Placing cities in the circular economy: neoliberal urbanism or spaces of socio-ecological transition?

ABSTRACT

The last decade has seen the adoption of the imaginary of a circular economy (CE) by cities. To date, much of the debate has been technical in orientation, making that the implications of the CE for urban theory and praxis have hitherto not been explored in great depth. This Debates and Interventions contribution collects work from diverse disciplinary quarters and geographical contexts, documenting the CE as an emerging alternative space of urban politics and praxis albeit constrained by neoliberal urbanism. The selected contributions show that circular strategies constitute a ‘spatial fix’ marrying capital accumulation with the rising environmental challenges at the urban scale, hence reproductive of the splintered urbanism that mark contemporary neoliberal cities. At the same time, it appears the CE can be embedded in value systems that challenge neoliberal urbanism, opening spaces for a socio-ecological transition that the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has made more urgent than ever.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• diverse economy
• capitalism
• spatial fix
• political economy

Acknowledgments

The current Debates and Interventions contribution emerges from a session titled “Circular cities: urban fixes or spaces of hope?” organized at the Annual Conference of the RGS-IBG in London, 27-30 August 2019. We would like to thank all contributors for their commitment, one anonymous referee for her/his valuable feedback, and the editors Andrew Jonas and David Wilson for their support and guidance throughout.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper is funded by Innoviris, grant number 2017-PRFB-17.