Spending 71 days alone at sea, confronted by the awesome power and dazzling beauty of nature, Ellen began to ponder the fragility of the systems we've built. Her boat was her world and her survival was entirely dependent on the limited food, fuel, and other supplies she'd brought with her. She realised that our global economy is no different—it relies completely on the finite resources we extract, use and then dispose of. (“Ellen's Story” n.d.)1
The EMF frames the CE as the “big idea” necessary to “solve problems like climate change, waste and pollution” (“Ellen's Story” n.d.), telling a story of “win-win” solutions, of doing well by doing good, and advancing a vision of the line—the linear economy—turned in on itself, bringing cycles of nature to better order human activities. In this sense, the CE is presented as a fundamental transformation, a paradigm shift necessary to change course in a sufficiently meaningful way and avert environmental disaster.
The EMF is not the first to propose the term “circular economy,” which has been in use since the early 1990s (Kovacic et al. 2020: 15), or to use the metaphor of the earth as a ship (Boulding [1966] 1992), or to note the potential for product and material reuse and reintegration of waste into supply chains as a raw material: a set of potentialities investigated most prominently in the field of industrial ecology (Genovese and Pansera 2021). But the ways the CE is advanced by the EMF are in many ways exemplary of broader institutionalized CE discourses, in part because its definitions and publications are the most widely cited articulations of the promise and potential of the CE across a wide range of contexts.
Much of this citation is practiced by non-academic actors who dominate CE discourse (Calisto Friant et al. 2020) to advance their environmental policies. This is exemplified by the 2015 European Union Circular Economy Action Plan, which cites the EMF in order to ground its assertion that the CE is a sure economic, social, and environmental solution, arguing that “the circular economy will boost the EU's competitiveness . . . create new business opportunities,” promote “social integration and cohesion,” as well as “save energy and help avoid irreversible [environmental] damages” (European Commission 2015; see European Commission 2020 for the latest iteration of the plan). Such quotes illustrate how the CE is positioned as a project of world-making aimed not only at environmental remediation but also at particular notions of human well-being and good social order. Similarly, cities are foregrounded given their “central role in the global economy”; hence, “implementing the CE in cities can bring tremendous economic, social and environmental benefits” (“Cities and the Circular Economy—Deep Dive” n.d.). Yet, given the broad set of goods the CE is envisioned to offer, policy agendas often adopt the pursuit of “circularity for circularity's sake” (Harris et al. 2021), where social injustice involved with circular agendas, such as the enablement of the expansion of “waste colonialism” under the aegis of CE progress, remains largely invisible (Liboiron 2018; Manglou et al. 2022).
The pursuit of circularity as a good in itself is drawn out of powerful articulations of circularity as a natural phenomenon that can heal the economy and human societies if it can be successfully applied to human activities. This grounds the CE in the modern constitution that takes nature and culture as distinct realms (Latour 1993), even as it posits their union as the remedy for contemporary crises. As the EMF website explains: “If we move to a regenerative model, we begin to emulate natural systems. There is no waste in nature. When a leaf falls from a tree it feeds the forest. For billions of years, natural systems have regenerated themselves. Waste is a human invention” (“Regenerate Nature” n.d.; emphasis added). The paradigm shift that leading visions of the CE articulate is therefore premised upon repairing what they figure as a fundamental divide between human societies and nature. This divide is reified when “waste” is emphatically situated on the side of society, justifying the assertion that rendering societies in the circular image of nature will eliminate it—repairing not only environmental but social disorder.
Pointing to the imagined nature–culture divide as the fundamental characteristic of modern thought, Bruno Latour argues nature and culture are in practice coproduced, pointing to the myriad hybrids of nature and culture that populate our daily lives: is the genetically engineered plant nature or a technological artifact? Are English gardens and managed forests nature or products of human engineering? Such demonstrations of the false dichotomy upon which the façade of modernity rests inspired his icon(oclast)ic claim that human societies “have never been modern” (Latour 1993). Coproduction has since been theorized and mobilized more widely in the field of science and technology studies (STS in abbreviation), as a way of approaching research in a symmetrical way, giving explanatory primacy neither to social nor to scientific and technological causes. In this way, it can “be seen as a critique of the realist ideology that persistently separates the domains of nature, facts, objectivity, reason and policy from those of culture, values, subjectivity, emotion and politics” (Jasanoff 2004: 3).
In this article, we take up the lens of coproduction to interrogate what lies behind the foundational claim of novelty in the CE. To do so, we consider a collection of vignettes in which influential thinkers have envisioned human progress as achievable by bringing natural flows into social orders and rationalizing nature through the application of human reason to its apparent disorder. We read these acts of attempted hybridization as an important historical context for the CE not only to critically assess the foundational claims of novelty of CE discourses, but also to examine the dynamics by which such moves to order social–natural relations are underwritten not only by ontological but also normative claims about how the world is and how it ought to be.
