Circular economy expert Wayne Hubbard explains why cities are the engine room of the circular economy.
The circular economy has been a buzz term for more than a decade now, but we are yet to see circular approaches embedded in local authorities, across geographies, up and across national government policy, and deep into the communities where everyday consumption happens. In short, we are yet to see the circular economy scale.
I believe the solution to the scale problem lies in cities, and that is because cities have four structural characteristics that combine in a way that no other actor or institution can replicate or match.
1. Density
Diverse populations and institutions concentrated in a defined geography mean that pilots can be run faster, more cheaply, and be more representative than almost anywhere else. A repair cafe, a materials reuse hub, or a clothing hire scheme can be tested and demonstrate real results within months, not years.
2. Networks
Cities sit at the intersection of local government, business, civil society, and national policy in ways that no single sector can replicate independently. While I was CEO of ReLondon, we called this the ‘pinch point’ between policy and delivery. The ability to bring a landlord, a retailer, a community group, and a local authority into the same room, around a shared geography, is powerful. Crucially, cities also talk to each other across geographies, forming powerful global networks that are independent of national governments. (ICLEI, C40, GCoM).
3. Political scale
A city-level position carries disproportionate weight with national government. A single local authority making representations on extended producer responsibility or deposit return schemes may find it difficult to get its voice heard. A megacity or a coalition of cities, speaking with one voice and backed by operational evidence, is very hard to ignore.
4. Diversity
Urban populations reflect a nation’s full range of incomes, cultures, and circumstances. Solutions that hold up in a city, particularly if they work across different neighbourhoods and communities, are far more likely to be successful elsewhere.
Why cities are unique
No other single type of actor has all four of these characteristics. National governments have political reach but are removed from local delivery. Businesses have delivery capability but often have limited convening power. Community-based organisations have place-based trust but limited scale.
The great thing is that towns and cities are everywhere, and most people globally live in them. The UN’s ‘World Urbanisation Prospects 2025’ provides some new and compelling data on cities and towns. The UN has developed a new and consistent approach to assessing urbanisation with their ‘Degree of Urbanisation’ methodology (DEGRUBA). Using national data and satellite imagery, they have discovered that over 80% of the world’s population now lives in towns and cities. Previously, relying on national definitions, the UN had thought that this number was nearer 50%.
Using this new methodology, cities are defined as having at least 1,500 inhabitants per km2 and a minimum population of 50,000. They are home to 45% of the world’s 8.2 billion people. Two-thirds of all global population growth between now and 2050 is projected to occur in cities.
The 12,140 cities tracked by the UN range from 33 megacities of 10 million or more, through 429 medium-sized cities of between one and five million and down to 9,807 very small cities with populations below 250,000. 96% of the world’s cities have fewer than one million inhabitants. The interesting thing is that about half the world’s city dwellers live in larger cities (above 1 million) and the other half live in smaller cities (below 1 million).
When we think about where the circular economy needs to take root, we tend to think that the largest cities would lead. In fact, except for London and Paris, it’s the medium-sized cities that have led the way. Cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Phoenix, London and Paris. These cities all have the resources, the networks, and the political profile to act.
They are also largely in the global north. So what is needed is twofold:
- examples from medium-sized cities are needed to influence the megacities and the smaller cities in the global north;
- and also take root in the global south, where the biggest cities are bigger and where much of the global population growth will come from.
So how can this happen? Working in London for many years, I have come to think about scale not as a single axis but as three distinct dimensions, drawing on the framework developed by Riddell and Moore.
In this framework:
Scaling out means building tools, frameworks, and approaches that others can use without you having to be in the room. Methodologies for material flow analyses of food, textiles and packaging, originally developed for London, have been adapted by other cities. Communications campaigns, such as Repair Week or Circular Economy Week, create shared brand value that any partner can amplify. Free to access toolkits and published learning do the same thing at a lower cost.
Scaling up means turning delivery evidence into policy change. Demonstrating that ambitious circular approaches are operationally feasible shifts policy debate from whether to how. Barriers to circularity can be evidenced. A unified city’s voice, backed by real data from the ground, lands differently with a government minister than lobbying from any individual organisation.
Scaling deep means embedding circular change in specific places and communities. High streets are a particularly powerful lever. In London, 95% of residents live within 10 minutes of a high street, which makes them a natural concentration point for repair services, reuse infrastructure, and circular business support.
Community-level repair and reuse networks carry a kind of trust that institutional programmes rarely achieve, and they address cost-of-living pressures directly. Alongside the environmental benefits are a plethora of social value co-benefits, such as addressing digital exclusion, food poverty, and loneliness.
What happens when cities scale successfully
These three dimensions reinforce each other. Deep delivery generates evidence that enables upward policy influence. That policy influence creates conditions for wider replication. Replication, in turn, feeds better learning back into the next round of delivery.
If a single city can scale in three dimensions, a network of cities can create a reinforcing system in which learning circulates, improves and generates new insights.
Larger cities tend to generate research, commission toolkits, and run ambitious pilots. Smaller cities contribute something equally important: refinements that make large-city approaches transferable to different contexts, innovations suited to less dense environments, and neighbourhood-scale evidence that larger cities might struggle to produce.
The relationship can therefore be genuinely reciprocal. As more cities apply, adapt and share their learning, the quality of what circulates improves. The network becomes more useful the more varied its participants.
Networks to support this work already exist: the EU’s Circular Cities and Regions Initiative (CCRI), the European Circular Cities Declaration, coordinated by ICLEI, and the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform.
In the UK, we have formed the Circular Cities Network, and so we may well have access to fewer dedicated mechanisms since leaving the EU, but that gap is a reason to act, not to wait.
If cities are the answer, what action could they take right now? Here is a relatively simple proposition: what would happen if every city, regardless of size, asked a person or a small, dedicated team to develop three key circular economy recommendations across its municipality?
A practical exercise, with a brief to identify where the city is spending money on linear systems that a circular approach could save, such as through procurement, where local businesses could capture value currently leaving the city as waste, making the local economy more resilient, and where residents face cost-of-living pressures that reuse, repair, and sharing services could directly address.
During my time at ReLondon, we supported over 500 London-based SMEs in adopting circular business models, generating local economic activity, creating employment and reducing both waste and emissions. A functional repair and reuse economy is one of the most direct practical responses to both cost-of-living issues and resilience, and it is one that cities, of all actors, are best placed to build.
There is an oft-used but unattributed quote: ‘while nations talk, cities act’. Cities have the density, the networks, the political voice and the community relationships to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon circular economy now, at a meaningful scale, in all three dimensions. The engine room is already built. The question is whether we are prepared to use it.