Transitioning towards a circular built environment and turning waste into resources have become one of the new sustainability paradigms today. However, a circular transition can be considered a ‘wicked problem’. The multiple dimensions and scales of the circular transition and its substantial spatial implications fit well into the planning approach of Geodesign. The Horizon 2020 funded project “Resource Management in the periurban Areas - Going beyond Urban Metabolism (REPAiR)” implemented an innovative Geodesign approach. Moreover, it explored its capability to support spatial decision-making processes for the circular economy transition of the built environment within urban planning practices. This article aims to understand to what extent a process of Geodesign, which is conducted with the support of a digital tool and a Living Lab approach, can support the creation of localised circular economy strategies and foster the circular economy transition in cities and territories. The analysis explores and compares the results of three European cases -Amsterdam, Hamburg and Naples. It considers the kind of data input required to run the process in every phase, the stakeholders involved and their typology, the specific urban or territorial, planning and governance scales of analysis, and the final output definition after the Geodesign process implementation. The approach outputs constitute a decision support system for easing negotiations between local actors regarding the circularity strategies to implement. The findings reveal an intertwinement between different forms of knowledge included in the process, ranging from sustainability to governance and design, and the actors engaged in planning a circularity transition spatially. However, even using similar starting data, the local information and the starting conditions strongly influence the process and the types of strategies elaborated in each case.@en

Implementing a circular economy in cities has been proposed by policy makers as a potential solution for achieving sustainability in the construction sector. One strategy that has gained interest by both policy makers and companies is to develop “circular construction hubs”: locations that collect, store, and redistribute waste as secondary resources. However, there is limited literature taking a spatially explicit view, identifying the spatial parameters that could affect the locations of hubs both for now and in the future. This study therefore aims to categorize different types of circular hubs for the construction industry, collect spatial parameters required for finding suitable locations for each type of circular hub, and translate the spatial parameters into a list of data and spatial analysis methods that could be used to identify potential future locations. The study used the Netherlands as a case study, extracting spatial parameters from two sources: Dutch governmental policy documents on circular economy and spatial development and interviews with companies operating circular hubs. Four types of circular construction hubs were identified: urban mining hubs, industry hubs, local material banks, and craft centers. The spatial parameters were extracted for each type of hub from four perspectives: resources (such as material type, business model), accessibility (such as mode and scale of transportation), land use (such as plot size, land use), and socio-economic (such as labor availability). The parameters were then translated into a list of spatial data and analysis methods required to identify future locations of circular construction hubs.@en

The Netherlands aims to achieve climate resilience and water robustness by 2050, necessitating an interdisciplinary approach to spatial planning due to the complex nature of climate adaptation. A critical need exists for subsurface data, especially for interventions related to underground elements like water storage, soil infiltration, and subsurface management. This need became particularly relevant when the Dutch government adopted 'water and soil guiding' as a core principle for spatial planning in 2022 (Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Waterstaat, 2022). Translating this principle into practical solutions is complex, requiring detailed knowledge of subsurface characteristics. The absence of such information can lead to issues like groundwater contamination and high-maintenance parks.

Despite the necessity for interdisciplinary and subsurface data, organizational, technological, and institutional barriers hinder the use of information models and standards in climate adaptation design. Currently, even though there are many subsurface models and standards available, the Netherlands lacks an integrated approach linking subsurface information models with local climate adaptation design. It also lacks an example of the use of standards to exchange planning information containing climate adaptation design interventions.

This research explores how subsurface data models can enhance urban climate adaptation design. By assessing existing models, it identifies data requirements for effective interventions based on Dutch policy documents. The paper introduces CLIMACAT, an online tool integrating subsurface information models and other crucial data in one online catalogue following FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data principles, tested in four Utrecht neighborhoods.

The findings emphasize the importance of integrating subsurface information models into urban planning to achieve more effective and context-sensitive climate adaptation interventions. Significant barriers include data accessibility and standardization. New spatial plans were standardized using Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) Part 5 (ISO 19152-5), tailoring some attributes for climate adaptation design, facilitating cross-border information exchange. This approach addresses specific challenges in the Netherlands and provides a framework for international adoption, contributing to global urban climate adaptation efforts. The research highlights the need for accessible subsurface data and interdisciplinary collaboration, supported by continuous technological and policy advancements.@en

