Currently the world is dealing with a pandemic. The world has stopped, and people are distancing from each other. However, this large crisis is not the only crisis the world is currently dealing with. Climate change is affecting the world drastically since the last century. Our current way of development must stop to deal with this change. This is the ideal time to stop and think about the future. How can we provide a future-proof city that is still attractive to our grandchildren?
Regardless of the crisis, more people want to live in cities, and therefore more features are needed within the same space. Cities must continuously adapt to new needs and demands. This fast-changing environment makes it even harder to continue our current development, while adapting to the needs and demands. A future-proof city starts with a sustainable development of new plans. It is time to improve the involvement of sustainability in area development. This study will look at this overdue change in area development. It acknowledges this problem and aims to advice how sustainability can be better embedded in spatial planning.
To support this optimization, the instruments of a municipality are researched in this master thesis. Next to the instruments, also, governance and the organizational aspects are included. This research has found that these three aspects of instruments, governance and organization combined should be optimized. An optimization of these three aspects can ensure that an area is developed sustainable.

The last couple of years the concept of the Circular Economy (CE) has been gaining more and more attention. The Netherlands want to become a CE as well and the government presented a national policy programme including goals to reach a CE in 2050. One of those goals is that Dutch public authorities should procure all their projects 100% circularly by 2030. Practice shows that in the infrastructure sector public authorities start with high circular ambitions, but throughout the procurement process it seems to diminish. Public authorities tend to specify their need in detail, and make little use of the knowledge and experience that is present in the supply chain. The fact that the circular ambitions are only partly reached after the realization of the project makes the public procurement process not very effective. A possible contribution to increase this effectiveness can be a specific procurement approach that focusses on utilizing the experience from the supply chain, called the Best Value approach (BVA). However, no literature so far has described the opportunities of the BVA as an approach to procure circular infrastructure in the Netherlands.

The goal of this research is to create a guideline for Dutch public authorities about how they can procure circular infrastructure more effectively by making use of the BVA. This results in the following research question: In what way, if any, can the Best Value approach contribute to the effectiveness of public procurement in order to stimulate the transition towards a circular infrastructure sector in the Netherlands?