CircuBED project at the Festival of the New European Bauhaus

The New European Bauhaus calls for experimental projects that redesign the future. The CircuBED project has joined the challenge to imagine and build a beautiful and sustainable future.

The first New European Bauhaus Festival will take place on 9-12 June 2022 in both live and online formats. Join CircuBED at the Festival and discover circular citizens by playing the Circular Families game.

This game helps players think about the circular economy. The aim is to collect all 4 members from one of 13 ‘circular family’ groups that represent 5 sectors of urban society: construction, manufacturing, food, green infrastructure, and transport. To form a family, each turn players must decide on a circular action which could be ‘take’, ‘make’, ‘use’, or ‘recover’. Then, they can identify the circular citizen type they would like to become and discover features, actions, challenges and impacts.

The game, downloadable from the project website, is just one output from the CircuBED project that has been exploring how urban communities can help with the transition to a circular economy. Such a regenerative and closed-loop approach aims to avoid waste, extend product lifespan and regenerate natural systems to enable cities to prosper sustainably.

Resource efficiency in cities is strongly connected to citizens' behaviours; however, innovation has focused on technological solutions with limited attention to behavioural change.

CircuBED analysed nearly 60 social innovation initiatives which encourage citizens to change behaviours. This has shown how collectives of citizens, communities, businesses, and social enterprises can co-create solutions which align individual interests with social and environmental benefits. The project has identified 7 circular citizen types and offers a framework to help citizens take action.