The Circular Economy (CE) is receiving interest worldwide as a way to overcome the currently dominating linear and wasteful production and consumption models of our society. Currently the implementation of CE thinking into practice is still in an early stage. As the main hubs of consumption and to a more limited extent also, production, metropolitan areas often are seen as crucial to achieving a successful transition towards a CE, and therefore it is necessary to find ways to integrate a CE based approach into urban planning practice. In this paper literature dealing with the concept of the CE is reviewed within an urban planning framework to examine how well integrated it is in the built environment, both vertically and horizontally, in ideas prevalent in CE literature. The paper aims to contribute to the understanding of how the concept of CE can be integrated into urban planning practice with a view to enabling urban planners to integrate CE into their work to further accelerate the implementation of CE in metropolitan areas. In this paper a framework is presented for understanding opportunities for the integration of CE into urban planning.

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The development of energy efficient buildings has been identified as a crucial part of the challenge to reach climate targets. Energy performance requirements are one of the most concrete and actionable parts of the sustainability program of urban development processes. However, after construction, there is often a lack of evaluation and follow-up of the energy performance requirements for the buildings, which limits the understanding of the state and progress of sustainable urban development processes and the ability to capture lessons learned related to energy performance. The aim of this paper is to provide insight into how the actual energy performance of buildings relates to the development process of an urban district that has been developed with a high sustainability profile. The urban district of Kvillebäcken (Gothenburg, Sweden) is used as a case study. The results of this paper contribute to a better understanding of the efficiency of the energy performance requirement as a tool during the urban development process, taking the actual energy performance of the buildings as a starting point.

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