 Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.  You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain  You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

No abstract

Despite the spread of policy and business initiatives aiming at transitioning to a Circular Economy (CE), the concept is criticized in the scientific literature for its lack of emphasis on social contexts. Implementing CE initiatives to production systems can indeed lead to "unintended side effects," that is, both rebound effects and other indirect shifts in consumption patterns. In this forum article we address the question: "How to make the unintended side effects of implementing CE initiatives knowable and actionable?"We argue that the ability of life cycle assessment (LCA) to address unintended side effects from CE initiatives is limited, as LCA can model how different product systems interact with each other, but does not attend to the socio-technical dynamics taking place within and across different life cycle phases. To extend the potential of LCA in supporting decision-making, our suggestion is to complement LCA with other types of analytical approaches, such as Practice Theory (PT) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which can improve our understanding of the unintended side effects of CE initiatives.These theories consider societal dynamics as socio-technical and focus on the processes and practices through which production and consumption dynamics change.Thus, they can provide analyses of whether and how CE initiatives are capable of realizing novel relations within/among socio-technical systems. Ultimately, they can provide explanations on why things end up the way they do, thus supporting LCA in the investigation of more "real" rather than ideal scenarios.

No abstract

In 2002 the first public harbour swimming bath in the inner harbour of Copenhagen opened. By translating the old industrial harbour into a site of urban living and recreation, the practice of swimming in the harbour has been instrumental in aligning and catalysing a series of broader urban transformations pertaining to the wastewater infrastructure, industrial activities, urban development, and international marketing of the city. Through a study of the processes by which swimming in the harbour came into being as a transformative urban practice, we develop a navigational conceptualisation of urban transition processes. Our study suggests that the creation of the first harbour bath was not the end result of an overall master plan. Rather, we demonstrate that the harbour baths were the outcome of a contingent interplay among embedded actors' myopic and navigational actions over a period of twenty years. In order to conceptualise what provoked these navigational actions and how they translated into transformative urban change, we develop the notions of junctions and transition mediators. We introduce the notion of junctions to understand how navigations are provoked. Junctions are signified by particular sites with identities that have been rendered unstable due to tensions and ambiguities among the established sociomaterial assemblages by which they are configured. We argue that navigations signify sociomaterial repair work aimed at addressing such junctions. To conceptualise how such navigations might translate into coordinated urban transformations, we introduce the notion of transition mediators. A transition mediator is an artefact-such as the harbour baths-that succeeds in generating transformative change by displacing the boundaries and interdependencies within and among the established sociomaterial assemblages of the urban fabric.