Amsterdam’s Circular Economy
Contextual Quote
"For circularity to exist within capitalism, it must facilitate this acceleration of production and consumption."
"Amsterdam’s circular economy, however, is being developed very much within capitalist socio-spatial relations. Savini’s (2019, 2021) work shows how the city’s burgeoning circular economy is predicated on rising material through-put, processed by evermore fixed capital and infrastructure, to satisfy the self-expanding value-form of capital (Mau, 2023). For circularity to exist within capitalism, it must facilitate this acceleration of production and consumption, albeit through more-or-less closed rather than linear loops, turning capitalism’s sinks into taps. Reading the circular economy through a world-ecological lens enables us to see this process as a spatially polarised and implicitly imperialist project of reproducing colonial relations of uneven development, of exporting capitalism’s ‘entropy problem’ from core to periphery (Moore, 2023). Amsterdam thus occupies a privileged position within this deeply uneven geographical political economy of capitalist green transition, repositioning itself as a pioneer of circular economic innovation—seeking competitive advantage in revalorising waste streams as commodities, and appearing progressive and green, a clever strategy to attract inward investment and the new creative class of green entrepreneurs and post-growth innovators. These aspects of urban circular economies—class politics and institutional entrepreneurialism—require further investigation. When assessing circularity, we should always ask: What, exactly, is made circular? Who—and what—is doing the (paid and unpaid) work to make this circular? Circular for whom? And what and who is effaced—and how—by this circularity?"
- David Beel, Ian Rees Jones et al. [1]
Discussion
Interrogating Amsterdam’s circular economy
Matthew Thompson, Charlotte Cator et al. :
"As a city renowned for its liberal progressivism and radical experimentation with new ideas and sustainable practices whilst also a global hub for tourism, financial, logistical and digital and creative industries (Engelen and Musterd, 2010; Savini, 2017; Savini et al., 2016), Amsterdam represents an extraordinary case for studying the dynamics, contradictions and prospects for realising a circular city in the current conjuncture. Amsterdam benefits from its long history as the economic centre of the once-hegemonic Dutch Republic, ‘the head capitalistic nation of the 17th century’, as Marx put it (2013[1867]: 526). Moore (2003; 2010) cites Amsterdam as a prime example of the urban-rural antithesis—extracting cheap grains from the Baltic region to develop high-value-added sectors. The city’s wealth and power were built on early colonial expansion of extractive commodity frontiers across Europe and, later, into the Americas and Southeast Asia.
Present-day Amsterdam has an economic base that deeply problematises any claims to sustainability or circularity (Engelen and Musterd, 2010; Savini et al., 2016). Its harbour is one of Europe’s primary entrepôts for coal, feeding Germany’s Ruhr valley. Amsterdam’s airport Schiphol, in which the municipality maintains a 20% stake, is the world’s second biggest hub for international (connecting) passenger traffic after Dubai, with 52.5m in 2022 (Statistics Netherlands, 2023b). Amsterdam has the largest concentration of data centres in Europe, consuming vast amounts of electricity, playing into national digitalisation strategies promoting the Netherlands as a digital leader (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2020c). The Zuidas—Amsterdam’s very own Canary Wharf or La Défense (Swyngedouw et al., 2002)—is core to the city’s strategy to be a ‘business city’ and ‘knowledge city’ that leverages the ‘creative, innovative, entrepreneurial, talented people of Amsterdam’—a core strategic orientation since the early 2000s (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2004, 17–22). The Zuidas is one of the world’s largest tax havens, home to accountancy, consultancy, legal, insurance and finance firms specialising in corporate tax avoidance (Berentsen and Polman, 2021). The Netherlands is the world’s second biggest exporter of food products, after the USA, for which Amsterdam acts as a nerve-centre. Tourist numbers have more than quadrupled in the last two decades, from 4m in 2000 to 21m by 2019 (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2022). Amsterdam is thus the epitome of a global capitalist city.
