How Can Material Stock Studies Assist the Implementation of the Circular Economy in Cities?

Abstract

City and regional planners have recently started exploring a circular approach to urban development. Meanwhile, industrial ecologists have been designing and refining methodologies to quantify and locate material flows and stocks within systems. This Perspective explores to which extent material stock studies can contribute to urban circularity, focusing on the built environment. We conducted a critical literature review of material stock studies that claim they contribute to circular cities. We classified each article according to a matrix we developed leveraging existing circular built environment frameworks of urban planning, architecture, and civil engineering and included the terminology of material stock studies. We found that, out of 271 studies, only 132 provided information that could be relevant to the implementation of circular cities, albeit to vastly different degrees of effectiveness. Of these 132, only 26 reported their results in a spatially explicit manner, which is fundamental to the effective actuation of circular city strategies. We argue that future research should strive to provide spatial data, avoid being siloed, and increase engagement with other sociopolitical fields to address the different needs of the relevant stakeholders for urban circularity.