The circular city is emerging as new concept and form of practice in sustainable urban development. This is a response to the complex and pressing challenges of urbanization, as highlighted in the New Urban Agenda (NUA). The concept of a “circular city” or “circular city-region” derives from the circular economy model applied in the spatial territorial dimension. It can be associated with the concept of a “self-sustainable” regenerative city, as stated in paragraph n.71 of the NUA. This paper aims to develop an extensive form of “screening” of circular economy actions in emerging circular cities, focusing on eight European historic port cities self-defined as “circular”. The analysis is carried out as a review of circular economy actions in the selected cities, and specifically aims to identify the key areas of implementation in which the investments in the circular economy are more oriented, as well as to analyze the spatial implications of the reuse of buildings and sites, proposing a set of criteria and indicators for ex-ante and ex-post evaluations and monitoring of circular cities. Results show that the built environment (including cultural heritage), energy and mobility, waste management, water management, industrial production (including plastics, textiles, and industry 4.0 and circular design), agri-food, and citizens and communities can be adopted as strategic areas of implementation of the circular city model in historic cities, highlighting a lack of indicators in some sectors and identifying a possible framework for “closed” urban metabolism evaluation from a life-cycle perspective, focusing on evaluation criteria and indicators in the (historic) built environment.
Abstract:After the 2008 crisis, smart sustainable development of port areas/cities should be developed on the basis of specific principles: the synergy principle (between different actors/systems, in particular the socio-cultural and economic system), the creativity principle and the circularization principle. The Historic Urban landscape (HUL) approach becomes the guarantee that the transition toward the smart city development model is based on specific local cultural resources, and not only on technological innovations. In other words, the eco-town/eco-city strategy becomes culture-led. It stimulates places as spatial "loci" for implementing synergies and circularization processes. Without new evaluation tools and a widespread "evaluation culture" the risks in implementing HUL are very high.
As the world continues to urbanize, identifying and implementing new urban development models and strategies is necessary to face sustainable development challenges. To this end, the circular economy model can be implemented in cities in order to operationalize and achieve human sustainable development managing simultaneously, in a systemic perspective, the social inequalities issue and the ecological and economic crisis. Today there are many cities that are defining themselves as a “circular city” but, to date, a clear definition of this does not exist. In the transition towards the circular city, tools (such as evaluation, governance, financial, business tools) play a fundamental role. The aim of this paper is (after an analysis of the concept of the circular city and its implementation, starting from literature, official documents and reports) to identify and analyze tools for implementing the circular city model. In particular, a set of indicators to assess (positive and/or negative) impacts of projects and initiatives of the circular city agenda is identified.
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