Yet Amsterdam is also celebrated for its experimentation with progressive policies and its approximation of ‘the just city’ (Fainstein, 2010). Since 2018, the City of Amsterdam has been governed by a Green-Left-led coalition characterised as ‘new municipalist’ (Hamilton-Jones and de Groot, 2021) – an emerging global movement of urban activists aiming to democratise and feminise the local state through citizens’ assemblies, and to socialise city-regional economies through commoning, co-ops and remunicipalisation (see Schmid, 2023; Thompson, 2021). Amsterdam aims to become the world’s first ‘fully circular city’ by 2050 and already claims to be the first ‘doughnut city’, pioneering the application of doughnut economics (Raworth, 2017), based on the prior adoption of circular economy thinking in public policy since as early as 2014 (Cuomo et al., 2020; Savini, 2019, 2021). Diverse local groups are experimenting with commons-based alternatives to capitalism, as part of its Commons Network (Hamilton-Jones and de Groot, 2021); while bottom-up experimentation with doughnut economics is coordinated through the Amsterdam Doughnut Coalition. Amsterdam also hosts explicitly counter-hegemonic alternative policy organisations working to challenge neoliberal globalisation, notably the Transnational Institute (TNI), which feed into growing urban policy debates on circularity alongside remunicipalisation and economic democratisation.
Circularity as an urban sustainability fix The most recent manifestation of the city’s progressive policy agenda is the Amsterdam Circular Strategy 2020–2025—less a systematic programme than an overarching ‘narrative frame’ for coordinating multiple grassroots projects and public-private-civic partnerships (Cuomo et al., 2020; Savini, 2019, 2021; Savini and Geizen, 2020). This aims to tackle ‘the great challenge for the 21st century: to give ourselves and others a fair chance at a good life, while separating economic growth from the pressure on the environment’ (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2020b, 11). The City of Amsterdam envisions a combination of top-down and bottom-up interventions that enable achievement of public policy objectives whilst giving room to local circular experiments now proliferating across the city. Bringing together visions for a sharing economy, intelligent monitoring and management of waste streams, innovation and entrepreneurship, Amsterdam is being positioned as a frontrunner to benefit from competitive advantage in a growing international market for green and circular technologies.
Emphasising that ‘[a] circular economy is not only achieved with nice words and plans’, the city authority has formulated ‘concrete objectives’ to ‘reduce the use of primary raw materials by 2030’ and ‘be 100% circular by 2050’ (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2020b, 17). That such objectives remain ambiguous reflects the unchartered territory of transitioning to a circular economy without a ‘step-by-step plan that can simply be rolled out up to 2050’ (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2020b, 18). Implementation of the circular strategy is said to largely rely on ‘learning by doing’ and ‘scaling up wherever possible’ (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2020a: 14; our translation). This is an exploratory, pragmatic, recursive and experimental approach to ‘learning by doing’, one that ambitiously scales up to the city-region the kinds of practices and theories of change more conventionally deployed by social innovators in urban living labs at the more local level within specific experiments—and Amsterdam has plenty of urban living labs to draw upon for inspiration (Barnett, 2022; Cuomo et al., 2020).
Thus, so far, Amsterdam’s circular strategy is closely tied to the interests of what Savini (2019) has identified as its ruling urban regime—a ‘green growth coalition’. The learning-by-doing approach represents just one of the three modalities highlighted by Savini (2019) through which circularity is pursued by the coalition as an ‘urban sustainability fix’ and emergent regime of accumulation. First, ‘regenerative urbanist’ or ‘urban mining’ practices are experimenting with forms of upcycling, reuse, and repair (in bioeconomy, construction, electronics and chemicals) before the need for reprocessing and recycling. This is reflected in the city authority’s ambitions for circular construction of specific buildings, public spaces and, indeed, whole neighbourhoods under development, notably Haven-Stad (Port City), with aims to develop a marketplace for secondary construction materials as well as new data infrastructures to inform circular processes (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2020b).
