On the evening of Wednesday 17 June, 110 people filled the Keilezaal in Rotterdam and another 20 joined online, people who don't usually share a room: community partners joining by video link from Nairobi and the Galápagos, a researcher dialling in from Singapore at two in the morning, a forest manager from Gelderland, and a market cooperative from the Afrikaanderwijk a few kilometres away. They were there for the same reason: the second edition of Circular Communities, the book that argues the circular economy isn't something you design for communities, but something communities have been doing for generations, in their own words, on their own terms.
What changed since the first book
The first edition, published in 2022, mapped Dutch neighbourhood initiatives. The second edition does something bigger: it goes global, adding cases from Indonesia, Kenya, and the Galápagos to the Dutch ones, and zooms out from the neighbourhood to the region.
Authors Els Leclercq, Fátima Delgado Medina and Mo Smit explained what's new in the book. Their main tool is called the Circular Value Flower. It helps analyse and design circular systems. Now it has a new layer: the practical steps needed to actually close a loop. Harvest, storage, processing, distribution, access. Each step raises a question. Who has the space to harvest water or materials? Who owns the place where things get stored? Who's allowed to use what gets processed there? It sounds basic. But when the team mapped them across every case, from a village in Indonesia to a market in Rotterdam, the same problem kept showing up. The loop almost always breaks at one of four points: space, time, money, or ownership.
There's also a bigger shift happening, and it's more about the concept itself. The book used to focus on circularity at the neighbourhood level. Now it zooms out to the regional level. Timber gets sourced and shared across different municipalities. River corridors don't stop at a city's edge, so the thinking shouldn't either. And running through all of it is a concept introduced by master's student Noa Buijsman. Drawing on the Mi'kmaw principle of Etuaptmumk, articulated by Elder Albert Marshall, it is sometimes called "two-eyed seeing." The idea is simple: look at the same problem through a Western lens and an Indigenous lens at the same time, without either one cancelling the other out. As Fátima Delgado Medina put it: "sometimes the researcher's job is to recognise who the real expert in the room is, and it isn't the researcher."
Fátima Delgado Medina, Daniel Vivas Villalbas and Natalia Tribaldos (Daniel & Natalia are both MSc students from the Industrial Ecology program who joined Fatima's course on Regenerative entrepreneurship in the Global South. The rituals were a common pedagogy in the course. Photo credits: Robèrt Kroonen
A ritual, a song, a fisherman who isn't a metaphor
Before the panel, the authors handed the room over to a ritual space led by Fátima Delgado Medina, Daniel Vivas and Natalia Tribaldos. It opened with a welcome in five languages at once, "Bienvenidos, Karibuni, Selamat datang, Wilujeng sumping, Welkom", framed as five languages, five places, one book.
Then came a guided meditation: breathe in, picture Rotterdam, let the water carry you across the Atlantic to the Pacific, to the Galápagos at dawn, where a fisher is already awake, checking his equipment before heading out to sea. The point landed a beat later, deliberately blunt: "The fisher is not imagined. He is in this book. He is the book." His knowledge, of tides, of fish behaviour, of turning skin into leather, was described as relational, passed down through kinship rather than recognised as expertise by any institution that measures value through extraction.
The ritual also paused to honour Totó La Momposina, the Colombian singer who had died a few weeks before the launch, as someone who "never softened her accent" and "never stopped singing the land she came from," a tribute that doubled as the introduction to a song, El Pescador, performed live in Spanish about a fisherman's daily conversation with the moon, the beach and the sea.
The ritual closed on the line that doubles as the book's thesis: the communities "are not subjects of research, they are knowledge holders." The invitation was to learn from them, not extract from them.
The voices the book is actually about
What followed was a video stitching together the people whose practices fill the book's pages. As Fátima Delgado Medina summed it up afterwards: "Every community answered differently. Every community answered the same."
In Puerto Ayora, Galápagos, Vicente Erazo is fisher and president of the Pelican Bay Cooperative. He described turning fish skin, heads and viscera into leather goods, fertiliser and collagen: added income for a cooperative squeezed between conservation rules and industrial competitors. Valeria Ascencio, daughter of one of the cooperative's fishers, put it more simply: "el conjunto de todas las partes de un sistema y cómo se benefician entre unas y otras" (the set of all parts of a system and how they benefit each other). A circular community is all these parts working together, including the parts of the fish nobody else wants, turned into something sellable instead of waste.
In Nairobi, along the Mathare River, four community organisations are doing the unglamorous work of pulling a polluted river back to life. Alvin Ochieng of LEWMO collects household waste door to door and runs a buy-back system. Davis Thuo of Easy Urban Green Growers turns black soldier fly waste into fertiliser and feed, and teaches schoolkids the concept in Sheng because that's the language that actually lands. Tom Agola of Youthprinua runs a waste-for-water exchange that turns recyclables into clean water access. The talk wasn't about technology. It was about dignity, jobs, and a cleaner river.
