Future Circular City

The session “Future Circular City,” moderated by Oliver Lin, Acting President of the Taiwan Design Research Institute, served as a platform to explore the profound transformation required to design urban environments that thrive within ecological and societal limits. Tomas Diez, Co-founder of the Fab City Foundation, and Chingyu Yao, Director General of the Secretariat of New Taipei City Government, shared their distinct yet complementary perspectives on how circularity can shape the future of urban development.

The discussion emphasized the critical role of design in reimagining cities, from centers of consumption to hubs of circularity, distributed and meaningful innovation, as well as resilience.

Diez opened the session with a stark reminder of the environmental crises fueled by consumerism and extraction. He traced these issues back to early global trade, highlighting how European colonial expansion, enabled by navigation advancements, led to the establishment of modern capitalism through resource control. An example is the 17th-century Dutch and British rivalry over Indonesia’s Banda Islands, where nutmeg was once as valuable as oil in the 20th century. This competition led to the historic trade of Manhattan for the island of Run between them, illustrating how colonial economies were built on monopolizing resources.

Tomas Diez

Diez argued that this extractive logic persists today, shaping global trade and urban development. He described cities as octopuses with far-reaching tentacles, swallowing up resources from across the world——minerals from Congo, or cheap labor from China, for example ——to sustain consumption. Technological revolutions, he explained, have only shifted the form of extraction rather than ending it. Nutmeg gave way to oil, and now data is the primary resource driving economies.

Cities, Diez asserted, operate on a “Product In, Trash Out (PITO)” model, where resources are extracted, consumed, and discarded, leading to unsustainable urban growth. He calls for a transition to a circular system——“Data In, Data Out (DIDO)”——where digital tools enable localized production, reducing reliance on global supply chains and minimizing environmental impact. Through the Fab City Global Initiative, Diez promotes open-source technology and digital fabrication to empower communities to produce locally and share knowledge globally. Fab Labs——localized makerspaces with curated tools——embody this vision, allowing rapid prototyping and innovation while adhering to shared principles of technological empowerment. Instead of shipping physical products, digital information can be transmitted globally and manufactured locally using 3D printing and CNC machining, aligning with the philosophy of bioregioning that materials should stay local while knowledge flows freely.

Chingyu Yao brought a governmental perspective to the discussion, focusing on how circularity can be integrated into urban governance. Drawing from her experience in New Taipei City, Yao highlighted the importance of aligning urban planning with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and ensuring that sustainability practices are inclusive and socially equitable. She shared the city’s efforts to implement circularity through small-scale design interventions that address specific community needs, such as universally accessible spaces and gender-inclusive facilities. These projects show that even minor design changes can have significant social impacts, making urban spaces more inclusive, efficient, and sustainable. They also suggest a potentially synergistic relationship between circular design and other values such as social justice, inclusivity, and gender equality; when “mixed” together, they tend to create new social ties.

Chingyu Yao

One important caveat Yao made in passing is also worth highlighting. When governments create policies with the SDGs as a framework, they often focus exclusively on the positive outcomes. In other words, they emphasize the goals a policy helps achieve while ignoring the trade-offs that could potentially arise. For instance, a government might decide to rebuild a piece of local infrastructure to support certain SDGs, but this project could displace vulnerable members of society in the process.

In its annual SDG reports, New Taipei City addresses this issue by noting not only the SDG a policy aims to achieve but also those compromised as a result. Yao emphasized that this is where design can be most impactful. These trade-offs serve as a valuable design brief for the design community that collaborates with the city.

Another key topic of the session was on how we might operate across different scales for distributed design, fostering resilience and meaningful innovations. Diez introduced the “Fab City Full Stack” as a framework for implementing the DIDO model at various scales. The Full Stack consists of seven interconnected layers that outline how technology is adopted, applied, and disseminated within broader systems. Fab Labs and makerspaces serve as foundational infrastructures where individuals engage with new technologies, acquire skills, and drive innovation. Through this framework, we can understand how locally rooted innovations, developed in specific contexts and by local communities, may have hyperlocal impact in bioregional and planetary scales. It provides a structured approach to identifying and implementing the different scales of action that we might take to drive meaningful change.

The Hydrogen Village project in Northern Serangan, developed by Fab Lab Bali, serves as a model for distributed energy resilience building that is meaningful through different scales. The project explores green hydrogen as a decentralized and equitable alternative, particularly for underrepresented coastal communities. By working within the Banjar system, it transforms traditional social structures into platforms for innovation, equipping local populations with skills to engage in sustainable energy solutions. Knowledge, tools, and strategies developed are shared globally for other regions to adopt in their own contexts. Through fostering distributed energy resilient communities, the project demonstrates how localized initiatives can create impact on bioregional and planetary scales.

Yao emphasized the role of local governments as practitioners rather than policymakers, navigating between central government policies and local community needs. While national policies set overarching goals, their implementation at the city level requires context-specific, bottom-up solutions. Yao highlighted the importance of ensuring that policies, such as net-zero targets, are meaningfully adapted rather than blindly followed. Local governments, she argued, hold the responsibility to empower citizens, and should focus on orchestrating collaborative efforts between local communities, businesses, design initiatives, and other organizations. By shifting the focus from compliance-driven development to community-centered urban design, local governments can prioritize what truly matters for the wellbeing of the people and the land.

The “Future Circular City” session offered a compelling vision for the cities of tomorrow. By embracing circularity that takes into account not only material flows but also other values such as social justice and gender equality, urban spaces can reduce their environmental footprint, empower local communities, and create inclusive and resilient ecosystems. The integration of bioregional principles, distributed design and innovation, and operational scale thinking provides a roadmap for cities to transition from extractive, consumer-driven models to regenerative, place-based systems.

Diez and Yao also agreed on the need for ongoing experimentation and adaptation. The journey toward a circular city is not linear or predictable; it requires constant dialogue, trial and error, and the willingness to explore new models. As cities evolve, they must become spaces for learning, where policies, technologies, and social practices are continuously tested and refined.

The shift from linear to distributed systems——whether through localized fabrication, community-driven governance, or bioregional energy resilience——highlights the potential for a more adaptive and regenerative future of cities. As we move forward, the challenge will be to break down silos and foster collective effort across scales, where design, policy, and local communities and their knowledge converge to create sustainable and equitable urban lifescapes.