‘Build new’ comes last: an urban planner’s view on circularity

As head of architecture and urban planning at the Research Institutes of Sweden, RISE, Linda Kummel thinks a lot about what makes a city truly liveable.

“It’s a city where most kids actually have the freedom and the ability to walk around by themselves, not being afraid of traffic and for their parents to feel safe, to actually let the kids go out and play, go to school on their own, by bike, walking, and so on,” Kummel told the Mobility Times.

Mobility is a key aspect of urban planning, she said, and something that needs to be tackled right at the beginning of the planning stage.

“To make great mobility you need to have it there when you begin the design,” she insists. “You have to know how the streets connect to each other, where people gather because of how the streets are interconnected. It’s like laying a puzzle. It's the buildings, the streets, the squares, all of those places in between. You have to think of all those things at the same time.”

Unfortunately, Kummel laments, “many projects today are more about creating new bubbles outside of the existing city, and that makes it difficult to create this network”.

Kummel is pleased that circularity has found its way into the mainstream of Swedish urban planning, and says she “loves” the “Rule of Four” that was coined by the Swedish transport administration as far back as the 1990s.

“First you look at what you have, to see if you can change the way of thinking about what you already have, the resources,” she says. Optimizing existing resources comes next, and rebuilding is the third step. Only once those steps are taken, but only “as a last resort”, you build new, she insists.

“So you have to go through all of these four steps before you start building any new infrastructure or housing,” Kummel said. “That’s a really good principle for circularity.”

Does she apply circularity in her own life?

“Mostly I recycle things at my own house, but also when we remodel something in the house, we use the materials that we already have, and change the ways we use rooms in different ways.”

One of Kummel’s first jobs as an urban planner more than 20 years ago was to write a handbook for the municipality of Lund, in southern Sweden, on how to reduce the use of cars.
Soon other cities wanted to see her work. “They asked us, can we please have this handbook because we want to know what we can do,” she remembers.

“That was a good way to start, to actually see that we can do a lot more things than we think, just bring out the good examples and copy them. Nobody needs to invent these things on their own.”

When she is not busy with urban planning, Linda Kummel goes cycling, or retreats to her small summer house by a lake where she takes her stand-up paddle board out on the water. “I just lie there on the SUP,” she smiles.

Does she have any advice for urban planners starting out?

“Always think about the customer who is going to be in this building and who is going to use this building, and who is going to use the streets or the infrastructure that you are going to plan.”