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. ... Read more

The concept of circular economy (CE) is high on the agenda of many planning agencies in European countries. It has also become a prominent issue in European academic education institutions. It is expected that spatial planning and design can support and add the spatial quality dimension of such a transition towards CE. However, incorporating the concept of CE in an integrative manner in urban design and planning courses is challenging because of its metabolic and complex nature. This article presents the first results of integrating design-teaching activities at a faculty of architecture with an H2020-financed research project. The integration of research and design education provided the students with a situated and indeed transdisciplinary learning environment. Students understood that they needed to address challenges from a systemic perspective rather early in the design process, meaning to understand what the relations between different subsystems and their spatial structures are. Furthermore, the experiment provided evidence that the eco-innovative solutions developed by the students are seen as an effective option to achieve objectives for a transition towards CE by stakeholders. ... Read more

Improving waste and resource management entails working on interrelations between different material flows, territories and groups of actors. This calls for new decision support tools for translating the complex information on flows into accessible knowledge usable by stakeholders in the spatial planning process. This article describes an open source tool based on the geodesign approach, which links the co-creation of design proposals together with stakeholders, impact simulations informed by geographic contexts, systems thinking, and digital technology—the Geodesign Decision Support Environment. Though already used for strategic spatial planning, the potential of geodesign for waste management and recycling is yet to be explored. This article draws on empirical evidence from the pioneering application of the tool to promote spatially explicit circular economy strategies in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area.
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