Speaker
Description
The circular economy (CE) has emerged as a sustainability prominent framework, garnering attention from scholars and policymakers and influencing the policies of cities and regions. However, urban and regional CE strategies tend to focus predominantly on ‘looping actions’ (see Williams, 2021), such as using waste as a resource and reducing resource consumption. This approach often neglects the socio-spatial preconditions and implications of ‘going circular.’ Growing criticism of the urban CE agenda highlights these shortcomings (Dąbrowski et al., 2024), noting that circular actions and strategies are not always sustainable (Taelman et al., 2020), can perpetuate the growth-based paradigm and spatial inequalities (Savini, 2024), and fail to fully exploit circularity’s potential to drive socially inclusive (Vanhuyse et al., 2022) and regenerative (Williams, 2023) transformations of cities and their hinterlands. This paper adds to these debates by shedding light on the interplay between spatial planning and CE strategies, emphasising how the spatial context influences—and is influenced by—CE interventions.
Drawing inspiration from Meerow and Newell’s (2016) critical analysis of urban resilience—another increasingly contested urban policy ‘buzzword’—we propose a critical perspective on the urban and regional circular economy. Specifically, we question: for whom, how, where, and why should cities and regions develop circular economy strategies? Posing these questions prompts a more critical approach to the ‘footloose’ concept of circular economy, especially when it is implicitly applied to spaces like cities or regions, which are far from being neutral backdrops for the implementation of such policies.
Studying a range of real-world examples of urban and regional circular policies and projects implemented in North-West European cities, we explore these questions and demonstrate how CE strategies are deeply embedded in spatial contexts and territorial governance arrangements, reflecting broader (often dominant) political and economic agendas. Our findings reveal the dual role of cities and regions as both starting points and contested arenas for implementing CE strategies. Successes and limitations of existing CE approaches are examined, highlighting how spatial planning practices can either mitigate or exacerbate the uneven distribution of the externalities of circular activities in urban regions.
By this, we contribute to the increasingly lively and politicised scholarly debates on the role of CE in spatial development, while calling for planners to adopt a politically aware, context-sensitive approach to designing and implementing circular economy policies.
References
Dąbrowski, M., van den Berghe, K., Williams, J., van Bueren, E., Eds. (2024). Going Circular: Unlocking the Potential of Regions and Cities to Drive the Circular Economy Transition. London: Routledge (Regional Studies Policy Impact Books). https://doi.org/10.1080/2578711X.2024.2418227
Meerow, S., & Newell, J. P. (2016). Urban resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why? Urban Geography, 37(3), 267–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1206395
Savini, F. (2023). Post-growth, degrowth, the doughnut, and circular economy: a short guide for policymakers. Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, 2(2), 114-123. https://doi.org/10.3138/jccpe-2023-0004
Taelman, S.E., Sanjuan-Delmás, D., Tonini, D., & Dewulf, J. (2020). An operational framework for sustainability assessment including local to global impacts: Focus on waste management systems. Resources, Conservation & Recycling, 162, 104964. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2020.104964
Vanhuyse, F., Rezaie, S., Englund, M., Jokiaho, J., Henrysson, M., & André, K. (2022). Including the social in the circular: A mapping of the consequences of a circular economy transition in the city of Umeå, Sweden. Journal of cleaner production, 380, 134893. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.134893
Williams, J. (2023). Circular cities: planning for circular development in European cities. European Planning Studies, 31(1), 14-35. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2022.2060707
| Keywords | circular economy; circular development; spatial planning |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
