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Circle Economy and ICLEI have partnered up to initiate the go to knowledge hub of case studies about the circular economy in cities. The Cities Collection is a repository of case studies that demonstrate the role of cities in the circular transition, and includes policies, business cases and research articles. Cases in the Collection flow into an ecosystem of digital products which support users in transitioning cities to circularity, for example [Ganbatte](https://ganbatte.world/cities/) and <a href="https://circulars.iclei.org/" target="_blank">ICLEI Circulars</a>, both part of the <a href="https://circulars.iclei.org/circle-lab-for-cities/" target = _blank">Circle Lab for Cities Programme.</a>

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Circular Cities

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Starter Kit collection

Policy case

Impact on the availability of resources as well as their effect on living organisms, ecosystems, and components of the environment.

Ecological Impact

Impacts on the social fabric of the community and well-being of the individuals and families.

Social Impact

Impacts on the financial condition of a company, as well as the the economicconditions of its stakeholders and on economic systems at local, national, andglobal levels.

Economic Impact

Impact on the health and happiness of human populations

Well-being

Impact on the ease of innovation, and facilitating uptake of innovations

Innovation

Scalability

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

Reduced use and withdrawal of water and rate of recycling and reuse of water

Save Water (SDG6)

Reduced use of fossil fuel energy sources and/or increased use of renewable energy

Reduce Energy Consumption

Societal Services

Providing water and sewage services, including water collection and distribution, water treatment systems and sewage treatment facilities

Water and Sewage

Collecting waste from households and businesses by means of refuse bins, wheeled bins, containers, etc., and providing treatment, incineration, materials recovery and reclamation, and disposal of hazardous and non-hazardous waste

Waste Management

Ensure renewable, reusable, non-toxic resources are utilised as materials and energy in an efficient way

Prioritise regenerative resources

Replace energy sources with less impactful alternatives and enact energy efficiency measures

Regenerative energy

Enacting measures that optimise energy use

Energy efficiency

'Inform' increases the overall levels of awareness and builds the necessary skills and knowledge around the circular economy to foster long-term change.

Inform

Implement innovation programmes

'Manage' influences the use and function of physical and material elements within the urban environment. 

Manage

Infrastructure

Develop infrastructure to support sustainable lifestyles

'Mobilise' sets the direction of and builds momentum towards long-term change, while also determining how this direction is determined and governed.

Mobilise

Visions and Ambitions

Metrics and indicators to measure progress

'Incentivise' sends market signals and support to businesses, citizens and governments to promote certain activities.

Incentivise

Public-private partnerships

 Spatial Planning

Compact city development

Economic Frameworks

Redesign systems to lay the foundation for circular activities and enable the transition to a circular economy 

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Rethink

Includes a variety of actions (e.g. campaigns, information sharing, public events) that encourage city residents and visitors to build sustainable practices into their daily lives

Enable sustainable lifestyles

The built environment, including housing, commercial buildings, and the necessary infrastructure for mobility, is essential for our livelihoods, but:
- the extraction of minerals used to produce construction materials is responsible for a quarter of global land use change,
- approximately 40% of global GHG emissions can be attributed to buildings’ construction, use and demolition, and
- construction and demolition processes drive nearly one-third of all material consumption. 

Making the built environment more circular must prioritise a heavy reduction in material use—while also closing the loop on materials and bringing secondary and renewable material choices to the fore. Our four key solutions for the built environment are:
- Make the most of what already exists: Make the most of existing materials by reusing, repurposing, upgrading and renovating following circular approaches. Where new builds are needed, use secondary materials and be as efficient as possible with urban planning solutions that follow circular design principles so that buildings can be reused, repurposed, and easily disassembled in the future.
- Be as energy efficient as possible: From the design phase, utilise circular strategies to create material- and energy efficient buildings. Couple these designs with a rollout of clean energy solutions, and prioritise energy-efficient appliances and retrofitting. 
- Utilise secondary materials: Maximise the high-value reuse of buildings and components where possible. Ideally, enable the utilisation of construction and demolition outputs and ensure that as much of it as possible is recycled to avoid the need for virgin materials, such as sand and gravel.
- Prioritise circular materials and approaches: Transition to using renewable wood, timber or cross-laminated timber instead of steel and concrete, or move to other locally available materials. Utilise mainstream modular construction and prioritise lightweight frames and structures to reduce cement and steel use, as well as green roofs where possible.



