REFLOW - Stockholm Royal Seaport's Eco-cycle model

The City of Stockholm has ambitious sustainability goals and strives to be a global role model in sustainable urban development. Amongst other things, this has resulted in urban development projects with high sustainability ambitions, such as Hammarby Sjöstad and Stockholm Royal Seaport. To increase understanding and optimize the city's various resource flows, extensive development work with a circular model has been ongoing for several years in Norra Djurgårdsstaden.

Inspired by the Hammarby Model, the City of Stockholm and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) began work in 2011 to develop an approach for an eco-cycle model.

The results of the initiative attracted considerable national and international attention as the model demonstrated the complexity of resource flows in a district and the opportunities to make these flows circular. Based on the Eco-cycle Model 2.0, the City of Stockholm continued to work on simplifying what was initially a complex model. The REFLOW concept was developed to visually show and explain the city's complex hidden resource flows in a simple way.

To simply and visually show and explain the city's visible and hidden flows, the communications approach REFLOW was developed as interactive material aimed at fifth graders. The material aimed to show the city's hidden flows in a simplified manner. This resulted in a web solution where animations and illustrations showed the flows of water, energy, and materials.

In 2017, work began on scientifically developing a model that could be filled with data to provide information about quantities and impacts. Through the project 'Resource Flows of Stockholm Royal Seaport', funded by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (2017-2018), the Urban Accounting Model was developed in collaboration with KTH. The model was used for structuring the data needed to collect and analyse the city's resource flows. The project 'Connected SRS - Connected Stockholm Royal Seaport' also explored the availability of digital data.

When the experiences and knowledge generated in the above projects are combined, the currently low access to data on actual resource use will help create a complete picture of physical resource flows.

In 2023, Smart Built Environment granted funds for further development of the innovation idea connected to the eco-cycle model.

Purpose and goal

The purpose of the project is to continue developing a coherent model for resource flows, data inventory, and categorisation. The goal is to develop REFLOW into an eco-cycle model based on current research, anchored and adapted to conditions in the City of Stockholm and Swedish municipalities.

The benefits of the project for sustainability work in Swedish municipalities are:

• Application and practical use of previous research results.
• Development of more knowledge-based and efficient methods.
• Increased clarity and requirements on municipalities as organisations, in terms of making climate-related data available that are open and/or shared.

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