Courses
Courses are another resource that exist for the circularity assessments. Specifically for the sector-wide circularity assessment (SCA), there are three courses that people can follow:
You can find some of these course videos in the various sections of the Handbook. If you prefer to follow the course and its structure, you can certainly do that. However, more (and more up-to-data) information on the approaches to the various steps can be found in the Handbooks, so you should work with both.
As for the Urban Circularity Assessment (UCA), there is a collection of all UCA related videos on the Urban Circularity Assessment collection of the Metabolism of Cities YouTube channel.
Do you want to see even more urban metabolism related videos? Check out the Metabolism of Cities YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/metabolismofcities.
FAQ
How did cities in CityLoops carry out the SCA?
Through a first type of course, Course 1A and 1B, cities were trained to properly undertake the data collection process necessary to conduct a SCA. Each session explained what type of data is important in contributing to a comprehensive understanding of circularity at a sector level. By the end of the course, cities had developed skills in gathering and uploading data for their own city data portal. Numerous insights can be found in the individual Data Hubs of each city. Metabolism of Cities (MoC) ran this moderated version of this course for the CityLoops cities, in which there was live support and weekly online class sessions with a group of participants. (The course ran for 8 weeks from Feb-March 2021.)
In a second moderated course, Course 2 on processing, which Metabolism of Cities ran for 10 weeks from April-June 2021, the cities learned how to take the documents and datasets collected during the first course, which were in different formats such as excel sheets, pdf, shapefiles and csv among others, and convert them into a standardised, machine-readable format. That enabled for the interactive visualisation of data into the centralised and accessible CityLoops Data Hub. Through this process, the cities learned how to create interactive maps and graphs that helped visualise their data in any way they chose.
How many hours do the courses take in total?
The time that it takes to carry out the SCA is something that can momentarily only be estimated, until it has been trialled by the CityLoops cities. Based on the courses that were given by Metabolism of Cities, the workload was estimated to take a total of 290- 350 hours for all three steps (120-150 hours for data collection, 120-150 hours for data processing, and 50 hours for data analysis).
Why is the course so long?
Feedback from the course participants revealed that continuous drips of time were better than one intense sprint. Moreover, it takes time to contact data providers and get data from them, so it is better to stretch the course out.
What’s the difference between course 1A and 1B?
Course 1A is for the construction sector and 1B is for the biomass sector. For Course 1A and B, only Layer 1 is shared.
What do the different modules focus on?
As can be seen in the image, there are a total of 8 modules, which in the first CityLoops city iteration ran over 8 weeks:
- 2 modules on Layer 1 - Urban context
- 2 modules on Layer 2 - Sector economic activities
- 4 modules on Layer 3 - Material flows and stocks
Is there anything that I need to do before the course?
There is nothing that NEEDS to be done before, but if cities wanted to do some preparatory work, they could try to find out:
- How waste data is reported in their city? By EWC codes? Other codes? Per NACE activity? Who reports this?
- Who collects the waste reporting from single companies?
- If the city uses NACE codes at all or how do they report on the economic activities? (Perhaps the chamber of commerce or an economic department would know.)
Can I also take another course?
There are already 3 courses that are similar to the ones that were produced. There is a Spanish data collection course that was given in Aug-Sep 2020, an English data collection course, and a Spanish data processing course.
Amongst other things, these courses were created to test out this platform with some volunteers from around the world. However, do note that these courses are available outside of CityLoops and are not CityLoops specific.