Van Cirkel naar String Figures. Het Verweven van Circulariteit in de Gebouwde Omgeving via Sociaal-Ruimtelijke Visualisaties
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Circular built environment transitions — systemic shifts toward building practices prioritizing material reuse, renovation over new construction, designing for disassembly, and incorporating bio-based and recycled materials — are grounded in circular economy principles. Simple visual representations of these principles — such as circles, ladders, butterflies, and triangles — have played a significant role in popularizing the concept and raising awareness among policymakers and spatial professionals. However, as the focus shifts from theoretical concept to realization, these transitions will require critical engagement with entangled circuits of knowledge, values and power that shape and are shaped by the social and spatial dynamics of the built environment. Imaginaries capable of capturing these socio-spatial entanglements are essential for navigating and facilitating such transitions. Building on Donna Haraway's String Figures concept , this research frames circularity in the built environment as an evolving, relational process. Through mixed-method participatory action research, it develops and tests visual methods that (dis-)entangle socio-spatial complexities of circular built environment transitions. The visualization methods reveal site-specific circularity potentials, embedded relational dynamics between materials, spaces, and actors. As part of the interdisciplinary Regenerating Flemish Industry Parks (REFLIP) project, the research focuses on two existing Flemish industry parks Haasrode and Kortrijk-Noord — to explore stakeholder dynamics, spatial preconditions, political perspectives, and temporal cycles in circular built environment transition. It introduces five visualization methods — Switchboard, Route map, Comics, 2x2 Futures, and Photographic Gun — that contextualize abstract circularity principles in real-world projects. These methods address entanglements by identifying interdependencies in projects and disentangling them to make these interdependencies legible and actionable within stakeholder processes. The visualizations engage both with possible futures and with existing proto-circular practices — such as long-term thinking and forms of repair and care embedded in situated contexts. By reframing these accidental, context-specific practices as part of circular transitions, the research questions generic toolboxes and examines how circularity might emerge from what is already present yet often overlooked. In doing so, the visualizations contribute to project-based knowledge, the integration of values, and the facilitation of stakeholder agency. Acting as process-supporting instruments for participatory design and repositories of site-specific knowledge, they enable designers and stakeholders to collaboratively assess circularity potentials and explore pathways toward imagining more regenerative, non-extractive futures for the built environment.
Source: Lirias
Author: Verbiest, Ellen
Language: English
Subfield: Building and Construction
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7113236239
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