WHAT
Between September 2020 and March 2024, nine pilot cities across Europe came together with a consortium of experts in circularity, social inclusion, heritage and local fabrication for the CENTRINNO project, funded by Horizon Europe. Their common goal was to test regeneration strategies for European post-industrial neighbourhoods that are socially inclusive, circular and sensitive to the tangible and intangible heritage of industrial areas.
The Cartography toolkit was born out of the CENTRINNO project and it was developed as a toolkit for our pilots to map and visualize local productive communities, their resources and potential circular connections. Further, the Cartography toolkit also included rigorous top-down mapping to help us understand the unique context and challenges of pilot neighbourhoods.
Today, the Cartography toolkit serves as a blueprint for other cities and organizations interested in mapping urban ecosystems and mobilising circular communities.
WHY
Cities are increasingly interested in transitioning to a circular system. Not only to deal with resources more responsibly, but also to address their carbon footprint and reduce consumption-related emissions. All too often, the circular transition is not discussed in the context of social inclusion. We need to build a circular community in which everyone profits from a new economic and productive model.
The Cartography toolkit inherently focuses on local stakeholders and what they can bring to the table. Be it resources, forgotten skills or production capacity for the circular products of tomorrow. In CENTRINNO, we developed a vision of a circular economy that is not a perfect circle but a food web, in which resources are passed through an integrated network of large producers, small makers, schools and Fab Labs.
HOW
OurbCartography toolkit was developed in an interactive and iterative approach throughout three years. This website acts as a platform to aggregate the resources we developed in the project, which include workshop materials, mapping templates and case studies from our pilots.
The materials are all blueprints and adaptations from the activities conducted with our pilots, which included geospatial context analyses, stakeholder interviews, material flow analyses and urban mining analyses. If you are interested in the background of the methods we have developed, read the Urban Ecosystem Mapping Guidebook and our technical Cartography guidance reports (Alpha Version, Beta Version, Final Version), which are all found on the CENTRINNO EU website.
WHO
The Cartography toolkit has been conceptualized and developed by Metabolic Institute as part of the CENTRINNO project. Metabolic has worked together with nine pilot cities to collect and organize their data, develop maps and identify circular opportunities. In the last part of the project, Metabolic has worked with the Fab City Foundation to make the Cartography available to other cities.