Alexander Wandl (Netherlands)
Urbanist and Professor, TU Delft
Urbanism
Dr Alexander Wandl is an Urbanist and Associate Professor at the Section of Environmental Technology and Design, at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on developing sustainable urbanization, using an extended territorial metabolism approach and integrating (GIS-supported) methods and tools from different disciplines. As scientific coordinator of the Horizon 2020 financed research project REPAiR—Resource Management in peri-urban areas—he is at the forefront of developing spatial strategies, which support the transition towards more circularity. He specifically focuses on the challenges related to the sustainable development of dispersed urban areas and peri-urbanization processes in Europe.

Presenter of 1 Presentation

 Conference Calendar

A HOLISTIC ASSESSMENT OF METROPOLITAN CIRCULAR ECONOMY TRANSITIONS –

Session Name
0110 - Academic Sessions - Circular 02 (ID 32)
Session Type
Academic Sessions
Date
02/22/2022
Session Time
02:45 PM - 04:00 PM
Room

Hall B

Presenter
Lecture Time
02:55 PM - 03:05 PM

Abstract

Abstract Body

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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