Jessica Bradley examines how circular cities are being built in 2026, including the infrastructure needed for them to reduce waste.
According to circular thinking, urban infrastructure is integral to long-term, widespread success. Across a material’s lifespan – from design to material choices, development and manufacturing, and reuse and recycling – the physical and digital components of a city can either help or hinder its new and continued value.
“I’ve spent much of my career looking at how we can create more value from the resources already available to us,” says Martin Pauli, regional business leader for resources and critical materials at Arup.
“We need to apply this thinking at the scale of entire urban systems. The real opportunity lies in understanding the connections between resources, energy, water, infrastructure and communities. That’s where transformative change happens.”
But what does the infrastructure of a UK city that’s designed to keep products and materials in circulation really look like? And is it achievable?
What does good circular infrastructure look like?
Circular cities are central to efforts to ‘cradle and nurture humanity’s shift towards a sustainable future’, researchers say.
A circular city must be designed to reduce reliance on raw materials, capture long term value and reduce waste, says Ben Glover, director at Arup.
It should, he adds, be collaborative, and prioritise investment mobilisation and the long-term stewardship of shared assets, to ensure that circular solutions can be sustained and scaled.
“Ultimately, a successful circular economy should deliver reductions in material costs while creating wider environmental and social benefits,” he says.
This comes down to how the infrastructure of a city deals with materials that are coming in and going out, from a corporate business perspective to a householder perspective, says Debbie Ward, director of circular economy and reuse at The Alliance for Sustainable Building Products.
At the household end, infrastructure needs to make it easy for people living in cities to reuse and repair. Community and charitable reuse organisations, are often overlooked, however, and need more recognition from local authorities, researchers said in a paper earlier this year.
The researchers argue that such organisations, which form a city’s reuse infrastructure, ‘facilitates forms of collection, processing and redistribution of used goods that would not be possible in purely commercial businesses’.
They say that this infrastructure fosters collaboration and sharing, and ‘brings people face to face with the values of material in circulation, and with one another’.
“We want circular living to become second nature and easy for people,” says Ruth Lambert, chief executive of Share and Repair, a Bath charity with repair cafes, library of things and other services to help educate and support people to reuse and repair.
Share and Repair launched in 2017, when it set up its first repair café. Now, it has 12 volunteer-run monthly cafes, with a base in Bath that offers repairs five days a week, and a Library of Things stocked with almost 900 ‘things’. At the end of 2025, it had 3,475 active Library of Things members, which was more than a 40% increase compared to the previous year.
Between April 2017 and March 2026, the charity saved the carbon equivalent of 143 economy flights – with 26.8 tonnes of waste diverted from landfill in this time. It largely puts its success down to its volunteers; the charity now has six members of staff and around 250 volunteers.
On a city-wide scale, experts argue that successfully implementing circular economy initiatives involves public and private sector involvement across production and consumption. However, transitioning to long-term, integrated systems is the most difficult aspect of building a circular city, Glover says.
While some financial incentives exist for organisations who want to reuse, for example, not all cities are equipped for the logistical challenges of this transition, Ward argues.
“It can take so much additional time, and transport and logistics can be expensive, and you may not have the resources to dismantle,” she says. “And the people who make the decision to reuse aren’t necessarily connected to the people who can implement it.
“It’s not yet business-as-usual – it’s a different process to what we’re used to, it doesn’t run as smoothly and there are far fewer certainties,” she says.
Who’s responsible for leading a circular city?
Cities are in a powerful position to enable and test circular solutions, a report by the European Investment Bank (IEB) argues. Despite the concept of circularity being widely known and somewhat embedded in most cities, some say there is a lack of clarity for who should be leading it.
Many experts agree that local authorities also have a huge role to play in the transition to circular cities. One key area of this, Glover says, is public procurement, including during demonstration projects.
“They can work with the public sector so they can then feed this through their projects so they act as exemplars, and the supply chain learns with them and can then activate the same projects through private procurement as well,” she says.
The EIB advises that, given that the circular economy is trans-disciplinary, cities form an internal circular team, and from there, appoint a circular champion e to lead the engagement of different stakeholders.
Glover agrees that local authorities play a pivotal role in circular infrastructure, as investors, convenors, regulators and long-term stewards.
“Through planning, zoning, procurement, land allocation and investment decisions, cities can create the conditions that make circular solutions viable, scalable and attractive to private investors,” he says.
But there are some barriers to this. Experts argue that the circular economy needs long-term vision – much longer than a policial cycle – and that dwindling resources are a hurdle, too.
However, there are also constraints on the development of circular cities, such as the different priorities of companies, local authorities and national government – who are all responding to global influences.
Pauline Deutz, professor of circular economy and sustainability at the University of Salford Manchester, outlines in her 2026 paper that not enough consideration has been given towards the conflicting interests of regional public and private sector stakeholders.
