Circular Economy / Circular Society

Lock-down learning has introduced many of us to the circular economy. The power of the circular economy concept derives from the simplicity of its fundamentals: reuse, don’t throw away.

I’ve been developing a parallel concept, which I call the circular society. This post contains some early thoughts, please let me know what you think.

The circular society resembles the circular economy, except that it addresses our squandering of social — instead of physical — resources.

Circular economy micro-primer

The circular economy is a framework to tackle global ecosystem degradation, particularly physical resource wastage.

Great applications of the circular economy in architecture can be found in RAU Architects’ Brummen Town Hall and Liander Head Office, 3XN/GXN’s Green Solutions House, een til een’s Biological House, Lendager’s Upcycle House. At the urban scale, Amsterdam’s Buiksloterham is to become mixed industrial/residential neighbourhood operating on circular economy principles.

The circular economy achieves a sustainable approach to the parallel global ecosystems of nature (renewable) and man-made stuff (non-renewable) by keeping all materials and products in use for as long as possible, minimising waste and further virgin resource extraction. These ideas of reuse, refurbishment, repurposing, adaptation and upcycling are fundamental to a circular economy.

According to the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform a paltry 9% of the world economy is circular. The rest is a linear economy, where materials are extracted, used and thrown away.

Failing social systems

Although the benefits of strong social systems need no explaining, it’s worth pointing out a great example of the strong correlation between social connections and resilience:

Judith Rodin in her book “The Resilience Dividend” references the work of NYU’s Eric Klinenberg demonstrating the benefit of strong neighbourhood communities during the 1995 Chicago heatwave.

Chicago’s two community areas of Auburn Gresham and Englewood at that time had almost identical sociodemographics by way of ethnic and age profiles, unemployment and poverty. Except that Englewood’s social fabric had suffered more over decades of decline: its people no longer participated in or interacted with their neighbourhood.

This was thought to be the main reason for Englewood suffering a heatwave mortality rate of 11 times that of Auburn Gresham.

In Auburn Gresham, people invested their personal social resources — such as time and skills — in their neighbourhood community. The accumulation of these resources gave its local society the strength to weather the heatwave.

Put another way, personal social resources flowed according to circular society principles in Auburn Gresham.

Circular society principles

Just as the circular economy uses a simple principle — use stuff better — to describe how balance can be restored to physical ecosystems, the circular society likewise uses a straightforward principle — use personal social resources (time, skills, etc.) better — to describe how to help rebalance failing social systems.

The circular society focuses particularly on addressing personal social resource wastage in a social system, most recognisably represented by a neighbourhood with its physical community. The below diagrams show how time spent caring for others might flow between generations in a neighbourhood. They are necessarily an abstraction – stay tuned as I develop these to better represent the complex processes involved.

This first diagram represents linear society. Here surplus time leaves the neighbourhood, e.g. by a week of it being spent in New Zealand. Time is still needed to provide care to those who need it, but without surplus time in circulation it needs to be imported such as from charities, government (e.g. NHS), or private care providers (e.g. care homes for the elderly, boarding school for children). Not only is this less efficient because imported care is less likely to respond to direct needs, but someone still ends up paying for the care. As soon as money enters the equation, part of it is lost to operating costs and profits, and worse still, the money, being highly mobile, is likely to leave the local economy.

(An aside: It’s best that if money is spent, it is done with locally owned care providers or other businesses — a night in with Netflix doesn’t count. A previous post discusses the benefits of a high local multiplier in the context of rebuilding the UK’s ailing high streets.)

The second diagram represents circular society. Surplus time remains local and is available to help those in need. Even just spending more time doing things in a neighbourhood provides opportunities for a chat with a lonely widower or intervening when things get out of hand in the playground.

Just as the circular economy wants technical resources to circulate retaining the highest possible utility — reuse and repair is better than recycling — a circular society wants social capital to be spent as locally as possible. Family members or community volunteers can care for an elderly person more effectively than an external —often institutional — caregiver.

Emergent applications of circular society can be seen in initiatives such as timebanking networks, which aim to strengthen local neighbourhood communities by encouraging the exchange of time, knowledge and/or expertise. They do this without resorting to an exchange of money.

And so the pandemic

During lockdown and even now, Coronavirus has stemmed the flow of personal social resources from neighbourhoods. Ecolise has a growing database of initiatives where this not-for-long dormant social capital capacity has sprung back into neighbourhood circulation: the volunteer fleet of drivers in Wuhan transporting medical workers to and from work; the UK’s Covid-19 mutual aid groups helping out the elderly; and balcony bingo in Dublin.

Whereas pre-pandemic, a substantial portion of time, knowledge and expertise might have departed neighbourhoods, it has over the past three months primarily been confined to circulating within neighbourhoods, often with a positive impact on these local social systems.

With any luck once the virus is removed, these cycles of neighbourhood social capital flows remain in place. Perhaps the potent intangible benefits such as new friendships and the sense of being able to affect positive change remain powerful incentives for people to continue reinvesting their personal social resources locally, growing their circular society.