Each vignette presents distinct visions of circularity, focusing on “economy,” “city,” and “technology,” respectively. They illustrate how notions of circularity and nature have historically been conceptualized in relation to one another, and make explicit how knowledge of and for circularity have been coproduced with notions of right order and action. We also extend our analysis to waste as a concept that has been variably constructed across history (V. Smith 2007), given its persistent role within knowledge claims across these vignettes and in present CE discourses. By adopting this historical coproductionist stance, we offer a means to evaluate how “circularity” has informed and legitimized claims regarding who should govern whom, what they should govern, and how they should govern.
In the following section, we consider how scientific literature approaches the transformative potential of the CE before discussing coproduction as a productive analytical lens for reframing some of the problems presented therein, and introducing our historical approach, which extends from Greco-Roman antiquity through to the twentieth century. Following this discussion, we present three historical vignettes that trace the ways that notions of circularity have been coproduced to collaboratively advance social progress across modern thought. Subsequently, we consider contemporary CE discourse in the context of the historical vignettes, offering reflections on the contribution of a historical coproductionist reading of the CE to contemporary debates on the feasibility, desirability, and transformative potential of the pursuit of circular economies.
Coproduction as a Lens for CE Critique
Following EU calls for the rapid expansion of CE-relevant knowledge, and subsequently from national and local governments and their respective funding bodies, researchers have increasingly organized new projects around the question of how to make the economy circular. Thus, CE-framed research and publications have expanded precipitously (Anaruma et al. 2021). Complementing this abundance of knowledge production efforts dedicated to advancing circularity, a burgeoning literature critiques the CE agenda from multiple angles.
Calling the CE a “policy legend,” Mario Giampietro and Silvio Funtowicz (2020) argue that CE is a site of “irresponsible management of [public] expectations” for change. While challenging the feasibility of joining circularity and economy, and pointing to the “impossibilities” of the CE (Lehmann et al. 2022), literature following this line of argumentation does not contest the ontological claim that natural and economic theories and modes of ordering the world are indeed separate spheres and thus produce knowledge and practices that are unaligned. To this end, many critical CE scholars focus on the ways that the CE is imagined within European policy (Kovacic et al. 2020), pointing out the durability of certain kinds of economic knowledge at the core of CE projects, and arguing that the destabilization of such “obsolete ontologies” as neoclassical economics (Giampietro 2023) and economies of waste (Savini 2021) would be necessary to achieve the kind of transformation that the CE promises. This line of critique treats economic knowledge as a primary space of world-ordering power, and the aspirational CE as a discernable set of economic relations that can be produced, measured, and known through economic rationalities.
Others have sought to expand the CE concept itself, arguing that it should be mobilized not in pursuit of growth but of prosperity (Jackson 2016), and that by attending to the social and political dimensions of the CE (Pansera et al. 2021), the latter might be repurposed as a space to explicitly enact social justice and more convivial modes of sociality (Genovese and Pansera 2021; Purvis et al. 2023; Savini 2023). Although these approaches are critical of how the economy is known, and of the relationship between economy and human well-being, they do not question the founding promise of novelty that the CE presents: bringing the circularities of nature to a linear economy. They approach the CE as an open space in which human and natural relations can be reordered, placing human values, agency, and imagination as the guiding levers of change.
Hence one position holds physical reality to be the primary impediment to the CE and the production of technologies and/or right economic knowledge as the key to producing it, while the other looks to social order and human psychology as the primary sites of world-ordering agency. Neither questions the basic premise of the project itself—that nature and culture are indeed out of synch and in need of some kind of transformative union. In contrast, the lens of coproduction “is symmetrical in that it calls attention to the social dimensions of cognitive commitments and understandings, while at the same time underscoring the epistemic and material correlates of social formations” (Jasanoff 2004: 3). Coproduction draws our attention to how our knowledge about how the world is (e.g., scientifically, technologically) is inseparable from how we think the world should be (e.g., socially, politically, and morally).
It is important to recognize that we do not advance coproduction as “a fully-fledged theory, claiming lawlike consistency and predictive power” (Jasanoff 2004: 3). Accordingly, we do not seek to offer a determinative framework to finally settle contested questions of plausibility or desirability of the CE. Coproduction is rather “an idiom—a way of interpreting and accounting for complex phenomena so as to avoid the strategic deletions and omissions of most other approaches in the social sciences” (Jasanoff 2004: 3). Adopting this idiom, we take circularity itself as a site of empirical and historical inquiry, examining how it has been mobilized together and across efforts to understand the natural world and to order the social world across history.