🏢 Built Environment

Businesses

Governments

The mobility choices and behaviours of residents and businesses can vary greatly depending on the structure and design of the city. A sprawling city covering large areas with wide highways and no bike lanes discourages cycling and increases dependence on private vehicles, which contribute significantly to resource demand and GHG emissions. Meanwhile, a more compact city with mixed use developments, accessible public transport and extensive and appealing pedestrian and cycle networks enables and encourages walking, cycling and other non-motorised, low-carbon forms of mobility. Combined with urban planning that incentivises higher densities along major public transport routes, transit-oriented development can help to slow the outward expansion of cities into the surrounding countryside. 

Compact city planning can help local communities build and create more efficient, safe and viable cities. This concept includes ideas such as the 15-minute city or ‘complete neighbourhoods’, whereby all of the basic needs and services of a resident can be accessed within 15 minutes by walking, cycling or public transport. This concept has also attracted attention as a way to reduce inequality by ensuring that all neighbourhoods have access to affordable mobility options.

Local governments can support the development of compact and low-carbon cities by integrating such concepts into the city’s urban plans, and ensuring that all residents are easily able to conduct their day-to-day lives using non-motorised or public transport. Cities can also ensure that necessary and facilitating infrastructure is provided, such as cycle lanes, pedestrianised areas and public transport options, to enable the shift away from dependency on personal vehicles.


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🚌  Compact city planning and development

Regenerate strategies phase out hazardous or toxic materials and processes and substitute them with regenerative biomass resources. A circular economy aims to mimic natural cycles—by shifting to more regenerative farming practices, for example—while also maximising the share of circular biomass that enters the economy. Regeneration can happen both at the systems level (by designing regenerative processes) as well as at the product level (by switching synthetic to organic fertilisers, for example).

Regenerate

Impacts

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Industries

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A framework of policy instruments that enabled and encourage the transition to the circular economy

Policies

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A framework of policy instruments that enable and stimulate the transition to the circular economy

The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

The Circular City Actions Framework provides urban changemakers with five complementary strategies they can use to start working towards a more circular system. 

The framework is action-based to provide users with concrete strategic directions and showcase the desired outcomes of each strategy. 
The framework consists of five complementary **strategies**, under which **sub-strategies** provide further detail. Finally, each sub-strategy consists of a diversity of tangible **solutions** which are framed in relation to key thematic areas. 

Note: solutions are currently focused on:
- 🍏 **Food systems**
- 🏢  **Built environment**
- 👕📱  **Consumer goods**
- ⚡ **Energy Systems**
- 🚌 **Mobility Systems**
- 💧 **Water Systems**

More thematic areas are coming soon...

'Click through each of the five strategy cards below to explore the framework and circular economy case studies in more depth!'



This framework was developed in collaboration with ICLEI, Metabolic and Ellen MacArthur Foundation with support from the MAVA Foundation. Read more about it [here]( https://circulars.iclei.org/action-framework/). 



Circular City Actions Framework

An action-based framework for local governments working towards circular cities

Thematic Areas

City Stakeholders

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Based on the work of [Bocken et al. (2016)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309699661_Product_design_and_business_model_strategies_for_a_circular_economy), the Four Flows Framework serves as a simple framework for managing resource flows in a circular economy by using less (Narrow), using for longer (Slow), using again (Cycle), and using clean, regenerative materials and energy (Regenerate).

