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.