We focus our analysis on the Greco-Roman tradition due to its foundational influence on the development of Western thought across the biological sciences, engineering, and urban-planning disciplines (Greaves and Wallace-Hadrill 2022; Malatesta 2006), where knowledge for contemporary visions of the CE is constructed and mobilized (Genovese and Pansera 2021). Most historical accounts of the CE tend to situate its emergence in the middle of the twentieth century (Kovacic et al. 2020; Wautelet 2018), although others have constructed genealogies leading back to seventeenth-century thinkers (Murray et al. 2017). While we, too, turn our attention to previous centuries, we neither follow this literature in its search for an origins story, nor lengthen its intellectual history to create a teleology. Rather, we approach the CE as the product of the customs and characteristics of a knowledge tradition wherein “the Classics” were made a formal entry requirement for the professions from the early modern period onward, providing a common educational background for economists, architects, engineers, and the medical professions (Malatesta 2006).
Our coproductionist reading of the CE seeks to avoid “both natural and social determinism” (Jasanoff 2004: 3). We accordingly situate neither scientific knowledge nor political interests as the primary source of explanations for how notions of circularity have been woven into sociotechnical orders across history and into current CE discourses. We do not cast these antecedents as part of the same intellectual project as the CE but inquire as to how circularity has long been mobilized across and among these disciplinary spaces, and to what ends. These ends remain distinct from present-day mobilizations of the CE as a tool to address planetary limits, climate change, biodiversity loss, etc. We thus take the CE as one of a series of instances in which knowledge production and human–nature relationalities have been (re)ordered through the application of situated notions of “circularity” in diverse political projects across history.
The first vignette focuses on prescriptions for economic order, competitiveness, and growth by highlighting the relationship between two modern texts influenced by the ancient Greco-Roman medics Hippocrates (460–377 BCE) and Galen (129–216 CE), and the philosopher Plato (428–347 BCE). Here, we discuss British physician William Harvey's (1653) De motu cordis and economist Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (A. Smith 1776). Harvey (1578–1657) is credited with introducing the “doctrine of circulation” to biology as the principle through which human life is sustained (Guerra 1959; Piñero 1973; Ribatti 2009), and is therefore often considered to be the “initiator of the scientific method” (Buzzi 2016). Smith is widely considered the “father of modern economic theory” (Virgilio and López 2022). It is less known that Smith imported Harvey's notion of biological order to produce and justify his own notion of circularity (Sennett 1994).
Our second vignette focuses on “the city,” social integration, and cohesion. Here, we introduce Vitruvius's De architectura (27 BCE), the only extant Greco-Roman architectural and engineering treatise, as a foundational text for architects seeking to build an ideal city, one in collective harmony with nature and without waste. We highlight a tradition of conceptualizing the ideal city in circular ways, due to the coalescence of economic, medical, and engineering thought and the projects of social and political ordering with which these theories were entangled.
Our third vignette focuses on technologies and “biotechnics,” a guiding principle for built design that emerged in the nineteenth century. As Philip Steadman has summarized, “biotechnics” proposed that nature should be the source of inspiration for technology given that “in the evolution of plants and animals, Nature herself had already made a great variety of ‘inventions’ embodied in the designs of organs or adaptations of the limbs” (2008: 153). We explore this principle through Reverend John George Wood's (1877) Nature's Teachings: Human Invention Anticipated by Nature, a text compiled with the intention of educating a so-called “lay audience” in natural science. Wood (1827–1889) influenced generations, was “much in demand as public lecturer and author,” and was “celebrated as a great popularizer of his day” (Lightman 2001: 355).
In each of these vignettes, we observe the cross-fertilization of notions of circularity across spaces of knowledge production and associated efforts to (re)order nature and society. We highlight how reappearing models of circularity are mobilized as organizing principles, drawing from and shaping notions of moral order in the production of particular forms of knowledge and vice versa. We consider how the CE is positioned as a paradigm-shifting corrective that bridges the nature–culture divide, and how this assertion of novelty is mobilized to call for certain kinds of action and inaction. Reading circularity through the lens of coproduction, we argue, surfaces key implications for critical CE scholarship, as well as for political actions aimed at fostering human and environmental well-being.
Coproducing Circularity
Circularity in Body and Economy
In 1628, physician William Harvey's (1653) De motu cordis proposed a paradigm shift in how the human body was to be understood. Harvey experimented with various animals from shrimp to humans and deduced that the function of the heart was to “project or expel its charge of blood” (1653: 22). He quarreled with his predecessors, Hippocrates and Galen, the established authorities of Greco-Roman medics, who argued that blood was consumed and regenerated continually through the ingestion of food while the heart generated heat (Pasipoularides 2013). Rather, Harvey showed, blood was pumped out through the arteries by the heart, and it entered through the veins in a circular movement with mass retained: “The blood in the animal body is impelled in a circle, and is in a state of ceaseless motion” (Harvey 1653: 68). Harvey argued therefore that the heart was the organ “upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds” (Harvey 1653: 4).