Implementing a circular economy in cities has been proposed by policy makers as a potential solution for achieving sustainability in the construction sector. One strategy that has gained interest by both policy makers and companies is to develop ‘circular construction hubs’: locations that collect, store, and redistribute waste as secondary resources. However, there is limited literature taking a spatially explicit view, identifying the spatial parameters that could affect the locations of hubs both for now and in the future. This study therefore aims to categorize different types of circular hubs for the construction industry, collect spatial parameters required for finding suitable locations for each type of circular hub, and translate the spatial parameters into a list of data and spatial analysis methods that could be used to identify potential future locations. The study used the Netherlands as a case study, extracting spatial parameters from two sources: Dutch governmental policy documents on circular economy and spatial development, and interviews with companies operating circular hubs. Four types of circular construction hubs were identified: urban mining hubs, industry hubs, local material banks, and craft centers. The spatial parameters were extracted for each type of hub from four perspectives: resources (such as material type, business model), accessibility (such as mode and scale of transportation), land use (such as plot size, land use), and socio-economic (such as labor availability). The parameters were then translated into a list of spatial data and analysis methods required to identify future locations of circular construction hubs.@en

With circular economy being high on governmental agendas, there is an increasing request from governing bodies for circularity measurements. Yet, currently existing macro-level monitoring frameworks are widely criticized for not being able to inform the decision-making. The criticism includes, among others, a lack of consensus on terminologies and definitions among scholars, politicians, and practitioners, a lack of supporting data and tools and, consequently, a lack of transparency and trustworthiness. To address those needs, a bottom-up approach to build a shared terminology is suggested as a starting point for monitoring development. The government, data providers, and tool developers are involved in the process of formal ontology development and alignment. The experiment builds upon a use case of the Amsterdam Circular Economy Monitor (2020). First, four ontology development approaches are used to create a theory-centered, a user-centered, a tool-centered, and a data-centered ontology. The ontologies are later compared, merged, and aligned to arrive at one single ontology which forms the basis of the circular economy monitor. The notes taken during the process have revealed that next to a material flow model, typical of socioeconomic metabolism analysis, policy makers are concerned with actors (i.e., institutions, companies, or groups of people) who participate in the analyzed processes and services. Furthermore, a number of terms used by the decision-makers lack clear definitions and references to be directly associated with the available data. Finally, a structured terminology alignment process between monitor users, developers, and data providers helps in exposing terminology conflicts and ambiguities.

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In the European context, cities and regions play a key role in boosting circularity and achieve the European Green Deal action plan ambition to ‘boost the efficient use of resources by moving to a clean, circular economy’. To this end, cities and regions will be instrumental in promoting circularity through engagement with key actors and integration of circular economy (CE) goals within their policies and spatial plans. To support this effort, it is essential to develop appropriate metrics and tools for evaluating the progress and transition towards a circular economy. Although numerous new assessment methodologies have been suggested (Corona et al., 2019), they generally focus on quantitatively assessing how circular a project, system, or business is, or on evaluating the extent to which circular strategies align with the principles of a circular economy. Current metrics rarely extend beyond material sustainability assessments, which means they often do not capture the complexity of the CE transition and lack a comprehensive, integrated perspective. In particular, what they omit are the spatial (Williams, 2020), the governance (Korhonen et al., 2018) and the social dimensions (Pitkänen et al., 2020). In this paper, we propose a holistic transition assessment tool developed and tested across several metropolitan regions, including Amsterdam, Naples, Łódź, Hamburg and Pécs, being at different stages of the circular economy transition. The final version of the tool was applied in two cases, the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area and the city of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. The tool focuses on five dimensions: (1) governance structures, (2) awareness, comprehensiveness of the sustainability assessment, (3) tools for measuring material stocks and flows as well as (4) for co-creation of solutions and strategies with stakeholders, and (5) circular built environment. The results of applying the tool in a series of workshops with regional CE stakeholders allow for exploring the following questions: What is the state of the transition towards CE in European urban regions from a holistic perspective? What hinders these transitions? And how to identify means to overcome those barriers? The assessment tool is of interest for regional and urban policy-makers, planners and stakeholders engaged in development of CE strategies and policies. What is more, the results presented in the paper allow for comparative insights into the state of transition towards CE and for drawing lessons on what it takes to nudge the development of regions and cities towards circularity.@en

