REPAiR will ensure progress beyond the state of the art by:
Extending the concept of UM by exploring the roles of governance settings and territorial and socio-cultural characteristics;
Some previous projects dedicated less attention to exploring the roles of the governance settings and territorial and socio-cultural characteristics of different (peri-) urban areas as factors constraining or supporting the capacity to devise place-tailored solutions to promote the use of waste as a resource. This is a knowledge gap that the REPAiR project will bridge by focusing on the ways in which governance, territorial and socio-cultural characteristics shape UM and determine the transferability of solutions across different peri-urban contexts.
Extending the concept of UM by strengthening the relation between design, not only of products but also space, and resource management;
Another significant gap that REPAiR addresses is the lack of integration and application of material flow analyses into spatial planning (Kennedy et al. 2011). Through the multidisciplinary PULLs in the six case studies, REPAiR will not only bring experts from different disciplines together in order to develop space specific strategies for waste management, but it will also produce a well-documented and tested methodology of transdisciplinary strategy making. As well REPAiR will develop a sustainability appraisal framework that will provide insights into effects at a local peri-urban area level. Therefore, it will merge sustainability information at the local and economy-wide levels.
Shedding new light on participatory and science-based decision-making;
The impact assessment on natural environment, resources, human health, welfare and human well-being was applied in PROSUITE at the technological level or macro-economic level (worldwide input output tables). REPAiR aims at improving and applying these assessment techniques in order to use them on a more regional scale, such as the peri-urban area level. Furthermore, life cycle thinking based assessment (LCA) at micro and macro is quite well established, in particular with respect to environmental sustainability and also recently with respect to social sustainability. But, the regional/urban/peri-urban (meso) level of REPAiR is to be advanced. ‘Meso refers to a level in-between product and economy-wide. It may include groups of related products and technologies, […] Defining and finding appropriate methods and models for this level needs further research’ (Guinée et al. 2011)’, which is at the core of REPAiR. REPAiR is going to develop indicator sets that fill the aforementioned gaps by integrating UM into tools for sustainable urban and regional design. REPAiR will bridge this gap by using the geodesign framework as a tool for facilitating close cooperation between stakeholders and for representing different policy areas and sectors for the design of integrated and place-specific and thus effective strategies for the use of waste as a resource, which are based on state of the art scientific methods and models.