treat wastewater, so it exists. So all the opportunities are there. It's implemented in large scale. So it's just about now how do we educate people, architects, engineers, developers to replicate this. And this is why I'm so much into education, where we have our own academy program where we train architects and engineers and developers and just people who are passionate about this subject, about how to do it right, in a right way. So the opportunities today is that you can go and educate yourself about these things and implement. You have to start from scratch. You don't have to be like when I started, really, I felt alone because there was no one else around me who was really doing it, it failed so many times. I did so many projects where things lost, a little work, and failed, but I kept doing and doing until I figured out how to do it. And then there's so many people like me who have done that and they're willing to share it with other people and say, hey, just to come and learn and do it. So that's where the opportunity is that there are people who are sharing the solutions very openly and saying, hey, come and learn, come and do it. But still, I feel like most people are just waiting, rolling their thumbs and waiting to see the policies coming out, waiting to see their city taking action. No, don't wait. Opportunity right now is to take risk, is to be bold, to be that first person in your community, in your city, show something. So if you're passionate about green cities, just don't go on exhibitions about green cities. Go learn something, implement it in your city. Even if it's small, if it's two square meter of water, just demonstrate something and then get people to come together and be like, hey, how can we do four square meters? And when you have four square meters, you'll be like, hey, how can we do 20? How can we do 100? But don't just don't wait. Don't follow this whole crowd of talking about green cities. Need to vote. The opportunity is to do so. I love this. And I completely agree with you, especially because I believe that everybody has their own roles and responsibilities. They can take up in the city, regardless of where they are situated, what their expertise, what their job or role in the workplace. They can indeed take up these responsibilities and take up these, do a role, as you mentioned. You mentioned that you have learned so many things during the first half, maybe, of your professional journey. Is there a lesson which jumps to mind, which was the biggest one which came back to you and which taught you so much that it's still influencing your work today? I was an engineering and architecture school. Being was to work on some of the biggest construction projects in the world because I was always hungry for innovation. I wanted to know what are the big guys doing, what innovation are their use. So I went and I applied for jobs in the biggest construction projects in the world at that time. And then I got hired, and I was so excited. I was like, yes, I'm going to work with innovation. I'm going to end I went there. And I was so disappointed. It was just once again building fast, building cheap, adding corners, throwing sewage out, overheating the buildings, et cetera. But when I left that, because I didn't believe it in it anymore, and I started to look for more constructive ways of building, I started to learn something that I was completely not educated in, which was how to combine all the systems to work together. Because when you go into architecture and engineering school, you learn that water is one system. Heat is another system, cooling is another system. So sewage is another system. They have nothing to do with the chat. They're like completely separate. So that's how you learn them separately. And then you come to the real world, and that's exactly how it is. So you have one person designing their building, then you have another group of people engineering it, then you have another group of people building it who completely don't agree with how it was designed because it was too conceptual. And then when it comes to building it within that, you have some people putting the pipes and dealing with the water, you have another people doing cooling, another people doing the heat, so separated. Like nothing is connected, right? Imagine if your body was built like that. So that's what we're doing to building. We're not building them as one ecosystem where things are connected, right? So when I started to really learn how to use natural solutions to heat and cool buildings, natural solution to treat wastewater, natural solution to harvest water, I started to learn that they're all connected. They're all connected. And so this is the one thing I will never go back to. Like every project we do, we always address that holistic. How do we design it in a way that the heating and the cooling and the water recycling, they all make sound just to give you a very practical example, right? So when we treat water, we normally build greenhouses where we use plants. So the shower water goes to greenhouses where you also have food production, right? And then that greenhouse, we also learn that when you integrate those into structures, you reduce the heat loss of the building because they work as a buffer space of microclimate, right? So now the greenhouse and the water recycling and the food production has a relationship to the heating and the cooling system of the building, right? So then when we're taking design decisions like that, because we're engineering and designing it ourselves, we can make sure everything is put together so it works. So this is the one thing that I think is very fundamental in from a design perspective