Embodying circular economy transition as a sustainable city concept, circularity in cities is increasingly the subject of policy innovations, urban strategies, and research & development agendas. It seems evident that a circular city should include more than the sum or multiplication of urban circular economies. Nevertheless, prevailing discourses remain till today business focused, and how circular economy creates economic, social, and environmental resilience in cities has yet to be explored. This paper conceptualizes the notion of urban circularity. It introduces an analytical framework sorting existing circularity concepts that are based on design and planning characteristics. Adopting comparative case study research on four contemporary forward-looking spatial representations of ‘circular’ places, this paper articulates their circularity interpretation. Demonstrating how diverging sustainability framings and political positions are embedded within the studied spatial representations, this paper aims to bring clarity in contemporary circular city approaches for policymakers as well as for spatial practitioners. The paper concludes with an agenda for multi-perspective and multi-dimensional circular city design, which is anchored in place specific and multi-scalar transition relations. It suggests urban landscape design as a disciplinary field to act as a pivot in transdisciplinary circularity design and research.

This paper aims to apply an intersectional environmentalist lens to the circular economy (CE) transition in Flanders. CE discourse often takes a deterritorialised approach, that is, a focus on innovation and growth. This approach tends to neglect local knowledge and background skills that can inhabit and work with landscapes in balanced ways to enable a fully circular society. This knowledge is partly embodied by “nobodied” actors. After introducing relevant terminology, this article draws upon a collaborative autoethnography which integrates autobiographies of authors’ experiences of circularity in projects with “nobodied” CE actors, and ethnographic notes on the Flemish context in which the CE discourse developed. The reflections unearth how a lack of an intersectional environmentalist lens in the CE rhetoric “nobodies” informal CE actors and practices. We show how they do not matter in a circular economy in a deterritorialised approach, but how they matter in a circular landscape view.

The notion of circularity has gained significant attention from governments of many cities across the world. The approaches to circular cities may range from narrower perspectives that see a circular city as the simple sum of circular economy initiatives to those more holistic that aim to integrate the whole urban system. Several researchers proposed frameworks that would guide cities to take a holistic perspective. This manuscript selects two frameworks and examines through them whether and to what extent broader and more holistic approaches to circular cities are being developed in practice. First, circularity principles, the scope of circular activities, and the concrete circular actions developed in the case study are read through Williams's approach to circular resource management. Second, the spatial circularity drivers framework of Marin and De Meulder is used to elucidate different sustainability framings and spatial practices that dominate contemporary conceptualisations of circularity. These two lenses are applied to five municipalities in Alberta (Canada) that have decided to develop strategies for 'shifting the paradigm' and transitioning to circular cities in 2018. Our study aims to investigate how holistic their roadmaps to circular cities are, and what changes are necessary to move towards more integrated approaches.

In recent years, cities have revealed themselves as being prominent actors in the circular economy transition. Besides supporting and initiating urban projects catalyzing circularity, cities are looking for monitoring tools that can make their progress towards circularity visible. Adopting Leuven’s pilot project for a building materials bank as a case study, this paper notes the particular challenges and opportunities in the pilot project to assess its progress and impact, in combination with gathering data for overall circular city monitoring purposes. Firstly, the paper names tensions between the “messy” transition process from policy ambitions to implementation and the question of data and monitoring. Secondly, the paper identifies relevant dimensions and scales to evaluate progress and impacts of a building materials bank, drawing from its development process. Thirdly, it proposes guidelines to monitor and evaluate circular city projects from the bottom up, combining quantitative indicators with guiding questions in a developmental evaluation. The analysis serves a critical reflection, distills lessons learned for projects contributing to circular cities and feeds a few concluding policy recommendations. The case study serves as an example that, in order to move beyond the tensions between circularity monitoring and actual circular city project development, monitoring instruments should simultaneously interact with and feed the circularity transition process. Therefore, dedicated data governance driven by enhanced stakeholder interactions should be inscribed in transition process guidance. Bottom-up projects such as a building materials bank provide opportunities to do this.

The design research presented here uses urban landscape design to attempt to reframe sustainable resource management. Urban metabolism projects generally originate in industrial ecology, emphasizing performance-oriented technical and entrepreneurial approaches. ¹ 1 Philippe Vandenbroeck, Whither Urban Metabolism, presentation in the Urban Design Strategies Course 2017, University of Leuven, Department of Architecture, Master of Human Settlements and Master of Urban Strategic Planning programme. However, industrial ecology approaches experience difficulties in making meaningful connections to social, economic and spatial contexts. Building on landscape architecture analysis and design methods such as mapping and systemic design, this article will highlight urban landscape design's capacity to reframe questions stemming from the urban metabolism model through the production of future imaginaries. Using the Belgian Central Limburg region's transition into a circular economy as a design exercise, this paper suggests that urban landscape design's constructivist approach ² 2 Ibid. has the potential to embed social and economic dimensions in applying urban metabolism. Operating ‘from within’ its intervention field, urban landscape design potentially facilitates transdisciplinary dialogues in urban metabolism design research.