Welcome to the ECOCITY 2022 Interactive Programme

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In the European context, the new Circular Cities and Regions Initiative underscores the crucial role of cities and regions 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.

Increasingly recent literature emphasizes the need to develop suitable metrics and tools for measuring the progress and transition of the circular economy (CE). While many new methodologies for assessment are proposed (Corona et al., 2019), they tend to focus on either assessing quantitatively how circular a project, system or business is; or examining the degree to which circular strategies are in line with CE principles. The main difficulty that existing metrics have is that they do not go beyond material sustainability assessments and, consequently, don't reflect the CE transition's complexity and are not integrated. In particular, they lack the inclusion of the spatial dimension(Williams, 2020), the governance dimension (Korhonen et al., 2018) and the social dimension (Pitkänen et al., 2020).

In this paper, we present how a holistic transition assessment tool was developed and tested in six metropolitan regions across Europe to answer the following questions: What is the state of the transition towards CE in European regions from a holistic perspective? What hinders the transitions? And how to identify means to overcome those barriers?

The assessment tool was elaborated in a four-year-long H2020 project investigating resource management in six peri-urban regions. The paper focuses on the elaborated tool and its tests in Amsterdam, Naples, Ghent, Łódź, Hamburg and Pécs, presenting the regional disparities in the circular economy transition.

Acknowledgement: the paper is based on research as part of the REPAiR project benefiting from funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688920.

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Cities are becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change, and there is an urgent need to make them more resilient. Online knowledge-sharing platforms contribute to an accelerated climate adaptation by promoting more green and blue spaces in urban areas. Climatescan.org is a citizen science tool created through ‘learning by doing’, which is interactive, open source, and provide more detailed information on Best Management Practices (BMPs) as: exact location, website links, free photo and film material. BMPs such as stormwater infiltration by swales, raingardens, subsurface infiltration in Sponge cities are mapped and published on social media.

Climatescan is in continuous development as more data is uploaded by over 1000 people around the world, and improvements are made to respond to feedback from users. This tool in 2021 is the biggest database on green blue measures around the world. It helps policy makers and practitioners to gather valuable data for decision-makers in a rapid appraisal at neighbourhood and city level. Climatescan.org provides insights, create awareness and builds capacity. Climatescan.org has over 5000 NBS uploaded on the open source platform and over 200.000 unique visitors and an an average of more than 100 visitors a day.

Analysing the open source Change Adaptation Platform ClimateScan shows that bio filtration is the category with most uploads (1181 projects) with the highest contributions from The Netherlands and Australia. Despite that these two countries are separated by significant geographical distance, climate and geohydrological circumstances, cross collaboration between the countries has seen the open and detailed exchange of knowledge regarding the implementation, maintenance and design of NBS.

However, points of concern are identified regarding the data quality and the aspect of community-building. Although the numbers of users are rising, only a few users have remained involved. Learning from these remaining top users and their motivations, we draw general lessons and make suggestions for stimulating long-term engagement on online knowledge-sharing platforms.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a huge disruption of in the world of transport, including urban mobility. While there have been countless negative consequences associated with the pandemic, the crisis has also led a number of cities to experiment with urban design and mobility, leading to some remarkable changes. Many urban thinkers and planners have already declared: it would be much better to not simply return to business as usual once the pandemic is over.

This talk takes stock of many of the incredible transformations that have taken place just since last year. Examples include the pop-up bicycle lanes appearing in cities from Berlin to Budapest. Cities like Bogota and Kampala have outright banned private motorized traffic in some zones. Cities like Rotterdam, Paris and Brussels all made waves by introducing progressive new policies, such as pedestrianizing iconic streets and various methods of traffic calming. Many lessor knows cities have worked hard on their future vision, including Tirana, Albania.

This talk first looks at the urban mobility paradigm shift underway in cities around the world, latching on to the unique moment in history where we have been given the opportunity to build better, safer and walkable cities that empower local communities.

The second part of the talk focuses on several campaigns that have been launched in 2020 and 2021. This includes campaigns to radically reduce automobile traffic in Berlin and Barcelona. It also includes a network of linked campaigns: “Build Back Better Cities” which has been launched by the Carfree Cities Alliance (of which the presenter is a member and coordinator) in collaboration with its international allies. This collection of campaigns is geographically diverse, encompassing cities in South America, Africa, and Asia.

The focal point of the presentation and discussion in the talk will be: How can we seize this incredible opportunity in supporting and being a part of the transition to a radically more sustainable approach in urban planning and mobility?

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The concept of circular economy (CE) offers an innovative and systematical approach to address a number of urban sustainability issues, via exploring symbiotic ways to design circular urban systems and optimizing the materials and energy metabolism of cities, so as to mitigate environmental footprints. Urban sustainability is highlighted as critical issues in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by United Nations, hence in nature, circular economy could offer a number of solutions towards SDGs in urban scope. As trade-offs, circular economy also potentially causes negative impacts to business as usual scenario, which is easily to be ignored. To highlight this scientific issue, this paper identified and matched the role of circular economy in realizing 17 SDGs and 169 their sub-indicators in urban scope. How circular economy strategy could potentially affect the SDGs, whether positive or negative, were comprehensive evaluated. Hong Kong as a global mega city, is applied as case study to illustrate how an inclusive circular economy could be achieved. We expect such findings could support an equilibrium decision making on circular economy promotion in cities, rather than optimum solution to single target under the triple bottom line of sustainability.