Arup consortium appointed to deliver second phase of EIB’s Circular City Centre

The Circular City Centre, a collaboration between the EIB and the European Commission launched in 2022, provides free advisory services and support to help European cities on the journey towards a circular economy. Also known as C3, the project helps cities put together strategies and identify scalable, fundable projects to pave the way towards an urban circular transition.

Building on the success of the pilot phase, a consortium consisting of Arup, Circle Economy, ICLEI, and Ecorys as a subcontractor will lead the second leg of the programme to scale up the transition. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation will collaborate as a knowledge partner.

This second stage of the C3 project will focus on circularity enablement, including capability building, for a pool of about 90-100 promoter cities in Europe over the next four years. This will lay the foundation to work with around ten cities on scalable, bankable, capex intensive CE pilot projects from sectors including the built environment, including energy, water and food.  

The work package includes four workstreams: the first one aims to raise awareness and mobilising tools for circularity led by Circle Economy, a second workstream focused on circular knowledge sharing and dissemination led by ICLEI, a third stream to further develop the Circular City Advisory team, led by Circle Economy; and a fourth workstream led by Arup to deliver the Circular Project Advisory (CPA).  

Martin Pauli, Arup's global circular economy services leader said:

“Our consortium brings together an incredibly strong team of subject matter experts drawn from across urban design, sustainable finance, circular economy, waste, carbon management, and many other services, which is creating a lot of value in this programme to help cities embrace the circular economy in Europe. Arup will deliver tailored technical assistance to help cities bring meaningful circular projects from concept to reality.”