Towards a circular degrowth economy: Explaining the material valorization regime of city-regions

Project Information

DECYCLE

Grant agreement ID: 101039545

DOI

10.3030/101039545

EC signature date 4 February 2022

Start date 1 December 2022

End date 30 November 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 431 711,00

EU contribution

€ 1 431 711,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DECYCLE (Towards a circular degrowth economy: Explaining the material valorization regime of city-regions)

Reporting period: 2022-12-01 to 2025-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Why the project DECYCLE?

A transition towards a degrowth economy is necessary to tackle the related challenges of resource scarcity and waste accumulation. Degrowth is a paradigm of social and economic organization that pursues socio-economic wealth while reducing material flows and reusing waste in socially responsible and ecologically regenerative ways. As a concrete approach to realizing these ends, the concept of the circular economy has gathered political momentum. However, this model will have no impact on city-regions’ ecological footprint unless it challenges the regulations that dismiss certain materials as waste in the first place.
These regulations establish who is allowed to use, reuse, process, collect, and dispose of materials in the city, and how. These regulations are highly political and contested because they organize how profits and costs are distributed in the process of turning all waste into new resources. Moreover, they are key to explaining why urban growth is still a linear process that exploits nature and labor in areas far from cities.

What does DECYCLE studies?

DECYCLE investigates how to rearticulate and reform existing regulations to trigger, maintain and foster an active and planned reduction of the urban metabolism. The urban metabolism is the overall number of materials, energy, water mobilized in the production, use and disposal of the built environment, and that eventually turns into waste.
The project focuses on three material streams in particular: construction, food, and heat. These are the largest such streams circulating in cities today, both as raw materials and as waste. They are also the most essential resources for the survival of urban inhabitants. They are necessary for housing, eating, and heating homes. Currently, only a small fraction of these materials is reused while the economy keeps being highly extractivist. Things are improving by the day, but the transition to a truly circular economy of those streams if far from enough to address the large challenges of global urbanization.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

How does DECYCLE studies the urban metabolism?

DECYCLE takes a political-institutional approach to the study of regulations. This approach is today missing in most environmental studies, which too often focus on the socio-technical challenges of transitions. Those studies hardly explain the political behind the difficult change of regulations, and tend to flatten power dynamics.
The project studies how regulations are contested, defended, and negotiated by practices that downscale the urban metabolism. We look at movements, collectives, public, private, and civic actors that wish to devise more circular and just ways of using urban materials and the built environment.
The methodology used is ‘enactment tracing’: this approach consists in overlapping the analysis of regulatory texts (laws, reforms, subsidies, contracts etc.) with the perspectives of stakeholders involved in the process. In this way, the research can show the patterns of compliance and contestation and reveal the true political bottlenecks in the transition.

The project takes five European city regions as case studies, using two different disciplinary perspectives to study them.
- Barcelona and Milan city regions: these regions are being studied focusing on the role of ideology in achieving the circular economy, and on the potential of ‘circular workers’ in reshaping dominant ideologies of production and their underlying regulation.
- Vienna and Hamburg city regions: these regions are being studied from a bio-regional perspective. This perspective focused on the metabolic relation between inner cities, rural areas, natural reserves and industrial areas. The politics of these relationships are being studied looking at the circular economy plans in those regions.
- Amsterdam city region: this city region is taken as a control case study. There the analysis will follow an institutional perspective to explain the wider politics emerging from the transition to a circular economy and its spatial implications for planning

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

What are the expected results of DECYCLE?

The project aims to radically rethink the mainstream approach to sustainable urbanization: green and circular growth. The reason is that this approach is simply not delivery in any way. It is not reducing the economy’s impact on the ecosystem, which is rapidly collapsing. It is also not delivery in terms of political consent, which is rapidly decreasing in times of climate delaying and climate denialism. A focus on degrowth and on the regulations that establish the urban metabolism can reveal key leverage points for a new eco-narrative and a new eco-governance of sustainable urbanization.
Theoretically, DECYCLE questions the regulatory infrastructure of contemporary eco-capitalism. It sets out to free urbanization from its dependency on the production of waste and raw materials. In so doing, it lays the foundations for future socio-spatial inquiry into the institutional basis of city-regional metabolisms.

How are the results of DECYCLE being disseminated and used in both science and practice?

In line with the degrowth critique, DECYCLE develops a perspective on scientific enquiry that is embedded in spatial and socio-political practice. The very methodology of the project is geared to stimulate critical thinking both within and beyond the project. A broad network of partners is being built to further advance critical urban studies in different fields, from political ecology to sociology, from environmental studies to industrial ecology, from spatial planning to urban geography.

All outputs of the project can be found here www.postgrowthcities.com

For any question, please contact the PI: Dr. Federico Savini, [e-mail]

The production of waste in processes of urban transformation. Source: PI, Amsterdam, 2020