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作者

David Bassens;Wojciech Kębłowski;Deborah Lambert

来源

URBAN GEOGRAPHY,Vol.41,Issue6,P.893-897

语言

英文

关键字

Sustainability,diverse economy,capitalism,spatial fix,political economy

作者单位

Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, Vrije Universiteit Brussel , Brussels, Belgium

摘要

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: Sustainabilitydiverse economycapitalismspatial fixpolitical economy “As major engines for economic growth, cities can drive the circular economy agenda forward to unlock economic, environmental, and social benefits.” (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2020, https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/) As shown by the above statement, cities are crucial actors for the proponents of the circular economy (CE). However, the CE has come to town only recently. The roots of the CE lie in the debates on industrial ecology, environmental economics and sustainability (Boulding, 1966; Stahel & Reday-Mulvey, 1981). Conceived in the early 1990 s (Pearce & Turner, 1990s), the notion of the CE was discussed primarily among engineers, natural scientists, and economists. It is only in the last decade that the debate has shifted from industrial implementation to more conceptual reflections and matters of territorial governance, engaging first Chinese and then European scholars (Khitous et al., 2020). While the debate on how to define the CE is still ongoing (Kirchherr et al., 2017), circularity points to new business models aimed at increased efficiency of production and consumption and achieving a restorative and zero-waste economy by closing the loop. The flourishing research into national, regional, and more lately urban indicators that could support a transition to the CE (Petit-Boix & Leipold, 2018; Prendeville et al., 2018; Remøy et al., 2019) suggests that cities are conceived as key entities apparently solving the contradiction between scarce resources and unlimited growth. As urban geographers, we need to seriously challenge this apparently elegant, but deeply troublesome view by placing the recent rise of the CE in the context of the growth paradigm of urbanized capitalism. It appears that the CE is prone to a Polanyian double movement. On the one hand, although diverse urban actors have recently begun to adopt the “circular” vocabulary, the contemporary “buzz” around the CE “has almost exclusively been developed and led by practitioners, i.e., policy-makers and business development agencies such as business consultants, business associations, business foundations etc.” (Korhonen et al., 2018, p. 545), indicating the pressure to frame the CE as one of ready-made “best practices” of competition-driven, “mobile urbanism” (McCann & Ward, 2011). Circular strategies could further constitute a “spatial fix” marrying capital accumulation with the rising environmental challenges at the urban scale (While et al., 2004), hence reproductive of the splintered urbanism that mark contemporary neoliberal cities. On the other hand, and more hopefully, early evidence suggests that the CE can be embedded in value systems that challenge neoliberal urbanism, potentially opening spaces for socio-ecologically transformative practices (Kębłowski et al., 2020). This tension invites urban geographers to draw on urban political economy without falling for its capital-centric, totalizing representations (Gibson-Graham, 2006). To our regret, much of the CE debate is unhelpful in unraveling these questions. To date, it has been predominantly technical in orientation, relying on epistemologies and ontologies that are disengaged from urban theory and praxis, and insensitive about how the CE could be embedded in urban society. Thus far, although few scholars have begun to explore the urban questions in the CE, several stepping stones are in place. The nascent urban debate about the CE could place it squarely in discussions about the embeddedness of diverse urban economies (Gibson-Graham, 2006). Crucially, this perspective centers on the degree to which the CE allows to build new state-market-civil society coalitions enabling or hampering socio-ecological change within and beyond cities. Williams (2019) hereby points to the local scale and proposes Curtis (2003) notion of symbiotic local capital comprising of natural, social, financial, human, and physical capital to think through how the CE can take root in cities. Hobson (2016) seeks to locate the agency of citizens and develops the concept of generative spaces in cities to challenge the “impoverished view of the role of citizens” (Hobson & Lynch, 2016, p. 16) and look for practices of emergent political action. Similarly, Norris (2017) uses the notion of a domestic circular economy to point to the various socio-political configurations and collaborations at stake in urban micro-economies. Meanwhile, Fratini et al. (2019) call attention to place-making dynamics and the complex geographies of urban transformations. In this contribution to Debates and Interventions, we collect work from diverse disciplinary quarters and geographical contexts. We document the CE as an emerging alternative space of urban politics and praxis, albeit constrained by neoliberal urbanism. We start our journey in Hull, where Lekan and Rogers show how the digitization of the CE is reinforcing existing socio-spatial inequalities in the neoliberal city. Still, these authors also stress the possibilities of digital CE spaces to achieve a more inclusive economy, for instance, when married to other value systems supported by platform cooperatives. Next, we move to Delhi and Jaipur, where Rathore illustrates how the CE is embedded in existing informal e-waste chains marked by ethnic divisions of labor. These informal economies of e-waste, however, are currently displaced and rendered invisible in a recent top-down push for capital-intensive waste recycling procedures. Hobson then draws our attention to the contribution that urban geographers can make in studying the embeddedness of contemporary consumption practices. She problematizes dominant notions of “circular practices” that locate change at the level of individual choice and behavior. Acknowledging structural conditions such as the need to stay “connected” in urban environments to access urban amenities and services provides insight into why a shift from consumers to users is all but evident. Next, with Kampelmann we travel to Amsterdam, Brussels, and Montreal, to discuss urban forest exploitation. In his contribution, Kampelmann details how local urban value chains can become institutionally and territorially embedded. He deploys the concept of “value cascading” to underline the crucial function of place-based storylines that speak to citizens and manage to congeale value onto otherwise undervalorized products to “save them from the woodchipper”. Finally, the contribution by Williams argues for a spatial planning perspective on the CE, stressing the need to make physical space in cities through planning instruments, but also leveraging the planning process as a space for community action around the CE. In her view, there is no way around the observation that, for the sake of ecological transition, spatial planning must go beyond oft-seen temporary forms of experimentation. Instead, there is an urgent need for spatial planning to provide long-term space for what the capitalist markets see as low-value circular activities, waste being the most pertinent example. To conclude, let us note that this journey takes place at the time of radical uncertainty. When planning it, we could not have conceived that urban life would be drastically altered by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. As politicians anemically seek to relaunch “the economy”, their agendas are often set on a return to the “normal” growth-based economic paradigm. However, the ongoing crisis may also have opened Pandora’s box, triggering visions, policies and practices that could be at odds with capitalist growth, as citizen-led solidarity-driven initiatives are stepping up where the state has failed to provide. As the fragility of global commodity chains that (used to) provide essential goods supporting social reproduction is becoming painfully clear, more attention is given to the importance of local production. Regardless of its potential ecological impact, this shift will be socio-ecologically transformative only if essential sectors are approached as building blocks for a foundational economy build on collective consumption, public procurement, social and ecological licensing, and new constellations of public-private-civic governance (Foundational Economy Collective, 2020). The principle of closing the loop, central in the CE, should be uncoupled from value-extractive logics and introduced in the kinds of generative spaces identified in our set of contributions in the spirit of progressive localism (Featherstone et al., 2012). Holding this compass in hand, we find that it is an essential task of urban geographers to analyze whether actually existing practices of the urban circular economy can fundamentally set in motion processes of progressive socio-ecological transformation that will save humanity in the long run. 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. 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