One example of this, she says, is how to support shopping centres and high streets without supporting the linear economy. Also, Deutz writes, local authorities in England aren’t aligned with national policymakers on their powers to drive the transition to a circular economy. And it’s unclear, she says, how much capacity staff have to take on this extra role.
“There isn’t one person or entity who can organise a circular city,” she says. “There’s no one with a handle on the bigger picture – people are doing different things and hoping it adds up to something sustainable.”
Deutz has found in her research in Hull some examples of good practice in the third sector – however, they aren’t necessarily being driven by the circular agenda.
“A lot of the circular economy activity happening in Hull is happening via the third sector, mostly for social purposes, such as trading second-hand goods to raise money,” she says.
“There’s a whole ecosystem going on which exists because of the vast gap of social services, and some organisations are supported by the local authority, not to be circular, but to do things it can’t do to support people.”
Deutz argues in the paper that a circular economy based on social enterprises is providing ways for people to be circular on a survival level, and under the radar in terms of circular economy planning.
What’s missing from our digital infrastructure?
The value of physical infrastructure in a city, such as individual material hubs’ value, can only be realised through digitally connected systems that link available materials with designers, developers and contractors, says Glover.
Digital technologies offer tools to enable and scale up circular economy strategies, experts say, and enable physical objects and systems to be ‘deeply integrated with the digital realm’
Cities need a central database of local buildings earmarked for refurbishment or deconstruction that makes it clear where planning permission has been requested, so that others can see its pre-development audit data, and what materials may be coming available, says Ward.
France, she says, is a good example for holding pre-demolition audit data centrally. Pre-demolition audits are mandatory for buildings exceeding 1,000 square meters, and the data from these audits is held on a national data platform set up by the French government.
“It would be a gamechanger to have an effective, interconnected ecosystem of digital databases, hubs and digital platforms where people can buy used products and materials in a comparable way to how virgin materials and new products are sourced,” she says.
This, she says, would support a ‘harvest map’ approach where an architect’s designs are informed by materials that are already there.
What are we doing right?
One catalyst for cities to drive circular thinking was the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) introduction policy mandating Circular Economy Statements for major ‘referable’ developments, says Gilli Hobbs, director of circular consultants at Reusefully.
This change, finalised in 2022, integrates pre-deconstruction and pre-redevelopment audits into the planning stage. Westminster City Council then introduced in its Environmental Supplementary Planning Document a ‘Retrofit First’ policy, while the City Corporation is introducing the Material Passports, and by 2027, will require 75% of all new capital project contracts across the City to have explicit circular metrics integrated into procurement tenders.
“This is a city-level driver for circularity,” Hobbs says. “It’s started to filter out into other local authorities and how they can influence circularity through the planning process. We’re seeing real, practical changes happening on the ground.”
This is a clear example of how top-down changes – in this case, emphasising doing things differently through the planning process – can lead to market innovation, Hobbs says.
What’s standing in the way of permanent, city-wide systems?
Culture change cannot come before the proper infrastructure is in place, Hobbs says.
“It’s important to push people into thinking and designing in a circular way, but it won’t work if, at the other end of the scale, there isn’t the infrastructure to do what it’s designed to do,” she says.
Big system changes are needed here, she says, along with more high street initiatives like repair cafes.
But Lambert says this won’t happen without more funding from local and national government – as well as more leniency with business rates. She says funding is the biggest challenge for the repair café, which is a pay -what-you-can-afford service, and not enough to cover costs.
Any funding that does come, Lambert says, is short-term.
“We’re constantly having to apply for funding, which takes a lot of time away from doing what we’re doing.”
This also means that the repair café’s hub is forced into a series of ‘meanwhile’ spaces, which are often more affordable, but are set for demolition.
A 2026 report by Restart, who surveyed volunteers and employees of repair cafes, argued that local authorities need to reduce operating costs for repair cafes, including business rate relief, help with rent and advertising. It also argued that there needs to be local training courses to help more people become fixers.
Also, Deutz says measures must be taken to avoid a two-tier circular system that forces some people to live off second-hand goods while wealthier people get new.
The future infrastructure for circular cities
While we are arguably edging closer to circularity in some or the UK’s cities, much more change is needed, both at the city level, and at grassroots.
According to a PwC report, cities will require funding for circular infrastructure and businesses through green bonds, impact investing and public-private partnerships.
And change will also require national policies that enable on-the-ground innovation and scaling-up. For example, experts are calling for a Right to Repair policy that would enable products to be better designed so it’s easier to repair them, and make spare parts more available and less costly.
Also, experts hope that the long awaited Circular Economy Growth Plan will help make it easier for people to get repairs without having to send items back to the manufacturer, by expanding local repair hubs and forcing manufacturers to standardise spare parts.
Ultimately, cities must be designed for social cohesion, the PwC report argues, by embedding inclusivity into design principles. This involves promoting shared resource models that enable participatory engagement, and collective ownership and shared responsibility.
