As part of my work in Danish Design Centre I have the pleasure of being part of the EU-funded REFLOW Project, which aims to develop circular and regenerative cities through enabling active citizen involvement and systemic change to re-think the current approach to material flows in cities.
REFLOW’s vision is to develop such circular and regenerative cities through the re-localization of production and the reconfiguration of material flows at different scales. To do so, it develops best practices that align market and government needs in order to create favorable conditions for the public and private sector to adopt circular principles.
Concretely, the project utilizes Fab Labs and maker spaces as catalysts for change in urban and peri-urban environments, and is currently being rolled out by a consortium of leading European organisations like IAAC (Barcelona), WAAG (Amsterdam) and CBS (Copenhagen) - as well as Danish Design Centre. In addition, a handfull of pilot cities are testing tools and outputs on the ground - including Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan and in Danish context, the city of Vejle. In Vejle our focus is on circulating plastic waste, which is a huge political priority in Vejle, which is also exclusively one of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities.
A particular focus is to develop a technical backbone for redistributing the material flows: An operating system for sharing materials across a city, if you will.
A select group of members of the consortium, including Dyne from Amsterdam, Fraunhofer Fokus in Berlin and IAAC from Barcelona are currently building this system, REFLOW OS, as an encrypted, federated and extensible system that can potentially also run on a distributed ledger (a general purpose blockchain such as the Ethereum network).
REFLOW OS allows materials to be exchanged across the network, as well as to be transformed and combined with other materials to create new resources. Tracking of any economic activity that happens to a resource will empower the community of practitioners, providing meaningful information about its supply chains and how to optimise them.
Read more about REFLOW as a project, check out the REFLOW whitepaper or the REFLOW OS in particular.
