UIA02-050: Circular South: circulaire energie voor bewoners Nieuw-Zuid (blockchain, elektrical storage, end user dashboard) (Antwerp Circular South: engaging the community in an online and offline circular economy)

Cities put a high demand on resources, while the dense urban context often puts restraints (spatial, regulatory) on the deployment of alleviating measures. However, at the same time this dense urban context offers the ideal social environment to address the circular challenge via behavioural adaptation. The development of a new district, such as the Antwerp district 'New South', offers a unique opportunity to facilitate the growing of the new community by engaging its members to co-create a circular economy on the site. The innovation in this project therefore lies in the community driven innovation, both via online and offline participation. Together with the inhabitants, we will test and implement a number of advanced technical solutions covering different resource streams. We will test technologies (such as blockchain or 2nd life collective batteries) that have the potential to engage individuals in tackling collective circular challenges. At the same time the project setup recognises the necessity not to impose but to co-create circular solutions in order to reflect the real needs of a specific community. The online and offline activities and their respective dynamic will reinforce each other in creating a circular peer to peer network. Not only do we set the ambition to reduce the use of resources by the end of this project, we also aspire to deliver a community platform (both technological and social) in which we can plug in new initiatives after the project cycle.

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Disciplines:Geology, Other earth sciences, Architecture, Electrical power engineering