Every city is unique and every city has different characteristics. These features greatly affect the systems and subsystems of the city. Therefore, each city should be carefully analyzed with its pros and cons. It should be examined how the circular actions that are looping, adapting, and ecologically regenerating are located in city systems.
There will be benefits that the city will have after the circular developments in the city. These benefits are primarily ecological, social, and economic. All these benefits should be foreseen after analyzing the city. Adjustments and improvements should be made according to these benefits for the city.
Each city must discover its own circular actions that enable ecological benefits to emerge. Ecological benefits such as reducing resource consumption, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing urban capacity to adapt to climate change.
Local cycling such as local circular food systems, community energy; and regener-ative actions like community gardening, conservation projects, urban agriculture can increase environmental awareness among the public.
Circular actions should increase access to resources in communities such as goods, accommodation, heat, clean air, green spaces. For example, furniture reuse can reduce challenges and help build human capital. However, it should be noted that the benefits of circular actions may not be experienced equally across communities.
For instance, low-income households have less access to green spaces.
Circular actions should result in economic benefits such as supplying and pro-duction costs to manufacturers, economic value creation, diversification of the economy, and creating employment.
Pop-up events allow the city to reactivate unused spaces, increase local vital-ity, increase local land values and stimulate the local economy. Therefore, pop-up events in the city can be a significant circular action for the economic benefits to emerge.
The concept of the circular city began to emerge in Europe after 2014, and the European Commission followed the publication of a series of policy documents.
This was followed by the Netherlands, Scotland, Finland, and Germany having national strategies for CE as of 2016. As can be understood from this, there are some circular developments in some European cities. Therefore, cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, London, and Stockholm, which are on the way to becoming circu-lar cities, can be taken as examples. These cities should be examined as a case study.
Every city defines circularity in a different way. Such as focusing on the application of CE principles with the framework of RESOLVE of six actions, supporting circular business models like London, promoting industrial symbiosis like Rotterdam, or managing municipal material waste like Lisbon.
Furthermore, Amsterdam recognizes the importance of implementing the CE strategy as part of an integrated approach to sustainable development alongside policies for environmental regeneration, adaptation, and resilience. As seen in these examples, the motivations for adopting circular development in cities also differ significantly. Each city needs to find its own motivation to adopt circularity in
accordance with its own urban systems and urban character.
Amsterdam took into consideration the connection between waste producers and users, looping the construction and organic waste by creating the smart data about wastes, encouraging the pop-up circular experiments, reusing the houseboats for different activities, gray water cycling as a circular action.
Paris has circular actions such as looping construction materials, food, and water, particularly, covering the city’s roofs and walls with 100 hectares of vegetation, replacing the existing gray infrastructural system with a blue-green alternative.
London instead of other cities has a strong example of a park with circularity. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP) has a process of ecological restoration such as bioremediation, local clean-up programs, conservation schemes, sustainable drainage systems, circular construction systems such as soil-washing, materials exchange platforms, resource banks.
Stockholm has the circular principles for 25 years is called Ecocycles 1.0. There are thermal power stations, purifying wastewater, organic waste from seaports used to feed the waste-to-energy system, the stored water used for watering vegetation in the port for circularity.
As can be seen from these sample cities, the main issues are the waste man-agement in the city, looping the construction, organic, food, material, and water, reusing the public spaces, greenery, etc. The integration of all these phenomena with each city should be studied in order to enter the path of being a circular city.
In addition, applying circularity in only one part of the city, examining that region, and starting the applications can be a solution for the beginning.
A method to characterize the circular city and its application to Turin
4.1 Turin as a circular city, general overview of Turin
The history of Turin stretches from Roman times to the birth of the Italian state and to the present day. For much of the 20th century, Turin was the industrial capital of Italy and home to an enormous array of automotive and mechanical manufacturing firms and related industries that fueled Italy’s post-war "economic miracle".
Today, Turin is known for its technological, engineering, higher education, design, and manufacturing professions, a strong legacy of social activism, a progressive political and intellectual tradition, and an important artistic and cultural heritage that drives a growing tourism industry. As the regional economic engine, Turin has extensive infrastructure, including an international airport, intermodal cargo port, and high-speed rail links to Milan and the rest of Italy. (green capital)
4.1.1 Urban development of Turin
There are two main factors that are vital to understanding Turin’s urban develop-ment:
The first one is that all the central city was developed from the mid-1500s through the 1800s. While the Baroque style is very well preserved, it adapts the urban core
Figure 4.1: Turin maps 01. Reproduced from [10]
Figure 4.2: Turin maps 02. Reproduced from [10]
to modern challenges and develops new infrastructure within it.
The second one is the absolute centrality of the industry as the driver of the major expansion of the city from the 20th century to the 1970s.
The city expanded furiously to accommodate industrial growth and a massive influx of migration from southern Italy, fueling extremely rapid urbanization in the span of just a few decades[10].
Turin is one of the greenest cities in Italy with 50 m2 of green space per capita.
While the city has been fortunate to inherit large parks and greenways from its baroque past, its targeted efforts to transform brown areas into green spaces, turn river corridors into ecological green belts, and create neighborhood green spaces with every redevelopment project have yielded highly successful results.
4.1.2 Transformation of mobility in Turin
On the mobility front, Turin has gone to great strides to overcome a cultural infatuation with the private automobile to public transformation. Even Turin’s most prestigious public squares were completely overrun by the automobile. In
Figure 4.3: Turin transportation. Reproduced from [10]
addition to major improvements in the transportation sector, which have reduced greenhouse gas emissions significantly, Turin has made enormous strides in the heating sector as well and is now the most district-heated city in Italy with over 50% of the city connected to district heating systems.