Proposal of a circularity design approach for urban factories based on local stakeholders’ engagement

Abstract

Due to their bad image, factories have been pushed outside urban areas, making their supply networks wider with increasingly high environmental impacts. Although factories' implementation inside urban areas might be challenging with various constraints related to legislation, neighborhood, and higher rental costs, it can also be a great leveraging opportunity to increase resilience alongside created value, and reduce costs and negative impacts. This is mainly due to the concentration of circular economy actors inside urban areas, in addition to the availability of funding for sustainability-driven projects by local private and public institutions. The present paper proposes a design approach that provides urban factories with a set of local stakeholders’ engagement opportunities to enable circularity design throughout their value chain. A test of the approach has been conducted during 2 workshops with eco-design experts who were proposed with a case study of an urban factory in Grenoble. It has allowed the validation of the approach's usability and usefulness.