Abstract Body

In recent years the scientific community has proposed methods for assessing sustainability and, among these, the European Green city Index and UN (2017) Sustainable City Indexing are leading the way. Other indices have been put forth by the European Commission, that is proposing a complete framework for assessing urban sustainability.

Although complete, the above-mentioned methods do not fully address the aspect of circularity and of circular economy in cities, as they mainly focus on sustainability from a broader perspective.

In this work we propose a method to assess urban circularity from a perspective that covers both aspects directly related to circularity of urban flows (like waste, energy, water) and enabling factors capable of indirectly fostering or boosting circularity (like policies and the role of citizens).

The proposed method is based on a survey covering:

1. Urban metabolic flows, such as: energy, materials, water, waste.

2. Infrastructures and digitalisation: quality of service, open data, sustainable and public mobility, smart energy services.

3. Policies and the role of the public administration in fostering the principles of circular economy at territorial level

4. Environment and quality of life, including pollution and GHG emissions.

The "Circular Reporting Score", a method based on urban metabolism and covering policy aspects has been developed, and two Italian municipalities have been involved in the study and investigated by means of a specific survey derived from previous studies on urban sustainability.

Results show that the proposed method is able to capture aspects related to the circularity of flows while providing citizens and policy makers with suitable tools for taking informed decisions to reduce the environmental impact of cities.

Finally, we go beyond the concept of circularity based on the strict balancing of material flows and we move in the direction of a wider concept interweaving the need to reduce the waste flows of cities with the need to analyse the city as a complex system composed of different interconnected domains.