Harvey's text initiated a shift in conceptualizations of nature, from the primary source of reference for human bodies and societies, to a “secondary” phenomenon that the human could itself know and order by adopting scientific methods (Fig. 1). In this regard, Harvey's doctrine of circulation was foundational to modern scientific thought (Entralgo 1957: 221) while simultaneously instantiating a seminal moment for the cross-fertilization of notions of circularity across the natural and social sciences. The publication of this text “coincided with the birth of modern Capitalism” (Sennett 1994: 249) and was adopted by economist Adam Smith (1776) in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
William Harvey experiments on the valves.
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection.
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pfpvg5kg.
Citation: Nature and Culture 19, 3; 10.3167/nc.2024.190302
In her present condition, Great Britain resembles one of those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown, and which, upon that account, are liable to many dangerous disorders, scarce incident to those in which all the parts are more properly proportioned. A small stop in that great blood-vessel, which has been artificially swelled beyond its natural dimensions, and through which an unnatural proportion of the industry and commerce of the country has been forced to circulate, is very likely to bring on the most dangerous disorders upon the whole body politic. (Smith 1776: 490)
Smith's imagination of the economy as a natural organism invoked the “body politic”: an ancient metaphor used by Plato in his description of Athens as a “sick city.” Here Plato positioned himself rhetorically as a doctor able to diagnose and offer a cure (Brock 2000). Smith, evidently a reader of the Classics—he made 41 references to the “Greeks” and 29 to the “Romans”—similarly styled himself after Harvey, the physician, to propose his remedy: a normative vision of economic order. The body politic, he argued, should be “properly proportioned”: it should have a decentralized market with limbs of a more “natural” size, each possessed of a circulatory system through which blood flowed efficiently. This could maintain a growth less prone to “convulsions, apoplexy or death” (Smith 1776: 490). Importing Harvey's argument that “all growth depends” on and “all power proceeds” from the heart, Smith argued in favor of more hearts, thus more circulation, and thus greater capital accumulation.
Smith proposed that banks and bankers be the hearts of this economy, as they were “the species which is best known, and which seems best adapted for this purpose” (1776: 236). This diagnosis prefaced his prescription for blood, a currency based in hard metals: “money, therefore, the great wheel of circulation, the great instrument of commerce, like all other instruments of trade” (1776: 235). Hence, “circularity” within the economic sphere was thought of in connection to bodily circulation, and by making his argument “from Nature” Smith could declare that empirical observations justified his scheme. Smith's arguments targeted the transformation of British colonial trade monopolies that, in his estimation, were so large that they diminished circulation and thus long-term profit (Paganelli 2006).
Nature was for Smith “source material” for economic order; in this vignette, we see him conceive of the economy as something that could be improved by the integration of biological knowledge about natural laws. Simultaneously, paradoxically, Smith sought to remedy circulation systems within nature herself. He saw nature as not working enough; nature did not know how to distribute her labor. She produced too much or too little. Nature required “management,” “cultivation,” and “circulation” to improve her shortcomings (Smith 1776: 142, 159).
Hence, Smith reflected “the doctrine of circulation,” produced by studying natural organisms, back onto nature to “improve” her growth. This subjugation of nature to economic order ultimately derived from his understanding of waste. Harvey, following Hippocrates, used “waste” to denote the degradation of tissues as they performed their function over time, and described how food eventually became “waste” (Harvey 1653: 122). Here, “waste” had a dual meaning; it was both a process of material destruction, and a problem prevented by consumption. For Smith, waste was also a process: the deterioration of material (thus value) that occurred in metals as they underwent transformation. Waste, he wrote, was a problem that could be fixed by “continual importation” of material (Smith 1776: 43), comparable to increasing the consumption of food. Equally, Smith thought of waste as emptiness. Following the Latin vastare (“to empty”), he spoke of so-called uncultivated lands as “waste”: “waste lands in our sugar colonies which they expect to improve and cultivate with profit by means of factors and agents” (Smith 1776: 135). Smith's corrective for waste was therefore the circulatory system: capital could “cultivate” and “improve the productive powers” of nature.
Hence, in Smith's treatise we see an overlapping of ideas: (1) waste as an imagined natural phenomenon that could be corrected by increasing material consumption; and (2) waste as a problem eliminated by increasing production to generate money—“the great wheel of circulation” (1776: 235). His conceptualizations of waste can be contrasted with contemporary CE discourses that situate waste as a product of society; rather, Smith saw waste as a natural occurrence to be remedied by economic intervention. Accordingly, whereas CE promoters frame circularity as a means to limit the increasing introduction of raw materials into human production while maintaining growth, for Smith increasing the material base of production is exactly the point. This account of cross-fertilization from the natural sciences to economics brings into focus the historical dynamics by which nature and culture have long been brought together through the notion of circularity, as well as how circularity-driven knowledge is coproduced with contemporaneous moral visions of social and political change.
Circularity in Cities
Our second vignette considers prescriptions for ordering “the city.” Here, we go back in time to examine Hippocratic teachings on health, later revised by Harvey, and their reception within Vitruvius's De architectura (27 BCE). In so doing, we show how medical knowledge concerning “circulation” and elimination of waste entered thinking on urbanism to become a standard building principle over time. We explain how these notions of circularity have been linked to natural, social, and economic order within “the city” to normalize particular governance aims.
The Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, and Places (c. fourth century BCE) examined how human health was influenced by local climate, winds, and waters, and thus factors such as humidity and dryness, as well as what we consume. Hippocratic treatises taught that a healthy body required equilibrium with its environment, a regime of consumption based upon moderation, and constant purging via bowel evacuation. The causes of disease were many (Kosak 2000), but Hippocrates generally linked disease to imbalance and the ingestion of noxious particles in the air, miasma, a theory that prevailed until the late nineteenth century (Koch 2005).
The reception of these ideas by Vitruvius and the De architectura (1.4) gave rise to what became a seminal set of principles for building a healthy city. Here, Vitruvius declared the importance of managing environmental conditions—heat, humidity, and the buildup of miasmatic particles—by ensuring the circulation of air. He stated that a city should have streets and buildings oriented properly toward the wind and sun (De architectura 1.6; 5.3.2). Vitruvius never labeled it as such, but this prescription for an ideal city can be read as a “doctrine of circulation”: prescriptions for how flows in the body and cities should be managed.
Owing to the transmission of Vitruvius's text and the ongoing relevance of miasmatic theory, Vitruvius's teachings characterized urban expansions and interventions for centuries (Greaves and Wallace-Hadrill 2022; Wallace-Hadrill 2022). The iterative reinvention and pursuit of such “circularity” in urban planning was subsequently coproduced with a variety of projects of social ordering from the Renaissance onward. Planning elites performatively refined and critiqued Vitruvian ideas while producing new authoritative visions of how circulation in “the ideal city” should be achieved, which were underpinned by novel scientific data and tests evidencing these principles.
While advancing their own projects by building upon the authority of the past, planners simultaneously integrated its politics of expertise: Vitruvius established that only “the architect” was a professional figure authorized to build by professional training in “a science arising out of many other sciences” (De architectura 1.1; Oksanish 2019). This suited subsequent planners and governments seeking to maintain a top-down planning paradigm that stabilized their particular definitions of urban, economic, and social order.
Radial cities built during the Renaissance are a case in point. Renaissance translators discussed Vitruvius to “clarify” his teachings, arguing that a sanitary, healthy “ideal” city with proper circulation required a radial arrangement of straight streets. Vitruvius never proposed that circulation required a circular, or radial, design; no such cities are attested in antiquity (Wallace-Hadrill 2022). Renaissance authors consequently established an enduring tradition of radial cities including Palmanova (1593); Benito Mussolini's Littoria (1931); the “Democracity”; “Circleville,” Ohio; and Ernst Gloeden's “Nuclear Town”: these and other examples commonly expressed morality, good health, and governance through circularity, both conceptual and material (Eaton 2002). The “Democracity” (Fig. 2), a scheme proposed for the World's Fair in 1939, promised to build “the world of tomorrow,” through circularity, which, its creators explained, was “the symbol of living” under “the old ideal of men and women working together.”3
A unison of conceptual circular city and street plan: “Democracity” (1939).
Source: The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1935–1945, 2. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. No Known Copyright.
Citation: Nature and Culture 19, 3; 10.3167/nc.2024.190302
Such schemes were therefore advanced through circularity, variously conceptualized, and commonly found justification in teachings that “the city” built according to the Greco-Roman paradigm was clean and waste free. This idea was carried forward from their foundational texts; Vitruvius described how Greco-Roman buildings were “the highest degree of perfection” and expressions of “civilised society” achieved by progressing forward from thatched shacks—a “practice of uncivilized nations” (De architectura 2.1.4; 2.1.7). Such ideas also served subsequent projects of knowledge production in their desire to authorize imperial aims (Greaves and Wallace-Hadrill 2022), according to the logic that spaces’ proper circulation were “backwards,” messy, and contained “waste.” Through such processes, known infamously as “slum clearances,” governments sought to clean away sections of society in pursuit of urban circularity as a vision of right biological, economic, and social order.
The coproduction of urban-planning knowledge and social order through the reinvention and pursuit of circularity can be further observed in the introduction of nineteenth-century clean water schemes. Clean water was deemed essential by nineteenth-century governments seeking urban health and economic prosperity (Hamlin 2009; Osborne 1996; Osborne and Rose 1999). Continuing to build upon Vitruvius, proposals for clean water framed Greco-Roman aqueducts as infrastructures that could deliver both objectives by eliminating waste from the city, body, and nature via continual circulation (Greaves 2022). This dynamic can be seen in the embedding of a new notion of waste-free circulation in proposals for modernization. One structure proposed for such circulation was “an immense aqueduct, two networks of conduits, circulating under the great city . . . the water gushing, as needed, over all the roofs; the inhabitants, the land, the river itself, freed from disgusting constraints” (Haussmann 1858: 131–132).
