2s1: Making cities circular; advancing a social and spatial approach to circular area development

Abstract

The urgency of reducing the environmental footprint of cities is hardly disputed. The concept of circular cities, currently prominent on policy agendas, is seen as one promising pathway towards it. Circularity discourse has come with the emergence of a range of collaborative efforts to further explore its possibilities. However, flows of materials, energy and products dominate in debates, and the attention going to how a ‘circular city’ might operate socially and spatially, at the level of an area or neighborhood, is largely missing.