In recent years, implementing a circular economy in cities has been considered by policy makers as a potential solution for achieving sustainability. Existing literature on circular cities is mainly focused on two perspectives: urban governance and urban metabolism. Both these perspectives, to some extent, miss an understanding of space. A spatial perspective is important because circular activities, such as the recycling, reuse, or storage of materials, require space and have a location. It is therefore useful to understand where circular activities are located, and how they are affected by their location and surrounding geography. This study therefore aims to understand the existing state of waste reuse activities in the Netherlands from a spatial perspective, by analyzing the degree, scale, and locations of spatial clusters of waste reuse. This was done by measuring the spatial autocorrelation of waste reuse locations using global and local Moran’s I, with waste reuse data from the national waste registry of the Netherlands. The analysis was done for 10 material types: minerals, plastic, wood and paper, fertilizer, food, machinery and electronics, metal, mixed construction materials, glass, and textile. It was found that all materials except for glass and textiles formed spatial clusters. By varying the grid cell sizes used for data aggregation, it was found that different materials had different ‘best fit’ cell sizes where spatial clustering was the strongest. The best fit cell size is ~7km for materials associated with construction and agricultural industries, and ~20-25km for plastic and metals.The best fit cell sizes indicate the average distance of companies from each other within clusters, and suggest a suitable spatial resolution at which the material can be understood. Hotspot maps were also produced for each material to show where reuse activities are most spatially concentrated.

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Circularity for Educators’, and a second platform for interaction and direct exchange that we call ‘Educators for Circularity’, are part and parcel of the Circular Impulse Initiative (CII), a project intending to enhance the integration of circularity in BK education. Whereas the first provides with content on either circularity or pedagogy, the latter offers the opportunity for all of us to meet and share our experiences and learn from one another. More than 40 professors and researchers have contributed so far with videos and additional resources that are open and accessible to all. @en

This paper introduces a methodological framework to integrate circularity in architectural curricula and the building blocks that led to its conceptualisation. The first block (Part A) examines how complexity has affected learning and architectural education, in particular. The paper departs from the notion that knowledge produces further uncertainty in conditions of critical complexity. Moreover, the highest levels of complexity require the least scientific of approaches. It then examines the main challenges resulting from this shift: one is that learning identifies with individuals’ ability to make informed decisions and is now conceptualised as actionable knowledge. Second to that, education should opt for a pedagogy that can support learning through decision making. Architectural education, in particular, should be able to foster a new type of professionalism, where individuals assume accountability for their design decisions that extends beyond the aesthetic realm. But what can drive curricula to become more responsive to the current environmental, social, and political realities? The second block (Part B) looks into the issue of circularity. It examines its relevance to architectural education for its potential to function both as an operational scheme as well as a value system. Furthermore, being a concept in the making, circularity can benefit from academic research but can also support a pedagogy that focuses on helping students learn how to learn. The proposed methodological framework (Part C) builds on these two blocks and on the faculty’s research on circularity to develop a scheme of what constitutes content for teaching circularity, how the goals for integrating it into the curricula can be formulated, and what type of pedagogy is suited to support the integration. @en

In recent years, implementing a circular economy in cities has been considered by policy makers as a potential solution for achieving sustainability. Existing literature on circular cities is mainly focused on two perspectives: urban governance and urban metabolism. Both these perspectives, to some extent, miss an understanding of space. A spatial perspective is important because circular activities, such as the recycling, reuse, or storage of materials, require space and have a location. It is therefore useful to understand where circular activities are located, and how they are affected by their location and surrounding geography. This study therefore aims to understand the existing state of waste reuse activities in the Netherlands from a spatial perspective, by analyzing the degree, scale, and locations of spatial clusters of waste reuse. This was done by measuring the spatial autocorrelation of waste reuse locations using global and local Moran’s I, with waste reuse data from the national waste registry of the Netherlands. The analysis was done for 10 material types: minerals, plastic, wood and paper, fertilizer, food, machinery and electronics, metal, mixed construction materials, glass, and textile. It was found that all materials except for glass and textiles formed spatial clusters. By varying the grid cell sizes used for data aggregation, it was found that different materials had different “best fit” cell sizes where spatial clustering was the strongest. The best fit cell size is ∼7 km for materials associated with construction and agricultural industries, and ∼20–25 km for plastic and metals.The best fit cell sizes indicate the average distance of companies from each other within clusters, and suggest a suitable spatial resolution at which the material can be understood. Hotspot maps were also produced for each material to show where reuse activities are most spatially concentrated.@en

