Federico Fantechi (p), Fabio Mazzola

Marcus Jandt

This paper examines the Circular Economy (CE) revolution and its potential to impact labour market inequality from a spatial perspective. The CE revolution is an all-encompassing strategy, aiming to restructure the market on both the supply and demand sides. Unlike most green policies, it is pursued with some attention to protect—if not foster—production systems and the competitiveness of territories. On the labour market side, this is expected to create growth and new jobs. However, while the numerical employment impact is forecasted to be positive, literature suggests the risk that most jobs created may be of lower quality and pay compared to those lost, potentially negatively impacting some disadvantaged labour markets. Jobs created within the CE revolution can be very diversified, ranging from labour-intensive ones—such as waste management and collection—to more specialized and knowledge-intensive roles, such as recycle plant workers and machinery repair, which have higher requirements and better salaries.

Overall, the potential local labour market impact of the CE revolution will be heterogeneous. This study hypothesizes that the impact will be unequal, largely depending on localized territorial capital and connected infrastructural endowment. Aiming to understand whether the CE revolution can push the EU's (specifically, focusing on Italian LLM) local labour market towards a convergence pattern or if lagging regions will continue to suffer, the paper explores how infrastructure, place characteristics, labour markets, and cities shape the CE revolution's impact. This is done by employing unique and very detailed data on employment and CE-related infrastructures, showing how the presence of pre-existing characteristics and infrastructures could dramatically change the local labour market impact. The study suggests that a medium- to long-term strategy focused on endowing territories with CE-related infrastructures and competencies could be more successful than one focused solely on supply, demand, and job replacement.

Marcus Jandt (p), Gudrun Haindlmaier

Sébastien Bourdin

Cities can be considered as central to the transition to a circular bioeconomy. They pose a major problem as they act as aggregators of organic biomaterial, hubs of unsustainable economic activities and consumption, making them significant contributor to contemporary challenges. Simultaneously, cities offer major opportunities for realizing the circular bioeconomy due to their and physical infrastructure, function as a knowledge hub, consumption power, abundance of economic activities and influential actors. Thus, investigating cities provides valuable insights into multi-actor governance processes and the interconnectedness of geographical scales in transitions. This is particularly relevant for the circular bioeconomy, where the flow of biological resources, innovation and knowledge through collaborative networks links urban centres with their surrounding and rural areas. Intermediaries are recently recognized to play a pivotal role in this landscape, as they operate across governance levels, facilitating knowledge transfer, operationalize policy, facilitate coordination as well as network-building through their engagement with various stakeholders (Hodson and Marvin, 2010)
To understand the multi-scalar interactions across governance levels in the circular bioeconomy transition, this study adopts a dual approach that integrates the geography of transitions perspective (Hansen and Coenen, 2015).
First, the study explores innovation policy approaches at both the national (Austria) and city (Vienna) levels, analysing how the bioeconomy concept is embedded within these policy frameworks. Given that policies at different governance levels pursue distinct agendas and priorities, this study pays particular attention to how city-level innovation policies diverge from national approaches.
Second, the study examines the role of Vienna-based intermediaries in transition, taking into account multi-scalar networks across levels of governance.
Accordingly, the study addresses the following research questions:
1. How do national and city-level policies promote the implementation of the (circular) bioeconomy concept from an innovation policy perspective?
2. How do intermediaries based in the city of Vienna discern their role in the transition process and what capabilities do they approach to actively shape this process towards a circular bioeconomy?
This paper adopts a mixed-method qualitative approach, integrating inductive and deductive policy document analysis to systematically examine the policy agenda and innovation processes shaping applied innovation policy approaches as well as semi-structured expert interviews to explore the role of intermediaries in the transition process.

Agnieszka Majorek-Gdula (p)

Federico Fantechi

Contemporary cities in Poland are developing at an exceptionally dynamic pace, presenting both opportunities and challenges for sustainable spatial planning. Accelerating urbanization and climate change necessitate the rational management of space—an increasingly scarce resource. One of the key issues is uncontrolled urban sprawl, which leads to inefficient land use, environmental degradation, and rising infrastructure costs.
The spontaneous expansion of residential investments largely dictates the spatial development of cities, often without considering long-term consequences.
This paper aims to analyze current land transformation trends in Poland concerning their efficient utilization. A key aspect of the study is the assessment of the extent to which previously developed land (land recycling) is reused compared to the expansion into new areas. The concept of land recycling prioritizes the redevelopment of anthropogenically transformed sites that have lost their original function, rather than the urbanization of previously undeveloped spaces.
The presentation will include case studies from Poland.