A Materials Bank for Circular Leuven: How to Monitor ‘Messy’ Circular City Transition Projects

Abstract

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.

The Development of Spatial Circularity Discourse in Japan: Ecomodernist, Territorialised, or Both? The Story of Onomichi’s Wastescapes

“…Recently, various publications have assessed implementation designs at local levels [46] or have described tools for CE design [47], approaches that local governments have taken [48] and monitoring systems [41,49,50], though these have mostly focused on European or Chinese cases. An interesting group of publications has recently discussed territorial approaches to circularity, mostly among French and Italian communities [3,14,51,52].…”

“…Please refer to the recent reviews [51,52,60] for a very robust overview of the French and Italian traditions and schools and of how circularity is integrated in them. Some of the more recent research by Marin [6,14,50] and Barles [72], scholars whose work influenced us in our studies on circular cities and territories, is rooted in ideas of territorial ecology and the French school of territory studies.…”

Uncovering the Holistic Pathways to Circular Cities—The Case of Alberta, Canada

“…The four circularity agendas can be seen as four dimensions between which a balance must be sought, depending on contextual factors. However, using different case studies, Marin et al [72] illustrated that circular cities are often imagined through one dominant agenda. For example, Masdar City is an excellent example of optimising flows [24]; however, it is built with new materials in a desert and envelops many investment costs concerning environmental and economic resources without the contextualisation of the flows.…”

Spatial clustering of waste reuse in a circular economy: A spatial autocorrelation analysis on locations of waste reuse in the Netherlands using global and local Moran’s I

“…Although there is no consensus on its definition (Kirchherr et al, 2017), a commonly adopted notion of CE is keeping materials and products performing at their highest application level for as long as possible, while reducing environmental impacts and being aware of environmental trade-offs. CE has also been put forward as an alternative economic paradigm that stays within planetary boundaries and is socially just (Marin et al, 2020). The study of circular economy was popularized by the fields of industrial ecology, industrial design, and business management; and examined the circularity of materials, products, and companies (Bocken et al, 2016;Kalmykova et al, 2018;Bakker et al, 2019;Hollander et al, 2017).…”