Approaches to the Circular Economy

The concept of the circular economy, which looks to reduce the demand for raw material inputs and natural resources and to recover, reuse, and recycle those inputs and resources as an integral part of the production process, is attracting increasing attention from business corporations. A transition to a more circular economy will bring major changes for consumers, in patterns of consumption and in the consumption process. At the same time, there is growing interest in the concept of the circular economy and in its implications for consumption amongst academic researchers. This chapter outlines the concept and characteristics of the circular economy, offers a review of the nature and variety of academic research literature on the circular economy, and explores some of the challenges facing researchers who look to examine its operation within the business environment. While the focus of the chapter is firmly on the circular economy, it also raises a number of issues that have wider and deeper significance for consumer consumption

Knowledge intensive regeneration versus sustainable communities

Regeneration is deemed as the enabler for societies and nations to transform them from industrial age to knowledge. In this regard, knowledge intensive regeneration is one of the latest models, called as New Century Cities (NCC) to make progress and ultimately achieve the transformation towards knowledge societies, which have the features and characteristics of sustainable communities. However, meeting the key features or characteristics of sustainable communities can be challenging due to its complex and interrelated features such as socio-economic requirement, environmental and physical requirements, which are all correlated to each other. This paper aims to discuss the knowledge intensive regeneration model in relation to the sustainable communities in order to highlight the level of match and conformance between them in order to justify the suitability of knowledge intensive regeneration for the sustainable communities' vision. Research methodology adopted in the paper is the case study approach, which is the Mediacity project, and used literature review, observation and interviews for data collection, while concept mapping was utilised for data analysis. Research findings reflect that the level of conformance is relatively high, social aspects is still weakly addressed in comparison to other dimensions. Therefore, paper proposes the stronger attention and strategic planning at the visioning and masterplanning stages of such projects in order to address this most challenging dimension of regeneration project