Advancing circularity in metropolitan areas involves planning, co-designing and implementing spatially explicit interventions with a multitude of stakeholders who are required to work with waste and resource management information. For the stakeholders, understanding information on these flows of resources and materials, and the spatial implications of these flows across the territory, is crucial when proposing new interventions and assessing the effects of these interventions. Spatial decision support systems constitute potential tools for supporting groups of stakeholders involved in the collaborative process of shaping the future of urban areas while achieving sustainability and increased circularity. This chapter focuses on the digital representation and portrayal, and the use of different types of information in a digital spatial decision support tool aimed at helping decision-makers through stages of the collaborative process that starts at problem identification and status quo understanding, and finishes at the proposed circular economy strategies for a metropolitan area. The way in which information is modeled and presented in the tool is largely based on the geodesign methodology, and is specific to individual stages of the planning process. The tool presents information relevant to a peri-urban area through different mediums: web maps and charts to describe the study area, Sankey diagrams linked with dynamic flow maps to portray its resource flow streams, and the integration of the above to portray and assess the scenarios developed jointly by the stakeholders. The tool was implemented in an interactive web application and applied to the collaborative process of developing spatial strategies for advancing circularity in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. A series of interconnected workshops were held with stakeholders, who used the tool to guide them through the stages of the co-development of the strategies. Stakeholders were presented with spatial information about the study area’s current resource and waste management situation in the form of web maps and the spatial distribution and dynamics of resource flows. This chapter describes how all this information was portrayed, presented, and used within the interactive web application at the collaborative workshops.

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As appointed in the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, cities and regions in EU member countries start accompanying their circular economy strategies by monitoring frameworks, often called Circular Economy Monitors (CEM). Having the task to assess the performance towards the achievement of set targets and to steer decision-making, CEMs need to rely on a multitude of statistics and datasets. Waste statistics play an important role in circular economy monitoring as they provide insights into the remaining linear part of the economy. The collection of waste statistics is mandated by the European Commission which provides general guidelines on data collection and processing. The Netherlands has one of the most detailed waste registries among the EU countries. The country's largest metropolitan region, Amsterdam, is currently building a CEM which tracks progress over time towards the set goals, highlights which areas need improvement and estimates target feasibility. This paper uses the Amsterdam CEM as a case-study to explore how the existing system of waste registration in the Netherlands is able to support decision-making. The data is explored with the help of four queries that relate to the CEM's goals and require data mapping to be answered. The data mapping and analysis process has revealed several limitations present in the waste data collection and a number of gaps present in current circular economy research and data analysis. At the same time, the available data already supports significant insights into the status quo of the current waste system and provides opportunities for circular economy monitoring.

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The announcement of a new Circular Economy Action Plan as part of the European Green Deal policy has created an urgent need for the reliable information on resource flows to monitor and support the transition. An updated Monitoring Framework is set to rely as much as possible on European Statistics, however at this point there are no changes introduced in supranational statistics regulations. This raises a question whether regulations that have been created before the paradigm shift are still able to supply us with statistics necessary to inform policy makers about current successful practices, remaining barriers, positive and negative impacts of the transition and overall progress towards the set goals. This paper focuses on the Waste Statistics Regulation, specifically the relationship between the types of waste and economic activities which are considered to be the waste producers. Dutch National Waste Registry is used as a case study to compare the guidelines on pan-European waste data collection to the actual waste reports. The task of this publication is to explore to which extent the guidelines available in the Waste Statistics Regulation correspond to the operational reality. To do so it presents a computational method to link waste producers to their economic activities using a national Trade Registry. An extensive discussion of the results provides insights and recommendations for the future guidelines of waste statistics to support circular economy transition.

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A shift towards a more Circular Economy is, in many policies, seen as crucial to achieving a more sustainable and inclusive built environment that meets future demands. In the last decade, the European Commission’s research funding has supported numerous initiatives aiming to reduce waste generation through shifts towards Circular Economy approaches. Many cities and regions followed and started to develop circular economy strategies, action plans and circularity monitors. The difficulties and challenges of implementing a seemingly simple concept are mainly to narrow, slow down and close materials streams and thereby reduce our dependency on raw material input. Europe’s geopolitical dependency on resource-rich countries has become very apparent during the last years. In this article, we identify some of those challenges and propose potential ways forward. @en

