Circular economy and the city: an urban political economy agenda

Deborah Lambert

Wojciech Kębłowski

Socio-ecological economic transitions: Making space for the foundational economy Colloquium of the Foundational Economy Collective, 9 & 10 September 2019 , Brussels

CE has come to town

• the CE as an emerging notion in urban policy• appropriated and promoted by policy-makers across scales (Ellen MacArthur

Foundation 2019, World Economic Forum 2018, European Commission 2018, City of Amsterdam 2017)

• a growing body of academic work on the CE roots, definition, principles, and application (Blomsma & Brennan 2017, Kirchherr et al. 2017, Gregson et al. 2015, Prendeville 2018, Merli et al., 2018; Williams, 2019)

CE has come to town

• the CE as an emerging notion in urban policy• appropriated and promoted by policy-makers across scales (Ellen MacArthur

Foundation 2019, World Economic Forum 2018, European Commission 2018, City of Amsterdam 2017)

• a growing body of academic work on the CE roots, definition, principles, and application (Blomsma & Brennan 2017, Kirchherr et al. 2017, Gregson et al. 2015, Prendeville 2018, Merli et al., 2018; Williams, 2019)

• CE remains a problematic concept that is largely:• conciliatory: applied in an “approbatory, uncritical, descriptive and deeply

normative” way (Gregson et al. 2015)?• fuzzy• focused on material flows rather than on the social, spatial and political• approaching city as a container

Unpacking the political economy of the CE

• looking at urban scale as a particular set of socio-spatial relations between means of production, labour and space, strategically “fixed” by the capitalist mode of production (Brenner 1998; Harvey 1985)• => CE as an economic imaginary that enables the capitalist mode of

production to adapt at the urban scale to resource scarcity

• => “circular” re-structuring : an opportunity for already territorialised pro-growth capitalist interests or a guiding imaginary for mobilising citizens, politicians and entrepreneurs to engage in diverse modes of economic exchange?

Unpacking the political economy of the CE

• looking at the embeddedness of the CE• following the Polanyian ([1944] 2001) double movement to detect a tension

in the CE:• on the one hand, a market-oriented reconfiguration prioritising “efficient” and “optimal”

use of resources by “rational” economic actors (geared towards rent and profit extraction)

• on the other hand, a way of gearing “the economy” towards mutuality, reliant on personal ties, shared values and trust as guarantors of resource access (relying on householding, reciprocity and redistribution)

• => heterogeneity of values and practices

• looking at power in the CE• following Lefebvre ([1970] 2003), asking about the agency and action within

urban phenomena such as the CE

Unpacking the political economy of the CE

• scale / embeddedness / power

• => unpacking regulatory frameworks, legal configurations and governance systems, social relations and urban institutions, labourconditions, geographies, …

Circular economy and the city: Brussels

a pioneering integrated urban economic model

A new economic imaginary?

Zeller et al. 2018

Source: https://www.facebook.com/rootsbruxelles/

Source: own photos

Source: https://brusselsisyours.com

Quality consumerism(Winter 2003)

Food gentrification(Anguelovski 2015)

Screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=161&v=35c3Ora6fkw

Source/https://toestand.be/fr/alleedukaai/ and https://www.facebook.com/CollectActif/

Source: https://www.facebook.com/collectmet/