Embodying circular economy transition as a sustainable city concept, circularity in cities is increasingly the subject of policy innovations, urban strategies, and research & development agendas. It seems evident that a circular city should include more than the sum or multiplication of urban circular economies. Nevertheless, prevailing discourses remain till today business focused, and how circular economy creates economic, social, and environmental resilience in cities has yet to be explored. This paper conceptualizes the notion of urban circularity. It introduces an analytical framework sorting existing circularity concepts that are based on design and planning characteristics. Adopting comparative case study research on four contemporary forward-looking spatial representations of 'circular' places, this paper articulates their circularity interpretation. Demonstrating how diverging sustainability framings and political positions are embedded within the studied spatial representations, this paper aims to bring clarity in contemporary circular city approaches for policymakers as well as for spatial practitioners. The paper concludes with an agenda for multi-perspective and multi-dimensional circular city design, which is anchored in place specific and multi-scalar transition relations. It suggests urban landscape design as a disciplinary field to act as a pivot in transdisciplinary circularity design and research.
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The design research presented here uses urban landscape design to attempt to reframe sustainable resource management. Urban metabolism projects generally originate in industrial ecology, emphasizing performance-oriented technical and entrepreneurial approaches. 1 However, industrial ecology approaches experience difficulties in making meaningful connections to social, economic and spatial contexts. Building on landscape architecture analysis and design methods such as mapping and systemic design, this article will highlight urban landscape design's capacity to reframe questions stemming from the urban metabolism model through the production of future imaginaries. Using the Belgian Central Limburg region's transition into a circular economy as a design exercise, this paper suggests that urban landscape design's constructivist approach 2 has the potential to embed social and economic dimensions in applying urban metabolism. Operating 'from within' its intervention field, urban landscape design potentially facilitates transdisciplinary dialogues in urban metabolism design research. Keywords urban landscape design / urban metabolism / circular economy / systemic design / Belgium Designing urban metabolisms With the increasing complexity of urban growth in the twentieth century, the integration of urbanism, engineering and planning became more and more difficult. Nowadays, subsurface utilities are typically conceived by engineers, while planners and urbanists design the urban spaces above the ground. Simultaneously, the urban use of natural resources became more and more wasteful and unsustainable. 3 The idea of the city as an 'urban metabolism' resulted from a rising awareness of natural resource scarcity and the challenges associated with this. The term 'urban metabolism', however, suffers from disciplinary fields being disconnected, while pushing their boundaries to fit the term to their particular field. 4 Instead of pushing the boundaries of separate disciplines, it would be better to find ways in which these disciplines can work in an integrated way. According to the 1956 Urban Design Conference, disciplines from which knowledge should be included in urban design should be planning, landscape architecture and engineering. 5 The Harvard Graduate School of Design's Grounding Metabolism book, 6 for example, acknowledges the influence of both environmental engineering 7 and critical approaches to urban metabolism, originating in political ecology and urban geography, 8 in the urban design discourse. The book calls for a meaningful connection to more socially, politically and ecologically viable models of urbanism. 9 Urban metabolism and sustainable urban development Urban metabolism serves as a framework for describing and analysing material and energy exchanges between cities and their environment. 10 It originates from the environmental sciences and was described in 1965 by engineer Abel Wolman in 'The Metabolism of Cities', his article on the deterioration of air and water qualities in American cities. 11 In spat...
In recent years, cities have revealed themselves as being prominent actors in the circular economy transition. Besides supporting and initiating urban projects catalyzing circularity, cities are looking for monitoring tools that can make their progress towards circularity visible. Adopting Leuven’s pilot project for a building materials bank as a case study, this paper notes the particular challenges and opportunities in the pilot project to assess its progress and impact, in combination with gathering data for overall circular city monitoring purposes. Firstly, the paper names tensions between the “messy” transition process from policy ambitions to implementation and the question of data and monitoring. Secondly, the paper identifies relevant dimensions and scales to evaluate progress and impacts of a building materials bank, drawing from its development process. Thirdly, it proposes guidelines to monitor and evaluate circular city projects from the bottom up, combining quantitative indicators with guiding questions in a developmental evaluation. The analysis serves a critical reflection, distills lessons learned for projects contributing to circular cities and feeds a few concluding policy recommendations. The case study serves as an example that, in order to move beyond the tensions between circularity monitoring and actual circular city project development, monitoring instruments should simultaneously interact with and feed the circularity transition process. Therefore, dedicated data governance driven by enhanced stakeholder interactions should be inscribed in transition process guidance. Bottom-up projects such as a building materials bank provide opportunities to do this.
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