In Bandung, Jakarta and Bali, the Fashion Village Lab, Kampung Kollektief and Bale Bengong, together with a team of Indonesian and Dutch designers, are working to repair the damage the global fashion industry did to riverside kampung communities. In Bandung, that means reviving batik artisanship, both as a craft and as a source of income. In Jakarta, it means something different: movable street furniture. Even after a community gets relocated and loses its fixed land, this furniture lets people keep their shared public life going, the kind built around fruit trees and shade. And in Bali, Bale Bengong works from Tri Hita Karana, the Balinese principle of harmony between the spiritual, the social and the environmental, as the ground on which circular practice is built.
Closer to home, in Rotterdam's Afrikaanderwijk, a neighbourhood cooperative now runs waste management for the local market. The municipality used to handle this. Now the cooperative does, and the results are clear: 96% of the waste gets recycled, twelve residents have jobs, and their Resource Station has become a real social hub. Resource Station employee Ivan Richardson describes the work simply: it's done "with a heart of love."
There's a similar story in the Gooi en Vechtstreek. For 650 years, this region has had a tradition of managing forests together as a community. Now that tradition is getting reconnected to something practical: local housing construction. The timber gets harvested for biodiversity reasons, but instead of shipping it out of the region, it's used to build homes right there.
What the panel actually argued about
The panel, titled "The Future of Circularity in Our Cities," brought together Annet van Otterloo (Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative), Peter Kampen (Geldersch Landschap & Kasteelen), and Mo Smit, with Bosibori Barake, Ángela M. Díaz-Márquez and Tita Larasati joining by video from Nairobi, Ecuador and Singapore.
It was 2AM in the morning in Singapore when Tita Larasati joined the call. Her topic was the Circular Value Flower, the book's main tool. According to her, it works well for one thing: helping people explain what they're already doing to outsiders. But something is still missing. Designers and scientists, she said, don't always see how that work connects to a bigger goal.
From Ecuador, Ángela M. Díaz-Márquez took the point further. A researcher and Innovation Specialist for Higher Education and Research at the Universidad de las Américas (UDLA), she has worked alongside the Pelican Bay Cooperative since the project began, and her argument was blunt: decision-makers in the Galápagos tend to ignore knowledge that is not written down or spoken in their own language. Researchers, she argued, need to stop treating community knowledge as something to collect and judge from a distance. It should count as knowledge, full stop. What made the Galápagos work possible, in her reading, was not the arrival of a method from Delft but the slow assembly of a collaboration in which fishers, academics, chefs and entrepreneurs each held a piece of the problem, and none of them held all of it. Circular practice in the islands did not begin when researchers named it; it began when the cooperative decided that the parts of the fish nobody wanted were worth defending.
Nairobi's Bosibori Barake, Nuvoni's Urban Programmes Coordinator, agreed with both points, and pushed them further with four concrete problems communities face:
- Their work for nature and society doesn't get counted in any official numbers.
- They don't have secure rights to their own land, so investing in it is risky.
- The people who control money and policy don't even know this work exists.
- Different community groups don't share resources, so nothing connects into one bigger system.
Her message wasn't about building new systems from scratch. It was about recognising what communities have already built, connecting it to people with money and power, and helping translate it into something institutions can actually understand and support. As she put it: experts shouldn't design for communities. They should make the knowledge that's already inside communities visible to everyone else.
Annet van Otterloo got a question: how do you share knowledge when language doesn't really work for it? Her answer was simple and direct. You feel it. You work together as if you're one body, one organism. And you don't pretend the language problem isn't there, you just deal with it.
Peter spoke next. He works in forest management, so he thinks in much longer timeframes than most people. He made one simple point: an 80-year-old tree is older than everyone in the room. That's how slow real forest regeneration actually is.
What's next
The authors see the book as a starting point. The next step is a global learning platform connecting the communities in the book, from Galápagos to Nairobi to the Afrikaanderwijk, so they can learn from each other directly rather than through a Dutch research team as the only common thread. There's also a stated ambition to translate community practices into formats institutions can actually use: policy briefs, shared frameworks, the kind of paperwork that unlocks funding and recognition rather than blocking it.
Order Circular Communities (2nd edition) here!
Circular Communities: Learning from Global Practices (2nd edition) is published by nai010 publishers, in collaboration with the Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative (Rotterdam), the Pelican Bay Cooperative (Galápagos), the Bioregional Construction Programme (Gooi en Vechtstreek), LEWMO, Easy Urban Green Growers, Youthprinua and Tempo Arts Centre (Nairobi), the Fashion Village Lab (Bandung), Kampung Kollektief (Jakarta) and Bale Bengong (Denpasar, Bali); with the Nuvoni Centre for Research, the Delft Centre for Entrepreneurship, the Circular Community Foundation, the Universidad de las Américas (UDLA, Ecuador), the Institute of Biology at Leiden University, and IHS Erasmus University Rotterdam.
The research was supported by the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus (LDE) Global Fund, the Galápagos Life Fund, the Province of North-Holland, Built by Nature, Delft University of Technology, the Municipalities of Hilversum, Huizen and Gooise Meren, Waterschap Amstel Gooi- en Vecht, the Municipality of Bandung, the Creative Industries Fund NL, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, MVO Nederland, Alliander, Philips, C&A, the Dutch Design Foundation, Erasmus Huis, and Playo.