Key details
Location
- Battersea
Price
- Free
Who can attend
- By invitation only
Type
- Workshop
In a time of accelerating climate crisis and growing inequality, the concept of the circular city has inspired diverse and powerful imaginaries, from the allegorical doughnut model to visions of a balanced, regenerative urban metabolism. These imaginaries have become central to political mobilisation, uniting various stakeholders around a new agenda for sustainable urban development.
Research has shown, however, how circular visions are often not truly novel but, rather, involve a repackaging of existing, largely ineffective urban green growth strategies. Even when circular city models are paired with more ambitious goals - such as Amsterdam's aim to become the world’s first ‘Doughnut Economy’ or Vancouver's circular food initiative - early policy implementations have tended to encounter barriers or limitations.
Circular city imaginaries
The flexibility of circular city imaginaries is one source of this challenge, as it enables these imaginaries to accommodate - even absorb - multiple economic and political agendas, some of which are neither socially just nor genuinely sustainable. In this context, for example, circular city imaginaries can distract from the urgent need to reduce, rather than just recycle, material production, consumption, and waste. By overemphasising technological solutions, these imaginaries can also neglect the communities and regions in which they are situated. Furthermore, they frequently fail to address critical questions around power, governance, and distribution: who controls the city's regenerative systems, and who stands to profit from them? Finally, there is the issue of circular cities operating alongside, rather than as a challenge to, a broader linear and extractivist economy.
For these reasons, the time is right to reconsider the circular city paradigm.
- How can cities overcome the limits and contradictions of existing circular initiatives?
- What regenerative systems effectively reduce environmental harm, while at the same time empowering communities?
- In what ways can the regenerative be combined with the redistributive?
- And, what practices and imaginaries will allow us to contest exploitation and extraction in ways that reach beyond the city, at a global and systemic level?
Submit your proposal
To address these and related questions, we invite contributions from across the social sciences, humanities, and art and design disciplines - including geography, urban planning, sociology, anthropology, architecture, design, media, and cultural studies, among others.
We are particularly interested in research that examines the interplay between the symbolic, narrative, and aesthetic dimensions of the circular city as both a discourse and an imaginary, alongside its material manifestations through policy, technology, and community activism.
Contributions that examine cities in the Global South are especially welcome, and we encourage critical engagements with the power dynamics shaping contemporary circular city discourses. This may include, but is not limited to:
- decolonial perspectives
- post-growth research
- posthumanism
- critiques of the urban-rural divide in circular city debates
- bioregionalism.
In the run-up to 2030, with many cities actively positioning circularity as a key strategy to meet the Paris Agreement targets, now is the time to explore new or more radical visions for regenerative urbanism. How can these visions align with, and also extend beyond, current climate and sustainable development goals, and how might they reshape our approach to a globally just and democratic green future?
How to submit a proposal
Please send proposals (max. 300 words) for 20-minute papers, together with a short academic CV or bio, to the event organisers via email: [email protected]
Organisers:
- Christoph Lindner, Royal College of Art
- Miriam Meissner, Maastricht University
Deadline:
- 23 May 2025
The Cities and Cultures Book series
A selection of the workshop papers will be published as an edited book intended for the Cities and Cultures book series at Amsterdam University Press.