In pursuit of modernity, such schemes installed novel regimes of distribution and access, expropriating common land and water, and eradicating local water economies (Da Costa Meyer 2022). Governments constructed what Patrick Joyce has termed “a sanitary economy” based upon the constant “introduction of fresh particles and the elimination of waste” (2003: 65). Consequently, cholera rates diminished and homes gained taps, but the symbolic importance of such infrastructures often stood in for their efficacy, as in the case of Naples, where governments covered up recurring disease by proffering their modern infrastructures as proof of health. To maintain the systems, the government was impelled to enter contractual construction and maintenance dependencies that alienated Neapolitans from their own resources and rendered water a luxury for the poorest inhabitants (Greaves 2022).
These schemes foreground how governments and planners have constructed circularity as a state of good health, bodily and urban, and thus as being synonymous with the public good. Accordingly, new projects of circularity were formulated to order society, nature, and the economy in its image, namely, as a waste-free body with good flows. Conceived and enacted through the authority of the Greco-Roman texts, which informed them, these projects reshaped distribution and ownership regimes in ways that stabilized a top-down planning paradigm and elite definitions of order.
Circularity in Engineering
Our final vignette explores the return of circularity from architecture back to natural history by way of Vitruvius's influential work. It takes up a vision of natural-cultural relations that relies on circular reasoning, whereby nature is interpreted as providing humans with models and solutions that should be applied in engineering practice and technological application, rendering those tools in turn the “right” ordering methods for nature. We examine the uptake and expression of Vitruvius's ideas in nineteenth-century biological knowledge through an influential text by Reverend John George Wood.
Vitruvius drew inspiration from nature to advance theories about the built environment. Seeing nature as an expression of divine order, he argued that buildings should imitate what he figured as natural principles, particularly symmetry and proportion (De architectura 2.1). Projecting these characteristics upon nature, he provided a justificatory logic for built forms that materialized these principles. Equally, he believed that cultural progress was directly achieved through the exploitation of nature: “[Humans] passed from a savage state of life to one of civilization . . . advantage being taken of the bounty of nature, in her supply of timber and other building materials” (De architectura 2.1.7).
From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the logic that good building practice could be justified by reference to nature was reinvented as part of the broader project to classify the world, and biological analogies were extended to practices of technological creation. “Biotechnics” emerged as a guiding principle for built design according to the central proposition that nature should be the source of inspiration for technology, since “in the evolution of plants and animals, Nature herself had already made a great variety of ‘inventions’ embodied in the designs of organs or adaptations of the limbs” (Steadman 2008: 153). Biotechnics proposed therefore that technological evolution “could ‘borrow’ the time already invested in the organic evolution of these natural counterparts to human artifacts” (Steadman 2008: 153), helping to advance technological development more quickly and efficiently by copying nature.
Reverend Wood's (1877) Nature's Teachings: Human Invention Anticipated by Nature takes up the principle of biotechnics “to show the close connection between Nature and human inventions, and that there is scarcely an invention of man that has not its prototype in Nature” (1877: v). While for him this might have meant that nature was designed by God, the text is ultimately focused on showing how humans were a part of nature, and thus that their actions were natural and justified.
Wood sought to prove that natural precursors existed for all human inventions, by creating juxtapositions based on physical similarity: juxtaposing “waterfall” and “hydraulic mining,” “air currents” with the “ventilation of mines” (Fig. 3), “camel stomachs” with domestic “water cisterns” (Wood 1877: 431, 442, 423). Through such comparisons, he suggested that human inventions themselves were an extension of natural law. Equally, nature became a model for future design, an argument produced by the rendering of nature as the epitome of cyclical efficiency: “Nature abhors waste and in the long run will prove it, however wasteful may be the ways of her servants. Take for example the case of an ordinary tree . . . the leaves fall. In the next summer scarcely a dead leaf can be found. They have . . . returned to the earth more than the nutriment which they took out of it” (Wood 1877: 493). Here, Wood saw Nature through Smith's own doctrine, referring to natural productivity and efficiency as situated in the “invaluable productive powers of decayed leaves” (Wood 1877: 494), reinvested by the tree to generate surplus.
Illustration of air currents juxtaposed with ventilation of mines.
Source: Wood 1877: 442. Project Domain Mark.
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/tsxh8xbv.
Citation: Nature and Culture 19, 3; 10.3167/nc.2024.190302
By means of this invention, seed is greatly economized, the supply can be regulated, and the sower knows exactly where every grain of seed goes. There is no scattering, as in the wasteful broadcast plan. (Wood 1877: 366)
He went on to argue that grasshopper egg dispersion occurred “precisely as is done by the machine dibble with its beans” (1877: 366). Here, Wood asserted connections between human invention and nature while valorizing these inventions and those who use them as virtuous by association. Thus, describing the seed drill as a tool designed to maximize production and efficiency, and to minimize waste—an expression of human ingenuity and best possible design—Wood opined: “It is really a pitiful thing to see human beings endowed with reason and aspirations performing such a task as dibbling by hand” (Wood 1877: 366).
