Environmental valuation and the city perspectives towards the circular economy

2021 ◽  
pp. 325-349
Author(s):  
Maria Rosa Trovato ◽  
Salvatore Giuffrida
Keyword(s):  
Circular Economy ◽  
Environmental Valuation ◽  
The City

scholarly journals Urban Living Labs, Circular Economy and Nature-Based Solutions: Ideation and Testing of a New Soil in the City of Turin Using a Multi-stakeholder Perspective

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grazia Sveva Ascione ◽  
Federico Cuomo ◽  
Nicole Mariotti ◽  
Laura Corazza
Keyword(s):  
Circular Economy ◽  
Stakeholder Management ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Green Roofs ◽  
Exploratory Research ◽  
Urban Living ◽  
Natural Systems ◽  
Living Labs ◽  
Multi Stakeholder ◽  
The City

AbstractIn the attempt to foster circular economy (CE), cities are increasingly adopting urban living labs (ULLs) as sites of co-production aimed at testing alternative solutions based on the reuse of products, reduction of consumption and recycling of materials. Taking this perspective, our study adopts an exploratory research design to discover the pragmatic implications emerging from a case study. The City of Turin joined proGIreg, a European project that entails the regeneration of former industrial districts by means of nature-based solutions (NBS). Ranging from aquaponics to green roofs, seven NBS have been experimented in Turin, which rely on the use of natural systems to tackle social, economic and environmental challenges efficiently and sustainably. Among them, the most promising is related to the production and test of the ‘new soil’, a blend obtained by mixing earth materials coming from construction sites with compost, zeolites and mycorrhizae. The case herein presented is interesting to analyse for the multi-stakeholder management setting used, where public institutions, private companies, research institutions, citizens and associations collaborated in the co-creation and testing phase of the NBS. Consequently, the data collected through participant observation and direct interviews allow researchers to describe multi-stakeholders’ dynamics and how they work. Thus, this paper narrates a micro-contextual experience while providing a critique. Results include an analysis of the unique combination of different stakeholders, which strongly impacted on the management and the effectiveness of the entire project. By consequence, the paper offers both theoretical contributions to the relational branch of stakeholder theory and practical evidence in demonstrating the importance of the relational branch of the theory over a more traditional transactional view.

scholarly journals A Framework for Implementing and Tracking Circular Economy in Cities: The Case of Porto

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1813 ◽  
Author(s):  
António Cavaleiro de Ferreira ◽  
Francesco Fuso-Nerini
Keyword(s):  
Economic System ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Circular Economy ◽  
Research Gaps ◽  
Meso Level ◽  
Population Research ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Significant Barrier ◽  
The City

Circular economy (CE) is an emerging concept that contrasts the linear economic system. This concept is particularly relevant for cities, currently hosting approximately 50% of the world’s population. Research gaps in the analysis and implementation of circular economy in cities are a significant barrier to its implementation. This paper presents a multi-sectorial and macro-meso level framework to monitor (and set goals for) circular economy implementation in cities. Based on literature and case studies, it encompasses CE key concepts, such as flexibility, modularity, and transparency. It is structured to include all sectors in which circular economy could be adopted in a city. The framework is then tested in Porto, Portugal, monitoring the circularity of the city and considering its different sectors.

Building Small Worlds in Urban Spaces

2020 ◽  
pp. 260-282
Author(s):  
Barbara Bennett Woodhouse
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Historically Black ◽  
Circular Economy ◽  
Children And Youth ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
At Risk Children ◽  
Collaborative Community ◽  
The City

Chapter twelve calls for a renewal of the “small is beautiful” movement and explores how the benefits of growing up in a village can be recreated in urban settings. The author presents E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, and its relationship to contemporary concepts, such as sustainability and the circular economy. that focus on sustaining human-scaled communities rather than on growing the GDP. The author describes and compares two initiatives that mobilize the strength of collaborative community to benefit at risk children and youth. The first is set in the city of Naples, in southern Italy, where a parish priest named Antonio Loffredo tapped the energy and aspirations of young people to build a collaborative community cooperative in an inner city neighbourhood called La Sanita’, as an alternative to the lure of organized crime. The second is the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), founded in the historically black neighbourhood of New York City by Geoffrey Canada, to prove that black children, given a fair start, could achieve the American dream. While similar in many ways, each initiative was shaped by and reflects the macrosystemic values of the surrounding culture.

scholarly journals Understanding and Managing Vacant Houses in Support of a Material Stock-Type Society—The Case of Kitakyushu, Japan

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 5363
Author(s):  
Wendy Wuyts ◽  
Raphael Sedlitzky ◽  
Masato Morita ◽  
Hiroki Tanikawa
Keyword(s):  
Circular Economy ◽  
Gis Analysis ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Patterns ◽  
Material Management ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
The Social ◽  
Management Perspective ◽  
Stock Type ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

From a sustainable material management perspective, vacant houses represent material stock and still have potential in the circular economy. This article addresses two aspects of understanding and managing vacant houses: the difficulty of understanding their spatial and temporal patterns and the management of the social costs behind the phenomenon of vacant houses. These aspects are approached by combining a 4D GIS analysis with expert interviews and additional qualitative tools to assess the spatial and temporal dimension of vacant houses. Furthermore, this manuscript presents a tool to estimate the obsolete dwelling material stock distribution within a city. The case of the city of Kitakyushu demonstrates the relationship that exists between the historical trajectories of housing norms and standards, such as comfort, cleanliness, safety, and convenience, and the dynamics of the built material stock and demography for three selected neighbourhoods. The results show that the more locked-in a district is in terms of “obsolete norms and codes”, the more likely it is that the obsolete stock is dead, and consequently, urban mining should be considered. The article concludes that a revisiting of the norms and standards of convenience and other domains is one of the prerequisites of the transition toward a circular built environment and the prevention of obsolete stock accumulation.

