REFLOW’s ambition

Multi-disciplinary collaboration at the service of pilot cities

So, how can your city begin the transition towards regenerative and circular goals? What knowledge and skills are needed to engage in this journey? What types of technology can make this transition smarter and effective? How can multi-stakeholder partnerships and citizen engagement be supported to make the most of pooling of resources and collective intelligence? And how can you test these solutions?

Creating and implementing a circular and regenerative city vision is a complex process and requires an interdisciplinary perspective. REFLOW approaches these objectives through its various Work Packages. Each Work Package is an essential element that your city should tackle in the transition to a circular and regenerative city model. However, the Work Packages themselves are not standalone pieces: they interact with and depend on one another, contributing to creating this multifaceted perspective and, consequently, to assisting your city in navigating its transition.

As the content and tools developed by REFLOW will eventually be available to other cities beyond the project’s pilots, we avoid using the term “Work Package” in this resource, instead using terms like “element” or “aspect.” The different elements of REFLOW are listed below, as well as their Work Package counterpart:

• Co-Creation Design & Framework (Work Package 1): This WP will design, deliver and evaluate a series of CE practices responding to urgent citizen and business needs. It will shape and facilitate the people-centred approach at the basis of the project. The aim of this WP is also the alignment of the distributed ledger infrastructure (WP2), circular engineering practices (WP3) and governance and urban planning (WP4) into an overarching activity of business model ideation and prototyping.

• Technical Infrastructure & Softwares (Work Package 2): The integration of new technological solutions to facilitate the circulation of data and resources;

• Creating & Managing Circular Flows (Work Package 3): A sound material management approach to map, identify and redirect circular material flows;

• Collaborative Governance & Urban Strategies (Work Package 4): A set of new practices to redesign governance models towards more collaborative and distributed public-private-people alliances;

• Pilots Framework (Work Package 5): A structure that acts both as a tool and as a dashboard. It aligns the cities from the understanding of their context, while recording the progress of their journey to discover how to become more circular;

• Capacity Building (Work Package 6): A capacity building set of actions to align the skills and needs of all key involved stakeholders with the vision of the city;

• Communication (Work Package 7): An ongoing communication strategy to inform and engage stakeholders and create a successful narrative of the circular economy transition.