Infrastructuring the Circular Economy

André Nogueira,Weslynne Ashton,Jonathan Pereira,Carlos Teixeira,Elizabeth Lyon

doi:10.3390/en13071805

André Nogueira, Weslynne Ashton + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/en13071805

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Abstract

The circular economy (CE), and its focus on the cycling and regeneration of resources, necessitates both a reconfiguration of existing infrastructures and the creation of new infrastructures to facilitate these flows. In urban settings, CE is being realized at multiple levels, from within individual organizations to across peri-urban landscapes. While most attention in CE research and practice focuses on organizations, the scale and impact of many such efforts are limited because they fail to account for the diversity of resources, needs, and power structures across cities, consequently missing opportunities for adopting a more effective and inclusive CE. Reconfiguring hard infrastructures is necessary for material resource cycling, but intervening in soft infrastructures is also needed to enable more inclusive decision-making processes to activate these flows. Utilizing participatory action research methods at the intersection of industrial ecology and design, we developed a new framework and a model for considering and allocating the variety of resources that organizations utilize when creating value for themselves, society, and the planet. We use design prototyping methods to synthesize distributed knowledge and co-create hard and soft infrastructures in a multi-level case study focused on urban food producers and farmers markets from the City of Chicago. We discuss generalized lessons for “infrastructuring” the circular economy to bridge niche-level successes with larger system-level changes in cities.

Highlights

The circular economy (CE) has captured the imagination of civil society and corporate actors as a framework for realizing the elusive goals of sustainability [1]
Researchers integrated tools from industrial ecology and systems thinking with design frameworks and methods as a means to both gather and analyze different types of data, as well as support collective decision-making about alternative futures with those embedded in the context of research
Urban infrastructures are the means through which resources flow in a system, given a specific goal, traditionally to support economic growth through the lenses of technical systems

Summary

Introduction

The circular economy (CE) has captured the imagination of civil society and corporate actors as a framework for realizing the elusive goals of sustainability [1]. Cities face urgent needs to expand and advance CE adoption and sustainability-oriented practices due to growing concerns over climate change, environmental pollution, and the inequitable distribution and allocation of resources in the linear (take-make-waste) economy [3,4]. They present unique opportunities for CE interventions as they are territories where human populations are concentrated, Energies 2020, 13, 1805; doi:10.3390/en13071805 www.mdpi.com/journal/energies. Cities are complex socio-ecological-technical systems (SETS) with nested subsystems such as neighborhoods, organizations, and infrastructure networks, and are themselves part of larger SETS such as states and nations. Urban infrastructures are key elements that integrate these systems and are responsible for the interconnectivity and interdependency of resource flows and allocation across their levels; for example, policy and strategies at the macro-level, organizations and operations at the meso-level, and patterns of daily life and related tactics at the micro-level [6]

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