Circular City Ports - Workbook

03 Benchmarking Benchmarking methodologies
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The exploratory trajectory started with a desktop research
on eleven ports in different parts of Europe.
The benchmarking of these different ports had the
aim of learning and understanding different ways
in which ports start to strategize upon circularity at
different scale, level and with different methodologies,
motives that each port have and the leverage
that they use. Herein, we started from the actors
and system as entry point. In this way we could keep
a broad perspective in the reading of ‘city ports’
(which is not easily depicted one-sidedly in spatial
terms or can be very limiting). The idea was, by first
looking at the actors and its systemic functioning,
we could say something more relevant about space
afterwards.
The benchmarking started posing to main questions
related to the ports: What type of circular Economy
is present in each port? To which other activities do
they relate?
In order to understand the different ambitions of the
ports, we zoomed in the analysis of practices in each
city port, documenting different circular initiatives,
translating all the information gathered in a descriptive
“fiche”. Each “fiche” was then categorized according
to their functions, their role, in the narrative
of the circular economy as a whole system. In this
sense, the work brought to the creation of a body of
knowledge of interesting practices, together with a
general overview on port ambitions and strategies,
which can be shared and extended with new practices
and ports, in order to envision together strategies
for the transition toward circular economy.
The practices analysed for each port were categorized
following the distinction of: orgware, materials
and framework: