Circular Urbanism: What It Is and How Cities Apply It

Circular urbanism is the application of circular economy principles to the planning and management of cities: keeping materials, buildings, water and energy in use for as long as possible, closing resource loops within the territory and designing from the outset so that nothing ends up as waste. Against the linear model of extract, build, use and demolish, it proposes cities that work like ecosystems. Two authors gave the approach its theoretical shape: Walter Stahel, a Swiss architect who has championed the performance economy since 1976, and Ken Webster, former head of innovation at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and author of The Circular Economy: A Wealth of Flows (2015).

Walter Stahel and the performance economy

In 1976 Stahel and Geneviève Reday delivered a report to the European Commission that already proposed substituting labour for energy through repair, reuse and remanufacturing. In The Performance Economy (2006) and The Circular Economy: A User's Guide (2019) he develops the idea of selling performance instead of products: the manufacturer keeps ownership and therefore the incentive to make goods last. Carried into the city, this means buildings conceived to be dismantled, infrastructure that is maintained rather than replaced, and a local economy of repair workshops, rental and refurbishment that creates jobs close to where consumption happens.

Ken Webster and the city as a system of flows

Webster brings the systems view. In A Wealth of Flows he describes the economy as a set of flows of materials, energy and information that, properly designed, regenerate instead of depleting. Cities, which consume around three quarters of the planet's resources and generate half its waste, are where that redesign has the greatest effect. Webster distinguishes biological cycles, where nutrients return to the soil through composting or biogas, from technical cycles, where metals, plastics and components are recovered without losing value. A circular urban plan has to map both flows before deciding where to intervene.

How circular urbanism is applied

In practice, circular urbanism works on four fronts. In construction, with material passports that record what each building contains so it can be recovered, design for disassembly and priority for renovation over demolition, since building generates more than a third of Europe's waste. In water, with rainwater harvesting, greywater reuse and sustainable drainage. In energy, with heat networks that capture waste heat from industry and data centres. In organic waste, with neighbourhood composting and biogas that returns to the city as energy or fertiliser.

Amsterdam adopted a circular strategy in 2020 based on Kate Raworth's doughnut model, with the goal of halving its use of virgin raw materials by 2030; the Buiksloterham district serves as a laboratory for circular housing and water. Paris requires material reuse criteria in its public competitions, and Copenhagen recovers heat from incineration and wastewater treatment for its district heating network. None of these cities is fully circular, but all have moved from pilot projects to regulation and public procurement, which is where the change of scale happens.

Resilience and limits of the circular model

Circular urbanism improves urban resilience because it reduces dependence on distant supply chains and landfills and creates local jobs in repair and reverse logistics. Its limits are equally clear: recycling consumes energy, the circularity of a material does not guarantee that less of it is consumed, and without sufficiency measures the rebound effect can cancel the gain. Stahel and Webster agree that the aim is not to close loops for their own sake but to design cities that need fewer resources to deliver more well-being, and that this design is a political decision before it is a technical one.