Tilburg Municipality has the ambition to complete its transition to a circular economy (CE) by 2045, and assume a leading role in The Netherlands. It already quantified the spatial impact and asked Fabrications, Stec Group and Shifting Paradigms to specify the kind of space which a CE requires.
The focus is on business parks with different environmental categories, ranging from small repair workshops in urban areas to large-scale industries. Three different value chains have priority for Tilburg Municipality: construction, manufacturing and textiles.
Circular value chains are no isolated parallel entities but are part of a network. Within that network five different dominant spatial profiles can be distinguished:
- The Logistics Landscape consolidates supplier intake, reverse logistics, storage, transshipment, and distribution.
- The Manufacturing Park provides space for circular production, prefabrication, remanufacturing—the industrial restoration of used products into reusable products— specialized processing, and knowledge-intensive manufacturing activities.
- The Work City connects repair, overhaul, reuse, and sustainable production with large companies and users.
- The Mixed-Use Area accommodates low-impact circular services, workshops, shops, practice-oriented test and development environments (living labs), and live-work programs.
- The Materials Park involves the storage, sorting, recycling, and processing of raw materials— derived from recovered products and materials—preferably at multimodal locations that are accessible by water wherever possible.
The study concludes that existing business parks offer opportunities for intensification, though not every undeveloped square meter is readily available. Taller racking systems, shared use of buildings, additional storeys, collective parking, and the temporary use of vacant land can free up space. These possibilities must be balanced against structural limitations, safety distances, (truck) manoeuvring space, water retention, battery storage, and future expansion needs.
Intensification therefore requires site-specific customization and must not result in the loss of the transitional and environmental buffer space that circular activities specifically require.
