Circular grassroots innovations for sustainable and inclusive urban transitions

The project aims at examining the challenges and opportunities that urban circular grassroots innovations encounter to create, maintain and scale their solutions for sustainable and inclusive transitions from below.

Cities are spaces of overconsumption, waste-intensive production, and high environmental footprints, but also hubs for creativity and innovation.

Citizens experiment with a wealth of innovations to address the challenge of a steady consumption growth and overuse of resources.

Despite their contributions further research is necessary to investigate the challenges and opportunities to diffuse these practices in terms of a. space (in central/periurban city districts), b. collaborative and democratic arenas among local government, urban planners and grassroots organizations, c. inclusivity and scalability of the grassroots initiatives (challenges to meet their ambitions, grow, replicate and expand their sharing/circularity practices).

The project adopts an inter/transdisciplinary and participatory action-research approach in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Gothenburg and Nantes, building on our previous research from several disciplines (sociology, human geography, urban planning, social psychology, consumption, business and public administration) and areas (repairing, housing, food, recycling).

The project supports the scaling of the innovations by facilitating knowledge co-production among activists, social enterprises, scholars and policymakers.