Walter Stahel

Born in Zurich in 1946 and trained as an architect at ETH, Stahel wrote in 1976 with Geneviève Reday a report for the European Commission on the potential for substituting manpower for energy, describing a loop economy in which repairing, reusing and remanufacturing create local jobs and reduce waste. It is the text that gave rise to the concept of the circular economy, and in 1982 he founded in Geneva the Product-Life Institute to develop it.

The Performance Economy (2006) added the idea of selling performance instead of products: the manufacturer keeps ownership of the object, charges for its use and therefore has an interest in it lasting and being repaired, the opposite of planned obsolescence. For cities, that logic translates into buildings designed to be dismantled, materials with passports, refurbishment before demolition and urban services, lighting, mobility, contracted by result.

The Circular Economy: A User's Guide (2019) is his manual for non-specialist readers. Stahel has advised the European Union and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and his critique of the linear economy that extracts, makes and discards inspires the circular urbanism of Amsterdam or Brussels. He is reproached for trusting firms to change out of self-interest; his answer is that regulation has to make what lasts profitable.

In a 2016 article in Nature he summed up his fiscal proposal: stop taxing labour and tax the consumption of non-renewable resources instead. If repair and remanufacturing use a lot of labour and new manufacturing uses a lot of materials, shifting the tax base would make durability profitable and create local jobs. For cities, that logic favours retrofitting over demolition, because the existing building already contains the energy and materials that new construction would spend again.