The Inclusive Circular Economy : Challenges and Opportunities for Urban Innovation

This open access book is a multi-disciplinary effort to address the complex socio-economic issues and the substantial environmental pressure that the expected large-scale migration will exert on cities in the near future. Emerging from a joint research project between China and the Netherlands, the authors herein put forward a vision for cities that the future demands while assessing efforts, recent and ongoing, in this direction. Building on the lessons learned from this research, it also proposes strategies and best practices for future policy aimed at the design and development of circular and inclusive cities.

Prof. Martin de Jong is a full professor and the scientific director of Erasmus University Rotterdam’s Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity initiative, a joint research center jointly established by the Erasmus University Schools of Law, Management and Philosophy. His research interests include transport infrastructure policy, eco-cities and sustainable urbanization, planning and policy-making in China, comparative institutional analysis, cross-national policy transfer, and cross-cultural management. He has served as an advisor to the Second Chamber of Dutch Parliament, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, the Nordic Road Federation, the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communication, the Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Jingmen and a host of other organizations and bodies. 

Dr. Daan Schraven is an associate professor on new economics in the built environment at Delft University of Technology, affiliated to the Faculty of Architecture in the Built Environment. He is a business economist by background with an empirical affinity to matters related to the built environment. In this capacity his research interests include the economic implications of the circular transition in the built environment, new economic logics for a sustainable urban future of the city, and the value and valuation of assets and materials in the urban space, markets and supply chains. Daan is principal investigator to various industry-funded projects and (inter)national science foundation grants where he uses research by design approaches closely with practice to explore and develop new business models and valuation methods to facilitate societal transitions toward more sustainability and circularity. He is a board member of the Centre for Sustainability, on the theme circular cities and regions, and member of the Domain Acceleration Team on Sustainability & Circularity of the four Dutch Universities of Technology (4TU).

Prof. Tong Xin is an associate professor at Peking University. Prof. Tong has been working on extended producer responsibility in China’s e-waste management for a number of years, specifically focusing on the interactions between global environmental governance and technological change in developing countries. She has been active in consultancy positions for local governments in Beijing, Sichuan, Shenzhen, Ningbo, and many other large Chinese cities. Prof. Tong is currently involved in two national research and development programs on solid waste management focused on behavioral change at a community level and supporting infrastructure with ICT applications. 

Dr. Dong Liang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs (PIA), and School of Energy and Environment (SEE), City University of Hong Kong. He focuses to interdisciplinary and international collaborative research on urban sustainability, sustainability science & policy, and their application in circular economy, corporate environmental-social-governance (ESG), Net Zero and carbon neutrality policy studies, sustainable human-techno-environmental system design, and sustainable urban planning, using advanced life cycle based, spatial and data driven techniques. He served as international advisor for the US Energy Foundation, UN-ESCAP, the Korea Industrial Complex Organization (KICOX), and the European Federation of Chemical Engineers (EFCE). He is the committee member of the "Industrial Symbiosis" section of the International Society for Industrial Ecology, Industrial Ecology section of Ecological Society of China, Circular economy section of Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences, and Vice Chairman of the Urban Human Settlement Environment Committee of the Chinese Society For Urban Studies. His research is well recognised by international society and was awarded as the Stanford University World Top 2% most-cited Scientists (2020 to 2025).