Wood followed Smith in his justification of the innate virtue of such design, echoing the doctrine of circulation wherein processes constructed as circular should be further improved by cultivation. The conclusion of Wood's argument was built into the circularity of his reasoning: technologies are modeled on nature because of its innate qualities of circulation and efficiency, while nature is in need of technological intervention to attain those same ideals. Here, nature is made both an appropriate point of reference for non-natural technologies and the embedded justificatory logic for the interventionist application of technologies to nature.
With this vision of natural–technological relationality, Wood simultaneously articulated a powerful normative vision of natural inequality in social order. This is captured by his passage on “the home,” with thinly veiled parallels to British imperial objectives. In this passage Wood refers to ants as practicing “slave-hunting expeditions” (1877: 409–410). The ants, he argued, carried other ants off to “a new home” and “led by instinct, set to work as industriously as if they had never been removed.” Wood reassured his reader: “Those who have watched their habits are unanimous in declaring that they seem perfectly happy and contented” (1877: 410). He carried this reasoning forward uncritically from Classical literature, which theorized a linear progression of advancement of human civilization, citing Vitruvius's example of the progression from simple huts to majestic temples (De architectura 2.1.7). Wood tacked an illustration of the Victorian home onto this timeline (Fig. 4), and like his model Vitruvius, declared British building methods “the highest degree of perfection” (De architectura 2.1.4).
“The Home.” Prefatory illustration.
Source: Wood 1877. Project Domain Mark.
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/tsxh8xbv.
Citation: Nature and Culture 19, 3; 10.3167/nc.2024.190302
With its embedded vision of right social order, Wood's reasoning supplied to a whole generation—those educated in his own teachings—a scientifically based argument that could ensure the replication of an extractivist and colonial nature–culture relationality. The knowledge he produced as natural history was equally informed by the social world in which he was embedded. The absence of waste emerged in his writings as a natural virtue of nature and something achievable among societies that were rational and enlightened. He described right social order as mirrored in nature, and figured tools to manage, master or extract, and colonize nature as equally suited to fulfilling human virtue.
Discussion: Questioning the Doctrine of Circularity
Circulation comes to be carried on by a new wheel, which it costs less both to erect and to maintain than the old one. (Smith 1776: 236)
Each of our vignettes highlights the cross-fertilization of ideas about “nature,” “waste,” and “circularity” across disciplines, highlighting the shared history of economics, medicine, architecture, and engineering thought. They can be read on a most basic level as illustrations of Latour's provocation regarding the coproduction of the natural and the social worlds; we have seen how biological and engineering knowledge have historically been organized around the problem of making human societies emulate nature's cycles, and in turn designing technological interventions to optimize those cycles. Going a step further, these vignettes highlight how imaginaries of right social and political order elevate particular kinds of knowledge and technological change as rational, valuable, and as such worthy of public resources. We have shown how such knowledge underwrites collective action and political organization (Jasanoff and Kim 2015).
We can now reappraise some of the debates raised in critical CE literature. The first is whether the circular economy is in fact possible. A considerable contingent of critical CE literature accepts the premise that a CE would be desirable in theory but argues that aligning natural processes with a growth economy, and making material flows truly circular, is physically impossible (Giampietro 2019; Haas et al. 2015; Lehmann et al. 2022). Considering this question through the lens of coproduction enables us to focus upon how the normative and ontological are made together, and thus pushes us to inquire into how arguments about “how and what the CE should and might be” are knowledge claims that also underwrite particular notions of right social order and action. The concrete possibility of achieving a CE can only be proven or disproven through further knowledge production activities oriented toward knowing, and ultimately making, the CE—such as metrics, chemicals and materials production, consumer education, and the creation of new firms. In this process, questions regarding the “true” achievability of the imagined ideal are made secondary to the pursuit of the project. Rather than inquiring into the prospective possibility of attaining real circularity, then, we might well ask what is undertaken when people figure themselves as creating knowledge of and for circularity: what is at stake when we say that the CE is possible or impossible? This allows us to refocus on questions of what the mobilization of circularity does in practice and what it might do. We have shown how inquiring into the world as something to be made circular—or indeed challenging the possibility of doing so—reorders our lives in meaningful ways.
We can see this in Smith's vision of a healthy economy modeled on a healthy body where money circulates freely like blood, eliminating waste and sustaining the well-being of the whole; Vitruvius's city designed for maximal flows supporting the health and governability of the population; and Wood's vision of circular relationality between humans and nature, where particular constructions of nature are elevated as prefiguring and informing human invention, and in the process their application to social and biological relations are legitimized. In each of these cases, an imagined ideal of circularity was mobilized as part of a set of normative visions of how the world should be, which both inspired the elaboration of these knowledge claims about how the world is and contributed to prescriptions for how to reorder the societies in question. Subsequent theorists frequently criticized previous notions of circularity for imperfectly understanding how water and air should circulate, for example. But just as these critiques inspired further engineering efforts and knowledge production efforts, which ultimately further stabilized the social orders that they were constructed with and for, rather than questioning the normative underpinnings of the original knowledge claims; so too asking if the CE is possible inspires modalities of measurement and the application of expertise that stabilize the visions of the circular futures, and thus the social orders, that direct them.
