Buildings constitute much of the physical fabric of cities and urban regions and are responsible for a large share of greenhouse gas emissions. The first dimension acknowledges this by focusing on the resource efficiency of buildings and building operations. This is particularly relevant since buildings in cities are usually directly controlled by local governments. Urban transportation is another major source of energy consumption and pollution. However, as transportation is so closely related to land use, access and mobility, interventions in this area are considered under the second dimension, which deals with resilient and sustainable urban form.


The following description draws on the systems-based framework of urban metabolism, including ideas from industrial ecology and socioecological economics, to envision a circular urban economy, including near-net-zero approaches (Friant, Vermeulen and Salomone 2020) . This dimension of integrated urban action is driven by efficient sociotechnical infrastructure, which involves incorporating new technology into social behaviour, everyday life and the structures and strategies of urban institutions.


Under the first dimension the economies and built environments of cities are designed for cradle-to-cradle material, energy and water flows (for example, Ferrão and Fernández 2013; Esmaeilian et al. 2018; García-Guaita et al. 2018; Koutamanis, van Reijn and van Bueren 2018; John et al. 2019; Maranghi et al. 2020; Mohan, Amulya and Modestra 2020). This means:


v reducing waste through second-hand markets or sharing platforms (Ardi and Leisten 2016; Ghisolfi et al. 2017; Parajuly and Wenzel 2017);


v sourcing materials from discarded products to make new ones for consumers, business, and industry, and maximizing renewable energy and recycled water to create a continuous virtuous circle of production and consumption (Zeller et al. 2019);


v recycling industrial, built environment and household waste into new stocks of materials for manufacturing, using manufacturing by-products across industries (for example, Xavier et al. 2019; Arora et al. 2020), and collecting, sorting and recycling electronic and electrical equipment waste into new stocks of materials for manufacturing;


v reusing materials, for example by collecting, sorting and sending edible food to people who need it and composting all organic waste for urban and hinterland nutrient cycling (Lin et al. 2014) and agriculture (Wielemaker, Weijman and Zeeman et al. 2018; Bahers and Giacchè 2019; Edmondson et al. 2020).


The fact that not all materials will be locally available means that a regional cycle of production and consumption is desirable, powered by renewable electricity that mobilizes nearby resources in peri-urban areas. Such a system can stimulate the economy and provide jobs for a wide range of people in these exurban communities (Fratini, Georg and Jørgensen 2019). For energy and materials sourced from further away, a transparent and spatially explicit material


flow tracking system could be used to monitor nodes along the supply chain and encourage collaboration on design to aid disassembly, the recovery of materials and remanufacture (Stahel 2019), as well as on aspects related to health, equity and worker justice (Davis, Polit and Lamour 2016; Cousins 2017; Delgado Ramos and Guibrunet 2017; Guibrunet, Sanzana and Castán 2017; John et al. 2019). Ideally, these monitoring systems would also clearly show critical urban dependencies for resilience and any uneven urban development and dynamics. Making such knowledge openly available can empower the public and decision makers in the long term (Delgado Ramos 2021).


Achieving circular urban production and consumption systems depends on profound changes in the structure of the global and local economies that both drive and react to its dynamics. Most importantly, to overcome structural barriers, the priorities of economic actors need to be reordered so that profit alone does not drive the economy (chapter 2).


Under this first dimension, buildings – old and new; urban and suburban – should be efficient in terms of both energy and materials. They should be able to act as their own power sources and be climate-ready for adaptation and mitigation. Key aspects of this dimension include:


v designing and building highly energy- and resource- efficient buildings and retrofitting existing structures to maximize energy efficiency;


v installing roof-top solar generation (photovoltaics and solar concentrators), wind turbines or geothermal building energy, or renewable energy provided by solar farms and wind turbines in the peri-urban region, which also has the potential to generate resources and jobs in these areas (Bagheri et al. 2018; Bracco et al. 2018; Arabzadeh et al. 2020);


v building distributed public infrastructure and neighbourhood energy generation systems, as well as new building envelopes that generate their own power (Van Den Dobbelsteen, Broersma and Stremke 2011; Sarralde et al. 2015; Bagheri et al. 2019; Mohajeri et al. 2019), which can improve energy efficiency while enhancing resilience and recovery during grid power outages;


v planning buildings and districts so that they rely on renewable energy to relieve pressure on the grid or whose design reduces energy consumption through passive heating and cooling, daylighting, energy recovery ventilation, battery systems to store excess renewable energy for when it is needed, reflective roofs, and insulating green rooftops (Dabaieh and Johansson 2018; Sudhakar, Winderl and Priya 2019; Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, International Energy Agency [IEA] and UNEP 2020a);


v using local, recycled and innovative materials (such as advanced concrete or steel produced with hydrogen; Hajek 2017; European Parliament 2020).


If enough new buildings produce excess renewable energy, they can offset consumption by buildings that may not


Cities that Work for People and Planet 69


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