REsource management in Peri-urban Areas: going beyond urban metabolism (REPAiR) Horizon 2020. This project aims at promoting territorial and systemic solutions and strategies for using waste as a resource and promote circular economy in peri-urban areas. The project builds on a network of six Peri-Urban Living Labs – based in Amsterdam, Naples, Łódź, Pécs, Hamburg, and Ghent – engaging regional stakeholders in a process of co-exploration of regional resource management challenges, knowledge co-creation, and co-design of solutions in a real-life context.
The project’s main product is the Geodesign Decision Support Environment (GDSE), an open source interactive platform used to steer the process of elaboration of territorial circular solutions and strategies for decision in the context of a living lab. Beyond this, REPAiR innovates by adding a territorial dimension to Material Flow Analysis (MFA) on the regional scale, proposing a new sustainability assessment methodology and exploring regional governance and socio-cultural factors that matter for making circular economy work. The contribution of the SPS Section to REPAiR focused on two themes. First, we explored the roles of the governance settings and territorial and socio-cultural characteristics of different (peri-) urban areas as factors constraining or supporting the capacity to drive a transition towards circular economy. Second, we shed new light on knowledge transfer across territories, by orchestrating and exploring the dynamics of the process of transfer of solutions between the six regions. This allowed for ob-serving how solutions for circular economy are transformed as they “travel” across space and determining what makes them transferrable.
GDSE in action – visualising material flows and circular activities across space.
More information: http://h2020repair.eu
Written by Marcin Dąbrowski