to change. And this is the one thing I will always stick to and never go back to the all the way. - That don't fling duct about water recycling in urban settings also. And I'm curious, what would you say to people who are a bit about water recycling? So for example, would you go to the end of the spectrum to drink recycled water? Which can be a bit challenging for people to mentally job over the order that this is recycled water and I don't know what's in it. So I'm curious how you would address the recycled water system as what how we can recycle the water, what end should we go until with recycling water and how would you convince people that recycling water is indeed not dangerous. It can be very useful and it is very beneficial for us humans even in cities. - I look at the mindset people today, the developers today and what I always suggest is just trying to be in the next reach of their mindset, trying to present something that is five steps I have. So because they mentally need to grow step by step, right? So right now, what we're advocating and what we're doing in all our problems is we're reusing the wastewater for irrigation and for flushing toilets, right? This is all early life. I can convince the developers to do this and they feel stuck. But if I go and tell them, hey, recycling water, wastewater, and drinking it, it's oh my god, like absolutely no. So I'm not even going in those conversations because I don't think humanity is ready for it. Do I believe the technology exists? I know about the exists. They're already doing that, it exists. Not advocating for it because just the mindset is that ready for it. But when you recycle 100% of a wastewater coming out of building, urbanization, a city, it's a lot of water, it's no joke. Because if you understand the difference of black water, which water coming out of toilet and gray water, which is water coming out of showers and things, 80% of the water coming out from your buildings is water from showers and sinks. It's not really polluted water. It's super easy to treat. So that's almost 80% of the wastewater is that. So if you're really afraid of black water because you've built this mindset that biology cannot treat it even though nature does it all the time, then just do that, just treat gray water, which is 80% of the wastewater. And you're doing that, you are saving yourself a lot of money because why? It's financially stupid what you're doing. I'm sorry, but it's you, it's all right. You go to the grocery store and then when you're going to, you come home, you're going to put in the fridge, 80% of the food you throw away right away makes no sense. Because what you do is you keep paying for buying water to irrigate your green areas. If you have communities and hotels that are spending over 100,000 euros in just irrigation, you can just install a system that cost you 30,000,000 euros and then for the rest of your time, have free irrigation water. And it's like 100 up to millions in euros in savings. Like why would you not do that? The technology exists. It's starting. you just financially stupid, I don't mean to offend anyone, but it's just to just put a perspective on how we behave. So, and then that's for irrigation, and most people don't understand the irrigation, a huge part of water consumption. And then you have homes, so if you reuse the water just to flush your toilet, which you can feel safe, you're not going to drink this water, it's just to flush your toilet. You reduce your water consumption by 30%, you save money, why would you want to do that? Why use fresh water, and this is where it gets rid of serious, why use clean and drinkable water to flush your toilet? When still the majority of the world don't have access to clean drinking water, like how are we thinking in terms of more? Muin, I could ask you for hours about just water recycling and how we could cool beyond just this first step of using gray water for irrigation or toilets. But I want to be respectfully over time, so what is your role in establishing the future of cities? Look, what I'm trying to do is to pave the road, right? In this unknown terrain, I can clearly see where we need to go, but there's no road in front of me, right? It's just a terrain, there is everything, I have to cross harsh legs, I have to go, I have to drill through rocks and mountains. Just every day, I keep adding one more block on the pavement, so when the next generation is coming behind me, it's just a no-brage. Getting into this field, being able to make good money, which I think is very important for things to scale up, making green buildings, good business. Today is very difficult, it's very challenging if you come into this industry and you have no experience, and it's very challenging. So my objective is just to help as many architects, engineers, urban designers, or just people in general who believe in this and wants us to get there. A lot of us are seeing it, it's very clear, it's not rocket science what we're trying to do to build healthy cities, people are doing good, are feeling good, not constantly struggling. It's that to see so many people struggling all the time, just to be able to live a healthy life. Today it's become very difficult, and we often learn today, social media, and social media, our children are there, and there's so much noise, and there's so much pollution there, and what not. But who's blaming our cities? They're walking around in cities, and they learn way more about brands and logos than products and animals. And of course they're always going to be in their head when the city is designed like that. They're always going to want that next brand, and they're not even able to pay attention to