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Urban Slums and Circular Economy Synergies in the Global South

Theoretical and Policy Imperatives for Sustainable Communities

  • Book
  • © 2024

Overview

Editors:
  1. Seth Asare Okyere

    1. School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

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  2. Matthew Abunyewah

    1. College of Health Sciences, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia

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  3. Michael Odei Erdiaw-Kwasie

    1. Asia Pacific Center for Business & Sust., Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia

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  4. Festival Godwin Boateng

    1. School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

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  • Provides empirically rich catalogue of synergies between slum urbanisms and circular economy
  • Highlights how circular cities offer possibilities to regenerate natural systems, design out waste, keep products in use
  • Includes various case studies of the synergies between urban slums and circular economy

Part of the book series: Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements (ACHS)

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Table of contents (11 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxiv
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  2. Introduction: The Embeddedness of Circularity in Everyday Slum Living in Global South Cities

    • Seth Asare Okyere, Festival Godwin Boateng, Matthew Abunyewah, Michael Odei Erdiaw-Kwasie
    Pages 1-10

  3. Linking Informal Settler Practices and Circular Principles in Global South: Lessons from Asian and Latin American Cities

    • Isaac Nevis Fianoo, Stephen Leonard Mensah, Seth Asare Okyere, Matthew Boadie-Ampong, Joshua Jirjiri
    Pages 11-25

  4. Modern Vernacular Architecture and Circular Economy in Informal Settlements

    • Johan Mottelson
    Pages 27-46

  5. Exploring Circular Economy Awareness, Perceptions and Practices in Selected Urban Slums in Kigali City of Rwanda

    • Vanessa Robertson, Eucabeth Majiwa, Nathan Kanuma Taremwa
    Pages 47-69

  6. Recycling from Construction and Demolition (C&D) Waste: Exploring the Scope of Circular Management in Constructing Slum Dwellings of Dhaka

    • Md. Nawrose Fatemi, Tahmina Rahman
    Pages 71-94

  7. Circularities in Housing Transformation Practices: A Synergetic Review

    • Florence Avogo Abugtane, Seth Opoku Mensah, Gervase Kuuwaabong
    Pages 95-111

  8. Circular Economy in Africa’s Informal Cities: A Review of Residents’ Value Retention Practices and Their Implications for Participatory Urban Planning

    • Stephen Leonard Mensah, Louis Kusi Frimpong, Seth Asare Okyere, Shine Francis Gbedemah, Matthew Abunyewah
    Pages 113-129

  9. Circularizing Livelihoods: Transforming Agricultural Residues to Electricity in Low-Income Peri-Urban Areas of Uganda

    • Nataliya Apanovich
    Pages 131-148

  10. Metropolitan Cartography: A Novel Approach for Assessing How New Morpho-Types Solutions Impact the Circular City Agenda. The Ouagadougou Case Study

    • Antonella Contin, Alessandra Pandolfi
    Pages 149-172

  11. Closing the Policy-Implementation Gaps in E-Waste Management: Implications for Circular Economy and Sustainability in Urban Ghana

    • Louis Kusi Frimpong, Stephen Leonard Mensah, Seth Asare Okyere
    Pages 173-191

  12. Towards just Circular Transitions in the Slums of Global South Cities

    • Matthew Abunyewah, Seth Asare Okyere, Michael Odei Erdiaw-Kwasie, Festival Godwin Boateng
    Pages 193-203

  13. Back Matter

    Pages 205-207
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Keywords

About this book

This book takes a theoretical and empirical distance from urban slums/low-income settlements as a threat to environmental sustainability and recast them as places where environmentally rehabilitative and circular practices occur—drawing on the theoretical lens of the circular economy (CE). CE is defined as regenerative system that minimizes waste, emission, and energy leakage by slowing, closing, and narrowing material and energy loops. In principle, CE departs from the traditional linear model of take-make-use-dispose. As conceived in urban contexts, circular cities offer possibilities to regenerate natural systems, design out waste, and keep products in use. While the CE key principles of reduce, repair, and reuse are essential to the sustainable and inclusive interventions in urban slums, there is lack of case studies exploring the role of place and agency, especially the slum living-CE nexus in global south contexts. In inequitable urban transitions, a nuanced understanding of thesynergies between urban slums and the circular economy is not only theoretically relevant for reconceptualizing the slum in urban sustainability discourses but also exert policy and practice ramifications to decidedly figure out how the urban slum phenomenon can foster the sustainable and inclusive development of marginal areas through contextual and people-centered initiatives.

Editors and Affiliations

  • School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

    Seth Asare Okyere

  • College of Health Sciences, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia

    Matthew Abunyewah

  • Asia Pacific Center for Business & Sust., Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia

    Michael Odei Erdiaw-Kwasie

  • School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

    Festival Godwin Boateng

About the editors

Dr. Seth Asare Okyere is an international development planner whose work thematically cuts across social equity, resilience, and sustainability to cross-pollinate ideas and action for just and sustainable communities in the global south. He has extensive experience across academia, policy agencies, and non-governmental organisations conducting transformative research, leading international expert teams, coordinating international joint projects, and engaging local communities to build capacity for sustainable development. The breadth and depth of experiences span cities and communities in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. Seth is in pursuit of the sustainable development of vulnerable communities within mission-focused approaches to co-producing equitable, resilient, and place-based solutions. Seth holds a Ph.D. in Urban Development Planning (Osaka University, Japan) and an MSc in Urban Planning and Policy Design (Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy). He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor (University of Arizona, USA) and an adjunct Associate Professor (Osaka University, Japan). 

Dr. Matthew Abunyewah is a research-focused lecturer at the Australasian Centre for Resilience Implementation for Sustainable Communities within the College of Health and Human Sciences, Charles Darwin University. He leverages participatory and interdisciplinary research approaches to inform government policies on disaster management and resilience, circular economy and sustainability, community development, industry and business development, and climate change and variability. Before joining Charles Darwin University, Dr. Abunyewah worked as a community and industry development practitioner researching workforce and training development, public policy development and disaster resilience across Africa and Australia for over eight years. Notable industry research outputs/reports produced by Dr. Abunyewah in collaboration with industry partners and government agencies include the Northern Territory Central Five Mines Report and Northern Territory Circular Economy Strategy. 

Dr. Michael Odei works at the intersection of global development and business sustainability.  For ten years, in industry and academia, he has applied a multi-disciplinary lens to business sustainability and global development approaches to identify the tools, models, metrics, and indicators that create the greatest value for businesses, society, and the environment. Prior to joining Charles Darwin University, Dr. Odei worked on Transparency International (TI)’s Mining for Sustainable Development (M4SD) Programme as a research and policy coordinator.

Dr. Festival Godwin Boateng is a critical postcolonial institutional political economist, specializing in sustainable development in Africa. He approaches questions about Africa’s development by linking dots discursively and systematically from the past to the present and from the local to the global toprovide a critical account of the inherited/historical, internal, and external factors which intersecting interplays and resulting transformations are determining socio-legal-cultural and political-economic outcomes in the continent. Some of his works have appeared in prestigious journals like World Development; International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction and Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. His current research at Columbia University’s Earth Institute focuses on cleaner, safer, and affordable mobility in Africa.

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