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Investigating the territorial embeddedness of circular economic practices in the Brussels-Capital Region

Notes de la rédaction

This is the press release related to the article from Deborah Lambert, Mariana Santos and David Bassens, published on 7 November 2022. Read the article.

Faced with the major environmental and economic challenges which will continue to exist in Brussels in the coming decades, the principle of a circular economy modifying the modes of design, production and consumption of products as well as their reuse and recycling is being introduced gradually into regional public action. Which economic forms exist in Brussels already and what do they look like? What are the main opportunities offered by companies which fall under the circular economy? How are they integrated within the territory? What are the current limits to their development or to the fulfilment of their objectives? Deborah Lambert, Mariana Santos and David Bassens, geographers at the Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), examine these questions in the 173rd issue of Brussels Studies.

The researchers chose six case studies from the food sector with different entrepreneurial profiles and objectives, each of them related to the principles of circularity: Atelier Groot Eiland, the BEES Coop, the company Building Integrated GreenHouses, the company Brussels Beer Project, the Collectmet organisation and the Too Good To Go application. The authors approach these activities through the prism of their “territorial embeddedness”, i.e. the ways in which they are integrated into existing socioeconomic systems. They carry out a multidimensional analysis which addresses their inclusion within the socio-spatial, economic, cultural, financial and institutional fabric of the Brussels-Capital Region. To do so, they rely on some thirty interviews, participant observation and an analysis of the documents produced by the structures studied and the main regional policy on the subject, expressed in the PREC (Plan Régional d’Économie Circulaire 2016-2020).

The first observation concerns the great diversity of “circular” initiatives in Brussels, which must be taken into account in order to develop a worthy support policy. The analysis also highlights several hiatuses in the deployment of these activities, which may affect their development or conflict with their operating principles. In particular, the researchers point to the frequent mismatch between the initiators and clients and the socioeconomic profile of the neighbourhoods in which they are located, a contradiction between the sustainability objectives and the types of jobs created (often precarious or dependent on subsidies), and a dependence on crowdfunding for start-up, which favours the development of projects aimed at privileged consumers, while more social and collaborative circular economy projects would benefit from institutional support which is less focused on market-based economic models.

In order to make more widespread use of the circular economy model, it would be important to diversify the scope of ideas of the circular city, which is too often marked by a technological conception of the productive city, at the expense of notions such as solidarity and reciprocity, which are highlighted in two of the projects studied. Finally, in order to allow a greater diversity of circular and non-circular activities to exist, it is also equally crucial to provide affordable spaces in the city for less financially profitable activities.

References
Lambert, D., Santos, M and Bassens, D., “Investigating the territorial embeddedness of circular economic practices in the Brussels-Capital Region”, Brussels Studies [Online], General collection, No 173, 7 November 2022. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/brussels/6233
Contact
Tatiana Debroux, Editor in chief:
tdebroux[at]brusselsstudies.be

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