Crossing Borders, Closing Loops: Designing Cross-Border Stakeholder Arenas for a Circular Built Environment in the Eurodelta Region

Students: Nitisha Sai Kiran Srikurmam

Tutors: Christa Reicher, Jorge Peña Díaz

The Eurodelta region, spanning the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, hosts over 45 million people and faces critical sustainability challenges. Despite its economic vitality, fragmented governance creates a patchwork of approaches to sustainability that undermines collective progress. This research explores how to transform the Eurodelta into an integrated circular megaregion through innovative stakeholder arenas.

Key challenges include fragmented governance with inconsistent policies across borders, and inefficient material flows where construction waste and other resources are underutilized. The research identifies three strategic arenas for transformation: Urban-Industrial Clusters focusing on circular construction principles, Port-Industrial Clusters leveraging logistics infrastructure for material exchanges, and Wine-Agri-Industrial Clusters demonstrating small-scale circular innovations.

The vision proposes development phases from 2025-2052, including kickstarting pilot projects, connecting initiatives, building circular infrastructure, and establishing a fully functional circular ecosystem. Practical implementation tools include specialized toolkits for urban innovation, industrial symbiosis, agri-vini circularity, and energy integration.
Success depends on cross-border stakeholder collaboration, policy harmonization, spatial integration, and knowledge networks. By connecting large-scale industrial operations with smaller bio-based enterprises through well-designed stakeholder arenas, the Eurodelta can pioneer new models of cross-border collaboration for circularity, transforming resource challenges into opportunities for sustainable prosperity.