other lives, because it doesn't exist. If you put a child in the natural world, it's just going to run around and look at bugs and butterflies and bees and leaves and see different colors and learn. It's going to be outside its mind, because it's going to pay attention to life. But in the city, we built an environment, it doesn't make sense to pay attention to outside, because outside looks bad. And so that's a reflection of what we create in people's minds today, but it's empty, it's great. So why don't we blame our cities? Why do we constantly blaming tech companies, that it's their fault, while we keep building the cities the same way? Yes, we, it's architects, engineers, developers, urban planners, who are a huge part, we have a huge role in responsibility in human well-being, but we're not understanding that. And we're being way too careful in our project, we're being the way to eliminate ourselves, because no one else is doing it. So we also want to play this safe car. It's not the right thing to do. If something is wrong, you should, especially if it's your occupation, you should speak out, at least speak out a lot, and then partner. Thank you so much, Moen. And please keep up this good word, because we do need to behave throughout for the next generation. And regardless of how far you are able to reach, it's very important that at least you started to be spinning the road. Do you have any closing comments or requests for the audience besides the ones you already asked of the audience itself? I repeat myself now, but I will do it because I think it's important, and I think it's important to remind people over and over about being bold and being brave. It's unfortunate that we've built a culture where the mistake is seen as something bad, failing is seen as something bad. While I would encourage people to fail, I would encourage people to do a mistake, don't follow the crowd, and think that you should always just come out that everything is perfect and you don't fail. That will limit you from taking risks, from daring to do something deep inside, everyone knows what we need to do. There's a builder inside of every person. Really, there is, because you look at every animal, they build their own nest. It's like how nature is designed. Every bird is a build. So that exists in our DNA. We all care about how our homes are built. We care about how our cities are built. But don't really limit yourself, but I'm just, I don't know, I'm just, I work in a supermarket. I have nothing to do with this. Now it's not true what it means a bad building is because we live in it. So speak out and do something about it, even if you're not an architect or engineer, but eventually you might build your home, but do it correctly. Do it in a way that inspires people. Don't be like, no, I'm just going to play the safe card, and then just going to do the typical gray box that everyone does because that's more safe. Then what did you contribute to the world? We all have to take a little bit on mystic and failing, but what we need to remember is that is what adds to the overall knowledge of the world. If we all wait for one person to fail, no one's going to want to do that. So it's important that we all go out there and fail and are bold and take risk and do something and then tell people, hey, don't do it like this because this doesn't work. You should do it like that. That's already done trying to save the world. You're not going to be able to save the world nearly a month, but the contribution that we can do for going in that direction, that's what matters. So believing yourself, and when you get involved into it, don't be afraid. Don't give up. It's going to come times where you're going to question yourself, you're going to look around you and you're going to feel stupid because everyone else is doing it the typical way. You're that one person who are trying to do a difference, and then you're going to have hard times because pipe is going to break and things are not going to work and it's going to smell. It's such I've done all those mistakes. You're going to question yourself, and be like, am I doing the right thing? Do I remind yourself you are because in that other day, this is how I see it. If you do what you love, it's good. You should do what you love, but the world needs people to do what is needed. I can also go and focus on doing what I love, which, okay, I love what I do, but I also do parts that are not so romantic, but the world needs. So we need to change that. If you don't like what you're doing, that's bad for you. It's stupid. You shouldn't spend your time on doing so. If you love what you're doing, okay, good for you. But if you really want to contribute, do what's needed. Thank you so much, Moin. Thank you. It is really interesting to hear from Moin about his advocacy for the importance of water in urban systems, not to mention his approach to water recycling. Darren Flynn advocated for more water recycling in cities in episode 442. You can find out more about Moin online, all the links are in the show notes. What was the most interesting part for you? What questions do the rights regarding Moins approach to the future of cities? What have you learned from this interview? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities on the WTF4Cities.com website where the transcripts and journals are available. You can also subscribe on the website, not to miss and new episodes and leave some feedback. If you would like to support the podcast, you can even find more information on the website about the WTF book and Patreon. I hope this was an interesting interview for you as well and let's start tuning in. What is the future for cities of guests?