The Circular Economy is Having a Reality Check

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”,

wrote Audre Lorde in 1984, “they may allow us to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Lorde was writing about the mechanisms of structural injustice and systemic oppression – here I will write about buildings and materials.

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Freetown Christiania is going through a transition. Around a lake in the South-East quarter of Copenhagen, Denmark, lives a small, self-governing community. Established in 1971 in response to a housing crisis, the commune was built around a deserted military barracks and has since grown to around 1,000 residents mostly living in self-built homes. Constructed by those who preferred not to live in the barracks, the structures are irreverent and exciting – some were designed by architects, most were designed by their inhabitants, and almost all are constructed from salvaged materials.

Glass windowpanes still in their original aluminium frames, corrugated steel sheets, painted doors, timber beams, repurposed caravans and boats.

A community recycling centre encourages Christiania residents to exchange construction materials, clothes, books, and electronics “for the price of a smile”. Scaffolding is stored in a central warehouse. And when I arrived on Thursday the 16th of May 2024, excavators were rolling down the central strip. Since its inception Christiania has had a tumultuous relationship with the wider city. The Freetown song “you cannot kill us, we are a part of you”, echoes the radical humanity displayed by its residents, and their impressively resilient response to attempts by the Danish government to limit development. In recent years, Christiania’s allowance of the possession and sale of cannabis has led the area to become a destination for both tourists and bad actors, and a smattering of violent altercations led residents to engage with Copenhagen police to protect their community. This has also resulted in a government-driven plan to redevelop the central strip (‘Pusher Street’) including a playground and an ‘affordable housing scheme’… which many of the incumbent residents may not be able to afford to live in.

I had come to Denmark for a conference on the circular economy, and I had already found it.

Circular x Change

I’m a materials scientist, I have always been interested in physical stuff and what it’s made of – especially if that stuff doesn’t destroy the environment. I don’t know how to design a building. Architects fascinate me.

The Circular x Change network is a group of European architects, design engineers and contractors working to realise the Circular Economy Vision, that the future built environment will be crafted by Mining the Anthropocene for Urban Minerals to Close the Loop in Construction…

Day one of the conference began with the announcement of the ‘CxC Charter’ – a set of ten commitments:

1.      Value every element.

2.      Reuse what’s there.

3.      Take construction seriously.

4.      Find solutions that can be upscaled/replicated.

5.      Data should be your friend.

6.      Document and share knowledge.

7.      Extend the lifespans of our existing buildings.

8.      Don’t disturb the graves [fossil fuels].

9.      Materials have rights too.

10.  Honour the workforce.*

*each of these has a further description, but I’ll leave them to your imagination

I quite like the charter. It’s a concise way of describing the plan of action to promote reuse of construction materials, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Number 9 made me smile. The tenth point is an important one and I’m grateful for its inclusion – too often conversations around the circular economy seem to brush over the practical implications of sending somebody 50 feet into the air to unscrew a bolted connection between load bearing steel beams by hand.

But can it be done on a budget?

“No!” says Søren Pihlmann , who has just presented two examples of circular architecture, one relatively tame but tastefully executed private home retrofit, where new plywood and steel support a characterful brickwork retention scheme, and a second project which is one of the most impressive bits of adaptive structural engineering I have ever seen. Pihlmann architects, a presumably batshit crazy developer, and a team of engineers have removed the mass concrete floor slabs from an existing apartment block, tilted them 45 degrees and reinserted them into custom manufactured tension brackets to create a dramatically reconfigured interior space. Pihlmann explains that it took nearly two years for the engineers to finish their calculations.

Start with the material, not the needs of the client.

SUPERUSE Studios conduct their business from the belly of a retrofitted leisure centre in Rotterdam, when they are not out scavenging for materials. Floris Schiferli (partner and designer), who tops my ‘might be onto something’ list, has the confidence of someone who is not attempting to dismantle industrial chicken sheds and turn them into new buildings. His presentation covered ‘materials harvest mapping’, location-based audits of scheduled demolitions to identify materials for reclamation. When they found the chicken shed, SUPERUSE created a digital model of the component parts, 3D printed them (reproduced en masse in cardboard), and invited members of the local community to put the pieces back together in a new design. Most of the sellotaped creations would bring a tear to the eye of a structural engineer, but the intent is commendable and inspired the teetering design of the new community centre, which features the reuse of hefty steel trusses, suspended at rakish angles over a grid of reclaimed glazing elements.

“The most intelligent people in this industry”

were apparently sitting in the confusingly named Valencia building in downtown Copenhagen for day two of the conference. If yesterday’s theme was risk-taking, today’s was risk-avoidance.  Joined by Danish MPs and university lecturers, Anders Lendager of Lendager took to the stage to discuss scaling and commercial viability. Lendager, the founding members of the CxC network, have achieved a mythical reputation of circular wizardry in Denmark. Most famously, the practice used diamond saws to remove square metre blocks of intact, cement bonded brickwork from old structures and reconstructed the panels as a patchwork façade on an apartment building. Anders Lendager is said to have taken out a loan on his own house to finance the incorporation of new companies to deliver upcycled building products for his architectural visions.

The programme featured another inspiring mix of case studies and debates focused on EU-funded innovation budgets enabling interdisciplinary research into retention and reuse, and the immense challenging of meeting a housing shortfall of 86,000 homes in Copenhagen by 2050 without breaching planetary boundaries. Søren Nielsen of Vandkunsten did well to mention the ~20 million square metres of unoccupied space in Copenhagen, and the often-ignored call to retrofit first and not demolish anything. Ditte Lysgaard Vind from Bloxhub thinks the built environment has become a service to the financial sector…which reminded me I would be flying back to London that night.

As the conference neared its end, I felt an uneasy sense of frustration amongst the participants. These people have been pushing at the boundaries of what is possible in a reuse economy for decades, and the same challenges (cost, scalability, testing and warranty of materials, risk and insurance, supply and demand, infrastructure, and logistics) have yet to be fully addressed. For me, what felt lacking was a true sense of purpose. SUPERUSE got close to it on Day 1, but their presentation of a concrete car park with reclaimed wind turbine blades fastened to the exterior seemed to reject the essence of materials reuse – a practice borne out of resource scarcity and the human need for shelter. Can the circular economy’s distributive, participatory theoretical basis be realised in a profit-driven world? Are we building a future where uninspiring, environmentally destructive new structures are hidden from view by a veneer of downcycled junk?

An-other City

I went back to Christiania that evening, to visit the small museum and bookshop. In the British way I was mildly annoyed at the lack of English texts, but I found a copy of Henrik Valeur’s most recent work whose title ‘En-anden by’ had been translated: ‘An-other city’. I paid (cash only) and walked to the water to read.

On page 13, I read: “we can be the agents of change, but not by appropriating revolutionary thoughts to the existing system […], it is not a matter of deciding what cities should look like and how they should be used, but of creating opportunities for what we don’t know, what we don’t see, what we don’t understand.”

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Thank you to all at Lendager, and to the participants of the Circular x Change conference, for an inspiring and energetic couple of days. I am grateful to be learning from all of you.

Rotor vzw-asbl , Superuse , Lendager , pihlmann architects , Panum & Kappel , materialnomaden gmbh

 Cover image: Sebastian Svane Müller