Critical literature also asks whether the circular economy represents a new economy by focusing on the economic premises it rests upon (e.g., Lowe and Genovese 2022; Temesgen et al. 2021). The vignettes again enable us to adopt new perspectives on this question. Economies have been made circular in different ways across history, and indeed the biological world has been induced to “circulate” more rapidly through economic interventions. As such, we can challenge the foundational claim of novelty in CE discourse—which underwrites articulations of urgency for bringing circularity from nature to human societies, or from human societies to nature, through technological application. Our vignettes show the many ways in which assertions of novelty, this act of bringing circularity as if anew to a different domain of reasoning, has itself been fundamental in reordering the world. In this sense, the ways in which power was exercised through circularity indeed did produce novelty.
Smith theorized the economy as needing particular changes in order to facilitate its corporeal well-being: a “healthy” state of efficiency and productivity. In so doing, he played a foundational role in ideating capitalism as we experience it today. Does today's drive to “remake” the economy with the concept of circularity truly challenge capitalism in the systematic and transformative ways deemed necessary (Valenzuela and Böhm 2017)? Does it disrupt the logics of consumer capitalism that drive ecological destruction in the first place (Savini 2023)? Perhaps not. However, rather than demonstrating the appropriation of a transformational concept, perhaps this highlights the limitations of bodies of knowledge and expertise that have been at the forefront of circular transitions across modernity: those which CE calls upon once more to reinvent the circle.
Reverend Wood articulated a fundamentally (im)moral vision of circularity whereby human technological progress and nature were iteratively informed and legitimated by one another. He embedded a vision of social (in)justice that helped underwrite a highly unequal and racialized colonial vision of the world, yet his was credible knowledge production oriented toward nature and technological advance. Today, CE discourse constructs a problem—of how to align economics with biological systems knowledge—and offers a host of technological solutions and shifting environmental policies (Johansson and Henriksson 2020), but it leaves unaddressed the entanglements of human social and political worlds with these material reorderings (Pansera et al. 2021). By failing to address the environmental injustices embedded in the current configurations of production, consumption, and disposal through the elevation of ostensibly objective economic and engineering rationalities, this approach validates and potentially reproduces existing inequalities, thus helping to naturalize processes by which new relations of exploitation and injustice are produced.
Conclusion
Across historical mobilizations of circularity, we see economic, biological, and engineering expertise elevated as the governing rationalities that reorder human–human and human–nature relationalities. In each case, political agendas of change are neither “prior and causal” to the ways of knowing the world elevated in the vignettes, nor natural outputs of objective knowledge. Rather, these projects are made one and the same, demonstrating the contingency of both political and scientific projects, how they are made together, and afford power to people and institutions while constructing others as particular kinds of subjects within those regimes. Perhaps the CE can be made a productive space for effecting change, depending on what kinds of change we see as desirable. To debate this issue, we must be aware of the ways that CE rationalities and our own modes of critique are contoured by how we imagine such transformation could take place and by the forms of expertise that can affect change.
The CE naturalizes socio-biological change as an economic and engineering project. No matter how much politicization, public input, or democratization of the CE we might advocate, within such projects progress is figured as the collective reordering of economies and engineering of new materials and processes. This advances particular human–nature relationalities while narrowing the relevance of different kinds of agency, practices of knowledge production, and even democratic politics.
Correspondingly, our analysis seeks to make visible and incite critique of the forms of knowledge, expertise, measurement, and technological creation that are embedded in the broader social imaginary of the economy as “the dominant end of society” (Taylor 2004: 72). We argue that recognizing how the CE is both new and old, and the ways in which circularity has previously been coproduced with a range of political projects, can help us to move past dichotomies in the critical CE literature. Instead of asking whether the CE is possible, if it elevates the right kind of economy, and brings about human and environmental well-being, we should ask whether the imaginaries and ways of knowing the world that construct the CE as the right solution, and thus the forms of expertise it empowers, are adequate to the task of socioenvironmental transformation.
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) PROSPERA Project, H2020-ERC-2020-STG; grant agreement no. 947713.10.3030/947713. This research has also been funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 101003491 as part of the project JUST2CE: A Just Transition to Circular Economy.
Note
Since we cite various parts of the EMF website, we will simply cite the article title and “n.d.” In the References section, each article is listed under Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
This is information is available from page 12 of the 1939 Democracity Booklet, which is available online at https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9b7b92b2-59eb-8860-e040-e00a1806304e. See Fig. 2.
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