Nowadays, the circularity concept dominates the debate on resource management in cities and territories. The idea is often used as a vehicle towards a more sustainable socio-ecological transition, based on the circular economy (CE) framework. Unlike other sustainability frameworks, CE originates in ecological and environmental economics and industrial ecology. It focuses on developing an alternative economic and technological model for production and consumption, avoiding natural resource depletion and redesigning processes and cycles of materials (closed-loops). However, when CE is translated to cities and territories, its environmental, economic and design agency is often neglected. On the one hand, it demands to acknowledge the need for a relational understanding of space, place and actors involved and, on the other, to explore the spatial specificity of CE. Therefore, there is a need for a broader theoretical discourse on the CE’s territoriality as the predominant. Research on circular urban and territorial development demands more than merely upscaling industrial ecosystems diagrams and generating circular businesses. Consequently, what is the role of territory in the CE conceptualisation in the urbanism literature? How to interpret territories through the lens of circularity, which tools, methods are needed? Therefore, territory, its role and meaning in the CE contribution to urban regeneration is the key focus of this text.

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Wasser Stadt Wien. Eine Umweltgeschichte by G. Haidvogl, F. Hauer, S. Hohensinner, E. Raith, M. Schmid, C. Sonnlechner, C. Spitzbart-Glasl and V. Winiwarter, ZUG Zentrum für Umweltgeschichte, Universität für Bodenkultur, Vienna, Austria, 2019, 495 pp. ISBN 978–3–900932–67–1.@en

A large proportion of European inhabitants live in dispersed urban settlements, much of which is labelled as sprawl, defined by monofunctional, low-density areas. However, there is increasing evidence that this may be an overly simplistic way of describing territories-in-between (TiB). This paper defines and maps functional mix in six dispersed urban areas across Europe, applying a method that goes beyond existing land-use-based mixed-use indicators but considers functional mixing on the parcel level. The paper uses data on the location of economic activities and the residential population. It concludes that, in eight cases from four European countries, mixed-use is widespread and that more than 65% of inhabited areas are mixed. Moreover, the paper relates functional mixing to specific settlement characteristics: permeability, grain size, centrality and accessibility, and connectivity. This demonstrates that functional mixing is not the result of local urban morphology or planning instruments, but of the multi-scalar qualities of a location. Therefore, there is a requirement to coordinate planning and design through different scales if mixed-use areas are to be seen as one strategy for achieving greater sustainability in the spatial development of dispersed areas.

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An increasing body of literature suggests that the conventional idea of a gradual transition in spatial structure from urban to rural does not reflect contemporary patterns of urban development and their potential for sustainable development. The research introduces the concept of territories-in-between (TiB) to address the issues surrounding the sustainability of dispersed urban development. A cross-case comparison research design was chosen to develop methods and principles that can be transferred to other geographical contexts. Ten cases in five countries were studied with the aim to answer the following questions: What spatial structures characterise dispersed urban areas in Europe? Which morphological and functional structures of dispersed urban areas offer the potential for more sustainable development? If so, how can this potential be mapped and measured to inform regional planning and design? Are there similarities and dissimilarities concerning potentials of dispersed urban areas in different locations, planning cultures, topographies and histories? Do dispersed urban areas have distinct characteristics? In sum, the findings show that dispersed urban areas in Europe are quite distinct from urban and rural areas and that they share characteristics from one place to another. The research investigated three aspects of sustainable spatial development, the potential of multi-functionality, the provision of ecosystem services and the presence and potential for mixed-use. @en

Food waste represents the largest fraction of the municipal solid waste generated in Europe and its management is associated to suboptimal performance in environmental, health, and social dimensions. By processing detailed multi-fold local data as part of a comprehensive and broadly understandable sustainability framework, this study quantifies the environmental and socio-economic impacts of household food waste management in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area based on priorities set by local stakeholders. Five alternative short-term management options have been assessed against the current system, relying on poor separate collection and incineration. Four options involve separate collection of food waste followed by biological treatments (home/centralised composting and anaerobic digestion) while one involves a mix of separate collection and centralised mechanical-biological treatment followed by anaerobic digestion. Among these, separate collection followed by anaerobic digestion coupled with effective nutrient and energy recovery is, according to our findings, the preferred option to improve the sustainability of the current system in all dimensions considered, except for the economic pillar due to the collection costs. Home and centralised composting as well as mechanical-biological treatment are associated to more adverse impacts based on our findings. The study informs local stakeholders and authorities on the potential consequences of their options, thereby allowing them to make sound choices for a future waste and circular economy strategy.@en

The on-line exhibition presents the results of the Horizon20 Project REPAiR in virtual exhibition rooms. Check-out this next generation experience to learn all about circular economy contexts and solutions:@en