These different principles of circular economy can be applied to our socioeconomic metabolism: we can design stocks like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and vehicles to be rich resource mines for the future, and design manufactured goods and consumables to be cycled and made regenerative. Furthermore, the focus must also centre on getting more value out of fewer materials. Achieving the aims of a circular economy—minimising material use, regenerating the Earth, and preventing material losses—can be done through these four key strategies mentioned above.

Source: Circle Economy. (2023). *[The circularity gap report 2023](https://www.circularity-gap.world/2023)* (p.22). Amsterdam: Circle Economy. 

Four Flows Framework

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The architects behind the Kingdom Tower -- planned to be the world's first building to reach 1km in height -- have been chosen to build a completely new suburban city from scratch on the outskirts of Chengdu in southwest China.The "Great City" is effectively an entirely new municipality, designed as one whole instead of the chaotic and environmentally inefficient alternative of urban sprawl. The designers -- Adrian Smith + Gordin Gill Architecture, based in Chicago -- have marked out a 1.3km2 circle surrounded by 1.9km2 of farmland and parks, where residents won't need cars because everything is within a 15-minute walk of the city centre. If the model is successful, the Great City will be copied on the edges of China's other megalopolises and their populations continue to boom -- putting pressure on housing, infrastructure and the environment.The architects claim that the city will be built around the farmland that already exists in the patch of land allocated for the Great City, while within the 1.3km2 city area itself "15 percent of land will be devoted to parks and landscaped space". Another 25 percent will be allocated for infrastructure like roads (of which only half will be accessible to cars, as many residents will be expected not to need them) and the final 60 percent of land will hold tall, glass-and-steel tower blocks like those found in any other new large development in China. If people need to get out of the Great City, there are public transportation stations on the permiter and in the middle.The 80,000 people expected to live in the Great City would give it a population density of 61,538 people per square kilometre.That's comparable to some of the most densely-populated city districts in the world -- like Paris' Le Pré-Saint-Gervais (63,876) or Manila's Malabon (59,767). In London, the most densely populated boroughs in the inner city have a density of around 10,000 people per square kilometre. The entire Great City complex -- urban circle and surrounding open park/farmland -- is roughly the same size as Hampsted Heath.The emphasis is on fitting as many people as possible into as small a space as possible while still making a city that "quite simply, offers a great place to live, work and raise a family".That means it "will use 48 percent less energy and 58 percent less water than a conventional development of similar population [and will also produce 89 percent less landfill waste and generate 60 percent less carbon dioxide". China's cities are notorious for their appalling air quality and their poor quality open spaces -- developments like the Great City are part of a concerted effort on the part of the Chinese government to start rectifying some of the mistakes of the past two decades of mass urbanisation.It also offers an intriguing alternative to the urban sprawl seen in western cities over the past few decades, which has tended to favour low density housing planned out in repetitive streets -- often under the assumption that everyone would get around by car.The Great City does have a western-style green belt, though, keeping the city confined within a certain space and reducing the land taken up by human infrastructure (which is interesting, seeing as the British government is reportedly considering relaxing green belt laws in the name of economic development). The Great City will offer an inner-city experience for residents on the edge of an existing conurbation, rather than something semi-rural that we might recognise -- a good thing, too, as postwar suburban sprawl is a hugely inefficient way of living.The closest comparable project to the Great City in the UK for scale might well be the post-Olympic developments at Stratford, which is effectively an entirely new district planned from scratch -- but don't expect to see anything quite so vast in scale being planned on entirely virgin land any time soon.

Chengdu

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Government of China

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture

A completely new suburban city named the "Great City" will be built from scratch on the outskirts of Chengdu in southwest China as an alternative to the chaotic and environmentally inefficient urban sprawling happening in the city.The design of the city will ensure that residents won't need cars as everything will be within a 15-minute walk of the city centre. People will be housed in tall tower blocks, and 15 percent of its land will be devoted to parks and landscape space.As a result, the city will use 48 percent less energy and 58 percent less water, and it will also produce 89 percent less landfill waste and generate 60 percent less carbon dioxide.