Cities as Emerging Centers in a Circular Economy: An Assessment of Indian Cities

Abstract

Cities in the twenty-first century are the major centers of economic production and consumption activities. The rising levels of natural resource use, greenhouse gas emission, and waste generation in the urban centers pose threats to attaining sustainable development in a world constrained by resource scarcity and ecological limits. A circular approach to managing consumption and production in the cities may help address the challenges in the urban ecosystem and bring in economic, environmental, and social benefits. The circular city model recognizes and incorporates the principles of Circular Economy (CE) and tries to establish an urban system that is regenerative, accessible, and where nothing is waste. While the RESOLVE framework rests on regenerate, share, optimize, loop, virtualize, and exchange, the recent circular city model focuses on three circular actions, namely, looping, regenerating, and adapting and four supporting actions, namely, optimization, sharing, substitution, and localization. As a result, the circular cities can eliminate and/or reduce waste, keep assets always at their highest value, become digitally enabled and can thereby generate prosperity, improve livability, and develop resilience for the cities and communities. This paper attempts to review the applicability of the circular city approach in the Indian context and to scrutinize the agenda of sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11). The concepts of sustainable cities and circular cities overlap in terms of efficient resource use, waste management, and so on. The performance of the Indian cities may further help analyze the achievement of sustainability which is the goal of CE.