Industrial sites and their surrounding regions are key drivers of Europe’s economic growth and competitiveness, providing jobs, resources, technological innovation. Industrial production and its linkages with energy, mobility, and supply chains have historically prioritized operational efficiency and short-term cost reduction often at the expense of long-term environmental and social sustainability, leading to substantial negative externalities, including high consumption of raw materials, excessive greenhouse gas emissions, high energy demand, inefficient waste and by-product management, fragmented infrastructures. These impacts extend beyond the industrial site boundaries, putting significant stress on adjacent cities and regions through air and water pollution, resource depletion, and spatial inequalities.
CIRCUIT will implement a set of innovative governance mechanisms, participatory methodologies, digital tools, evaluation frameworks and upscaling activities to enable industrial sites and urban regions to transition toward sustainable, circular and climate-neutral ecosystems. The interdependencies between urban and industrial coexistence, energy systems, land use, public procurement, mobility, and waste/resource flows’ demand pose also additional challenges for this transition. CIRCUIT will leverage advanced digital technologies, i.e. interoperable dataspaces, participatory digital twins, real-time monitoring systems, and simulation models to support planning, engage stakeholders, and facilitate evidence-based decisionmaking. These tools will be designed for replicability and scalability, ensuring that they are adaptable and tailored to diverse local contexts and governance structures. CIRCUIT will bridge behavioral and institutional gaps by designing capacity-building programmes, communication strategies, collaborative learning environments to support local actors in adopting circular and climateconscious practices.
ZSI analyses the CIRCUIT pilot partners’ ecosystem, and is responsible for designing the overall co-creation process, ensuring a coherent, yet adaptable design for pilot partners to strengthen and initiate local clusters and their respective value chains. Eventually, ZSI will also conduct a social impact assessment of CIRCUIT solutions.