Second, Savini (2019) observes the shortening of supply chains and restructuring of logistics for industrial recycling and waste processing, so that formerly centralised processes are localised at the city-regional scale, to become coterminous with urban waste streams and metabolisms. This is coupled with ‘reverse logistics’ connecting consumed goods back to producers for revalorisation. The City of Amsterdam aims to establish regional production networks and a large-scale circular agglomeration in its harbour—the Harbour company rebranding itself from a coal/gas port into a ‘circular incubator’ and ‘connector’ of material reuse streams, waste-energy, and e-waste processing—and to develop a marketplace and large-scale plant for hydrogen, Amsterdam’s newest circular strategy (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2020b).
Finally, ‘prosumption’ describes a socio-cultural shift through which consumerist subjectivities and practices are gradually replaced by integrated ‘prosumerist’ practices that collapse the distance between production and consumption through, for instance, sharing platforms, product redesign, and digital fabrication (Savini, 2019). Located primarily at the neighbourhood scale, such practices are a prominent part of Amsterdam’s circular strategy, which documents a wide variety of local bottom-up projects ranging from community composting to repair cafes. Prosumption has spawned an ecological entrepreneurial sub-culture experimenting with circular innovations. From 2013 to 2015, Amsterdam became a hotspot for start-ups in waste recovery and materials reuse, with ten times faster growth than the national economy; a makers industry specialising in repair and reuse is now promoted politically as a ‘new resource economy’ (Savini, 2021: 2126). Homegrown companies such as Metabolic and Circle Economy have quickly gained market share in offering consultancy services to other cities searching for sustainability fixes.
Savini (2019, 2021) argues that this embryonic circular economy is being promoted and developed by the city’s ‘green growth coalition’, which since as early as 2011 has attempted to reorient Amsterdam’s competitive advantage towards circularity. This coalition is backed by the Amsterdam Economic Board, a powerful network of corporate and governmental actors, as well as privatised infrastructure companies such as Amsterdam Harbour (Havenbedrijf) and the city’s water agency (Waternet). This is a broad-based urban regime with material stakes in an emerging circular economy driven by the municipality, which has been working with public and private partners to strategically invest in new infrastructure for circularity, including data servers and software platforms for sharing data about material streams, and logistical improvements to connect sectors for waste revalorisation. Waste has become big business in Amsterdam: ‘Garbage is gold’, as a former Alderperson for Economic Affairs put it (Savini, 2021).
But these are not the only actors in the new regime: ‘civil society organisations and motivated Amsterdammers are important ambassadors’ for a circular transition (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2023: 30). Especially with its ‘doughnut lens’ on the circular economy, Amsterdam invites a variety of actors into the transition, many of whom are connected through the Amsterdam Doughnut Coalition."
(https://academic.oup.com/cjres/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cjres/rsae022/7710625?login=false)
Source
- Article:Matthew Thompson, Charlotte Cator, David Beel, Ian Rees Jones, Martin Jones, Kevin Morgan, Amsterdam’s circular economy at a world-ecological crossroads: postcapitalist degrowth or the next regime of capital accumulation?, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2024;, doi
URL = https://academic.oup.com/cjres/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cjres/rsae022/7710625?login=false
"This article conceptualises the circular economy as a space of immaterial, as well as material, metabolic flows mediated by capitalism and planetary urbanisation. World-ecology provides us with the critical lens to view the circular economy as part of an emergent regime of accumulation that may supersede neoliberalism. However, if each regime entails new frontier zones for appropriating cheap natures and dumping wastes, then the circular economy—as a strategy for revalorising waste—presents a possible structural limit to capitalism’s further expansion. Moreover, when combined with notions of degrowth and doughnut economics, the circular economy may provide an imaginary and set of prefigurative practices that point towards a postcapitalist economy. Through a case study of Amsterdam—a city aiming to be fully circular by 2050—we examine this contradictory crossroads, problematising the idea of circularity within capitalism and exploring the potential of postcapitalist alternatives within the circular economy."