*Celebrating Spatial Planning at TU Delft: 2008-2019. Edited by Stead, Bracken, Rooij & Rocco

38 Spatial Planning & Strategy
REPAiR
Resource Management in Peri-urban Areas:
Going Beyond Urban Metabolism
MARCIN DABROWSKI
Fig. 17: Repair project meeting. Photo: M. Dabrowski.
REsource management in
Peri-urban Areas: going
beyond urban metabolism
(REPAiR) Horizon 2020. This project
aims at promoting territorial
and systemic solutions and
strategies for using waste as a
resource and promote circular
economy in peri-urban areas. The
project builds on a network of six
Peri-Urban Living Labs - based in
Amsterdam, Naples, Łódź, Pécs,
Hamburg, and Ghent – engaging
regional stakeholders in a process
of co-exploration of regional
resource management challenges,
knowledge co-creation, and
co-design of solutions in a re-
al-life context. The project’s main
product is the Geodesign Decision
Support Environment (GDSE), an
open source interactive platform
used to steer the process of elaboration
of territorial circular solutions
and strategies for decision in
the context of a living lab. Beyond
this, REPAiR innovates by adding
a territorial dimension to Material
Flow Analysis (MFA) on the regional
scale, proposing a new sustainability
assessment methodology
and exploring regional governance
and socio-cultural factors that
matter for making circular economy
work. The contribution of the
SPS Section to REPAiR focused on
two themes. First, we explored the
roles of the governance settings
and territorial and socio-cultural
characteristics of different (peri-)
urban areas as factors constraining
or supporting the capacity to
drive a transition towards circular
economy. Second, we shed new
light on knowledge transfer across
territories, by orchestrating and
exploring the dynamics of the process
of transfer of solutions between
the six regions. This allowed
for observing how solutions for
circular economy are transformed
as they “travel” across space and
determining what makes them
transferrable.