scholarly journals Circular Economy for Food Policy: The Case of the RePoPP Project in The City of Turin (Italy)

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 6078
Author(s):  
Franco Fassio ◽  
Bianca Minotti
Keyword(s):  
Circular Economy ◽  
Food Policy ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Problems And Solutions ◽  
New Business ◽  
Food Policies ◽  
New Research ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

Circular economy for food (CE) and food policies (FP) are two emerging but already prominent research areas, particularly when talking about the cities of the future. This paper analyzes the dynamics between these two fields of research, starting from review articles and the analysis of a case study, underlying the fundaments that FP and CE share. In particular, this paper focuses on using circular economy (CE) indicators and strategies to shape urban food policies (FP) to create a new business and political model towards sustainability. It introduces four converging perspectives, emerging from the literature, and analyzes how they have been integrated in the case study RePoPP (Re-design Project of Organic waste in Porta Palazzo market), a circular project born from the FP of the City of Turin (Italy). RePoPP is indeed a multi-actor project of urban circular food policies against food waste, which demonstrates how a circular approach can be the turning point in the creation of new food policies. This article wants to define for the first time a new research framework called “circular economy for food policy”, along with its characteristics: the application of a systemic approach and CE to problems and solutions, the need for a transdisciplinary and integrated project design for the 9R (responsibility, react, reduce, reuse, re-design, repair, recover, recycle, and rot), the use of food as a pivot of cross-sectoral change, and a new form of collaborative and integrated governance.

Reclaiming the Circular Economy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manisha Anantharaman
Keyword(s):  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Circular Economy ◽  
Green Growth ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Informal Recycling ◽  
Sustainability Strategy ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
National Governments ◽  
The City ◽  
Indian Cities

Circular economy is a global sustainability strategy pursued by national governments and multinational corporations looking to reconcile ecological concerns with economic growth imperatives. It also finds expression in informal work and community-based initiatives in cities across Europe and Asia. As sites that bring together state and corporate-led initiatives with everyday circular practices and arrangements, the city is fertile ground to examine the environmental politics of the circular economy. Drawing on fieldwork examining informal recycling work in Indian cities, the author argues that in an eagerness to realize the “win-win” sustainability solutions that circular economy promises to businesses and the state, the actual socio-spatial work practices such as waste picking, sorting, and repair, which comprise resource circularity, are ignored. Attempts at establishing circular cities are undermined by competing urban sustainability agendas, the lack of recognition of informal expertise, and the fundamental contradiction between accumulative and redistributive goals. Reclaiming the circular economy from green growth will require transformational politics and grassroots involvement and resisting growth in favor of equity and ecological reparation.

scholarly journals Infrastructuring the Circular Economy

Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 1805 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Nogueira ◽  
Weslynne Ashton ◽  
Carlos Teixeira ◽  
Elizabeth Lyon ◽  
Jonathan Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Circular Economy ◽  
Industrial Ecology ◽  
System Level ◽  
Farmers Markets ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
The City

The circular economy (CE), and its focus on the cycling and regeneration of resources, necessitates both a reconfiguration of existing infrastructures and the creation of new infrastructures to facilitate these flows. In urban settings, CE is being realized at multiple levels, from within individual organizations to across peri-urban landscapes. While most attention in CE research and practice focuses on organizations, the scale and impact of many such efforts are limited because they fail to account for the diversity of resources, needs, and power structures across cities, consequently missing opportunities for adopting a more effective and inclusive CE. Reconfiguring hard infrastructures is necessary for material resource cycling, but intervening in soft infrastructures is also needed to enable more inclusive decision-making processes to activate these flows. Utilizing participatory action research methods at the intersection of industrial ecology and design, we developed a new framework and a model for considering and allocating the variety of resources that organizations utilize when creating value for themselves, society, and the planet. We use design prototyping methods to synthesize distributed knowledge and co-create hard and soft infrastructures in a multi-level case study focused on urban food producers and farmers markets from the City of Chicago. We discuss generalized lessons for “infrastructuring” the circular economy to bridge niche-level successes with larger system-level changes in cities.

scholarly journals Conceptualizing Core Aspects on Circular Economy in Cities

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 7549
Author(s):  
Elena Simina Lakatos ◽  
Geng Yong ◽  
Andrea Szilagyi ◽  
Dan Sorin Clinci ◽  
Lucian Georgescu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Circular Economy ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Innovation Policy ◽  
Transition Phase ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Framework Model ◽  
Urban Level ◽  
Niche Concept ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The City

Currently, there are many different interpretations in the literature of what a circular economy is and how it functions. As cities are still facing challenges to become fully sustainable, the need for a comprehensive analysis of how the circular economy can be implemented in urban areas is increasing. This article aims at outlining circular cities by their key characteristics and to further explore and provide a framework for fostering circularity at the city level. In order to achieve this goal, we performed a systematic review and analyzed key papers published in the field of circular economy to determine how circular economy practices form circular cities. We discovered that cities play a focal role in facilitating the transition towards circularity through the closing of the loops, recirculation, technical innovation, policy elaboration and citizens’ support. However, city policymakers are still uncertain about how a circular city looks like and what its purpose is, as views are ranging from a strategic ambition to a niche concept of a smart city. Such uncertainty brings challenges, especially in the transition phase that many cities are in at the moment. This further implies that circular economy applied at the urban level still needs effort and innovation to successfully pass the transition phase from the linear economy. Therefore, lastly, we developed a framework model that can be adapted in other cities to facilitate their transition to circular cities.

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