Urban infrastructures, as socio-technical systems that transform metabolic flows, are a key focus for efforts at initiating a more circular economy of resource use and waste recovery. Beyond exemplar discourses and claims, an infrastructure-mediated understanding of and focus on actually existing circularity projects attends to the diverse array of components, sites and exchanges through which transformative socio-technical change is envisaged, enacted and challenged. This article uses in-depth studies of circularity infrastructure initiatives in Nantes (France) and Gothenburg (Sweden) that involve a range of public and private stakeholders. We focus on the contradictions and tensions in these initiatives to draw attention to circularity as a material and political process of relocalising resource use while spatially expanding resource networks. We show how this process involves reworking large-scale infrastructure while nurturing community-level initiatives of the foundational economy, and thereby shaping urban futures through reuse and recycled flows but with a view to sustaining economic growth strategies. We argue that the materialist and productivist logic underpinning the urban infrastructures of the circular economy largely serves to aggravate the underlying fundamental systemic concerns that circularity was supposed to address in the first place.

中文翻译：

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南特和哥德堡的城市基础设施、新陈代谢资源流动和循环经济“解决方案”的矛盾


城市基础设施作为改变新陈代谢流动的社会技术系统，是努力启动资源使用和废物回收的循环经济的重点。除了示范性的论述和主张之外，以基础设施为媒介的对实际存在的循环项目的理解和关注还涉及各种组成部分、地点和交流，通过这些组成部分、地点和交流，可以设想、实施和挑战变革性的社会技术变革。本文对南特（法国）和哥德堡（瑞典）的循环基础设施计划进行了深入研究，这些计划涉及一系列公共和私人利益相关者。我们关注这些举措中的矛盾和紧张局势，以引起人们对循环性的关注，将其作为重新定位资源使用同时在空间上扩大资源网络的物质和政治过程。我们展示了这一过程如何涉及改造大型基础设施，同时培育基础经济的社区层面举措，从而通过再利用和回收流动塑造城市未来，但以维持经济增长战略为目标。我们认为，支撑循环经济城市基础设施的唯物主义和生产主义逻辑在很大程度上加剧了循环经济最初应该解决的潜在基本系统性问题。