3 Questions on Resilience & Infrastructure with Esther Heidbüchel Urban resilience is not about bouncing back when things go wrong, argues Dr. Esther Heidbüchel, CSCP Senior Project Manager. Read how she thinks circular approaches can help cities to better respond, adapt and transform as conditions change. Cities are facing climate change, resource shortages, and geopolitical uncertainty. How can circular economy help cities become more resilient? Circular economy requires cities to know their critical value streams and have strong collaborative networks in place. These are prerequisites for maintaining economic and social ‘normalcy’ in crisis situations. By localising resource loops for water, food, energy and materials, circular cities reduce dependence on fragile global supply chains and create buffers against geopolitical shocks and price volatility. By exploiting waste streams, keeping products and materials in use, they lower exposure to resource shortages while creating alternative revenue streams from recovered nutrients, secondary raw materials and shared assets. Digital tools that not only map, but are capable to steer urban material and energy flows, further improve early warning and adaptive management during extreme weather or infrastructure failures. Finally, circular strategies such as industrial symbiosis, repair and reuse economies, and nature-based solutions can diversify urban functions and reduce dependence on single systems. This creates greater flexibility: when one system is disrupted, others can help compensate. Combined with strong stakeholder networks and a sense of community, this flexibility enables circular cities not only to recover from disruptions, but also to adapt and move towards more sustainable and equitable urban models. How can cities become resilient while at the same time staying just and inclusive? A city is not resilient if it is not just and inclusive. A city becomes resilient only by embedding equity and justice into every step of urban planning and implementation. This means prioritising investments in neighborhoods that are most vulnerable to impacts of natural disasters and economic hardship, ensuring that climate adaptation measures such as green infrastructure, flood protection and cooling strategies support equity. Participatory governance is essential: residents, community organisations, businesses of all sizes and marginalised groups should be involved in defining priorities, co-designing solutions, support implementation and monitoring outcomes. A just transition also requires targeted social policies: affordable housing mandates, accessible public transport, skills training for green jobs and financial support for low-income households to retrofit buildings or adopt circular practices. By linking circular economy strategies (repair hubs, community composting and material reuse centres) to local employment and social inclusion goals, cities can create shared benefits while reducing environmental pressures. What is one common misconception about resilient infrastructures on an urban level that you would like to challenge? A key misconception is that urban resilience is mainly a fixed status. It’s not about focusing on robustness only against, for example, heavy rainfalls, floods, storms, or sabotage; instead, it is about adaptivity and response capacity. A narrow, engineering-style view risks treating resilience as simply “bouncing back” after a shock, rather than building the capacity to anticipate, absorb, adapt and transform under changing conditions. In practice, this can lead to investments in ever higher walls or bigger drainage systems while ignoring systemic vulnerabilities such as land-use patterns, social inequalities or dependencies on fragile supply chains. A more useful framing considers resilient infrastructure as part of a socio-nature-technical system that remains functional and fair in most plausible futures. That means designing for flexibility and redundancy, using nature-based solutions alongside technical measures, and embedding participatory processes so that adaptation pathways reflect local knowledge and diverse needs. When cities plan for adaptivity instead of only robustness, they turn resilience from a defensive concept into a driver of sustainable urban innovation. Join Dr. Esther Heidbüchel at the Online Conference of the Circular Week 2026. Register here to secure your spot! To explore the full Circular Week 2026 programme, please visit the dedicated page. For all other questions, please contact Nils Kreft.