Cost Action tackles the complexities of circular city planning

On Friday, 23rd October, the 4th day-long meeting of the COST network project Circular City happened online. More than 60 participants from nearly all European countries continued their discussions on the circularity opportunities and challenges that individual nature-based solutions may have to make cities more sustainable and resilient.

To visualise to its wide audience what the project means with “Circular City” and what “nature-based solutions” could do in the future, a short explanatory video has been launched that will also serve as the group’s digital working model.
The video can be found here.

In several workshop rounds and two plenary sessions, the project’s four working groups – Urban Water, Green Buildings, Resource Recovery and Urban Farming – revisited the outcomes of the three previous virtual meetings which happened since June 2020 and which drew up a repository of available nature-based solutions ranging from areas as diverse (or not) as urban farm and bioswale or anaerobic digester and extensive green roof.

Katrin Bohn is one of the four academics representing Great Britain in this COST Action which is fully titled The Circular City: Implementing nature-based solutions for creating a resourceful city, and contributes mainly to the Urban Farming working group of the action.

Whilst our work is ongoing, urban agriculture’s key contributions to circularity have been identified as food production, nutrient recovery, material recovery (biomass) and rain water management. Examples are being collected of the opportunities that integrating food system activities into cities may pose, such as increasing biodiversity or reducing packaging waste, as well as of its challenges, such as the competing interests in relation to water or land use. The work will continue and be reassessed in the next meeting in December.

For further information on this COST Action see the project’s website.

COST Action Circular City is on facebook and twitter.

For more information on Bohn&Viljoen’s role in the project see here.

Image: Still from the project’s explanatory video (source: COST Action Circular City www 2020)