I attended this interesting workshop at the University of Debrecen, Hungary, with a presentation on material stock transfers between natural and urban ecosystems. I have spent wonderful days attending this extremely interesting, nice and warm workshop on metabolism at the Faculty of Economics and Business. The event was organized by István Kuti, CSc, Dr. Mihály Dombi, Dr. Andrea Bauerné Gáthy and Dr. Andrea Karcagi-Kováts.  Thank you very much for all your efforts to make the stay pleasant and warm. After this nice experience, I re-assure my preference for small, well-focused scientific meetings, rather than large fancy international conferences.

I have presented an ongoing research on the metabolism of ecosystems entitled: The transformation of the Patagonian steppe in bourgeois architecture: a socio-ecological system of surplus appropriation. Basically what I am trying to do is to advance our metabolic understanding of ecosystems behavior, paying attention to dynamics of stocks and overcoming current nature/society dichotomies. Thus, I am not directly interested in net material exchanges, but rather in understanding how specific metabolic inputs they switch and change along metabolic chains to be accumulated in the form of urban development. The main objective is to bridge a conceptual connection between ecosystems ecology, metabolism, and urbanization. For that aim, I am using the city of Punta Arenas in southern Patagonia as an urban laboratory, where such metabolic inter-linkages appear more clearly due to remoteness and geographical isolation. Here is the video of my presentation. Full article to come soon, so stay tuned!