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. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

Urban areas account for around 50% of global solid waste generation. In the last decade, the European Union has supported numerous initiatives aiming at reducing waste generation by promoting shifts towards Circular Economy (CE) approaches. Governing this process has become imperative. This article focuses on the results of a governance analysis of six urban regions in Europe involved in the Horizon 2020 project REPAiR. By means of semi-structured interviews, document analysis and workshops with local stakeholders, for each urban area a list of governance challenges which hinder the necessary shift to circularity was drafted. In order to compare the six cases, the various challenges have been categorized using the PESTEL-O method. Results highlight a significant variation in policy contexts and the need for these to evolve by adapting stakeholders’ and policy-makers’ engagement and diffusing knowledge on CE. Common challenges among the six regions include a lack of an integrated guiding framework (both political and legal), limited awareness among citizens, and technological barriers. All these elements call for a multi-faceted governance approach able to embrace the complexity of the process and comprehensively address the various challenges to completing the shift towards circularity in cities. ... Read more

REPAiR will develop, test, and implement strategies for improved urban metabolisms in six peri-urban living labs (›PULLs‹) in the case study areas of Amsterdam, Ghent, Hamburg, Łódź, Naples, and Pécs. In the frame of REPAiR a geodesign decision support environment (GDSE) will be developed and first tested in the PULLs. In REPAiR’s Work Package 6 “Developing and implementing decision models” decision making processes will be analysed and decision models for all six case studies will be developed in order to be implemented in cooperation with stakeholders in the six case study areas feeding into the GDSE. The deliverable D6.1 Governance and Decision-Making Processes in Pilot Cases is focused on the definition and clarification of governance and decision-making structures in the two pilot cases of the REPAiR project: Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Naples, Italy. The deliverable is divided into 5 chapters. After a brief introduction to the work done for the drafting of this document (Chapter 1), the second Chapter aims to explain the theoretical background on governance and stakeholder analysis and gives an overview on the development of EU policies in the field of waste management. The third chapter and the fourth chapters report a description of the pilot caseworks Amsterdam and Naples they include an overview on the governance setting, a detailed timelines of the development of the waste governance and the decision-making framework. This is followed by descriptions of the stakeholder identification and interviews conducted in the pilot cases. The Amsterdam focus area is located in the Western part of Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. The central idea of the case study is to develop a more circular economy. This idea is already quite present among many stakeholders and is formulated as an objective by public stakeholders. Moreover, the public side encourages the involvement of economic stakeholders into the development of a circular economy. The private stakeholders express great interest in becoming (more) involved into the process. However, the interviews also show that the development of a circular economy and changes in waste management in the Netherlands can only be reached on a long perspective and that many frame conditions in the waste management sector are long term bound. The Naples focus area is covering parts of the City of Naples and 10 municipalities in the north-east of Naples. After the conclusion of the waste crisis in Naples public authorities are aiming to improve the waste management on a long term perspective. The interviews show that there are two main challenges linked to this process: firstly, the current change of the administrative system in both Italy and the Campania region; secondly, the necessity to involve local citizens in the decision-making process to regain the trust of the population. Chapter 5 illustrates the conclusion of this first step of the project and gives an outlook on further steps. ... Read more