CiD-Hannover-2026: CiD Conference Hannover – Circular Design for Urban Transformation Faculty of Architecture and Landscape, Leibniz University Hannover Hannover, Germany, May 28-30, 2026

Conference website	https://www.cid-innovationalliance.eu
Submission link	https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cidhannover2026
Submission deadline	March 15, 2026

Call for abstracts: CiD Conference Hannover

Circular Design for Urban Transformation

 

28–30 May 2026

Faculty of Architecture and Landscape, Leibniz University Hannover

 

15 March 2026: Submission of abstracts

7 April 2026: Notification of acceptance

15 April 2026: Registration deadline

15 May 2026: Submission of first version of papers

15 June 2026: Submission of final version of papers

 

The conference Circular Design for Urban Transformation – organised by the CiD Circular Design Innovation Alliance, co-funded by the European Union – invites researchers and practitioners to explore how circular approaches can drive urban regeneration beyond linear growth models. As cities increasingly evolve through transformation, regeneration, and adaptation rather than expansion, circularity emerges as a key framework to rethink urban spaces, heritage, governance, and socio-economic processes.

The conference is structured around three thematic tracks:

• Track 1 — Circular Regeneration (architectural assets and urban space), focusing on urban regeneration and the long-term transformation of existing urban assets and heritage sites;
• Track 2 — Circular Constellation (actors, entrepreneurship and urban networks), addressing social entrepreneurship, creative practices, recycling-based activities, and bio-based economic models;
• Track 3 — Circular Processes (engagement, governance and urban strategies), exploring governance frameworks, participation, and the critical dimensions of circular urban transformation.

The conference welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions, as well as design-based and practice-led research, including critical reflections on the limits, contradictions, and governance challenges of circularity.

 

OUTLINE

Cities are increasingly shaped by processes of regeneration, transformation, and adaptation rather than expansion. In this context, circular design emerges as a critical approach to urban transformation, addressing not only material cycles and resource efficiency, but also spatial, social, and territorial dynamics.

Circular Design for Urban Transformation explores how design operates across scales and disciplines to activate regenerative processes within existing urban fabrics. It investigates how circular principles intersect with urban regeneration, social innovation, heritage regeneration, and new forms of entrepreneurship, governance, and collective action.

The conference positions circular design as a research-driven and practice-based field, in which spatial strategies, design methods, and experimental practices actively contribute to long-term urban and territorial transformation. At the same time, it explicitly welcomes critical reflections on the limits, contradictions, and challenges of circularity, including tensions between narratives and implementation, uneven impacts, and the political and institutional conditions shaping circular transitions.

Contributions may address circular design strategies for urban and territorial transformation (Schroeder et Al., 2023), with a particular focus on the regeneration of existing urban fabrics. Papers may explore the spatial and regional implications of the circular economy (Marin & De Meulder, 2018; Korhonen et Al., 2018; William, 2019; Scaffidi, 2022), investigating how circular principles influence urban form, territorial organisation, and development trajectories across different scales.

Special attention is given to the role skills and flow of knowledge between research, profession, and education, as well as to entrepreneurship and social innovation in urban regeneration processes (Dorobantu & Matei, 2016; Matei & Matei, 2012; Scaffidi, 2024) that activate circular transformation through the reinterpretation of cultural and urban assets. The conference welcomes contributions that reflect on design-driven research methods and experimental practices, highlighting how design operates as a critical and generative research tool. Contributions also may offer critical reflections on circular projects and processes, including discussions of governance, participation, and co-production, as well as analyses of failures, limitations, and lessons learned from practice.

The conference invites contributions that investigate circular design as a driver of urban transformation, understood as a multi-dimensional process.

 

TRACKS

Track 1 — Circular Regeneration (architectural assets and urban space)

This track addresses circular regeneration as a key paradigm for urban transformation beyond linear growth, demolition, and replacement models. It focuses on how circularity reorients urban development toward the long-term regeneration of existing buildings, heritage, urban spaces, and infrastructures, emphasizing continuity, adaptability, and the capacity of urban systems to evolve over time (Fusco Girard & Gravagnuolo, 2017; 2019; Gravagnuolo et Al., 2019; Scaffidi, 2019).

Circular regeneration is understood not only in terms of material efficiency or environmental performance, but as a spatial and socio-economic process that activates new forms of value within existing urban fabrics (Marin & Meulder, 2018; Pintossi, & Brocato, 2021; Schröder et al., 2023). Contributions may explore how adaptive, incremental, and regenerative strategies enable the transformation of underused or obsolete spaces into platforms for social and economic innovation, supporting new forms of entrepreneurship, collective use, and local production.

The track invites critical reflections on circularity as an open-ended process, in which urban transformation is shaped by changing actors, practices, and governance arrangements. Design-based research, empirical studies, and practice-led contributions are particularly encouraged to reflect on how circular regeneration redefines urban value, resilience, and territorial development across different contexts and scales.

Track 2 — Circular Constellation (actors, entrepreneurship and urban networks)

This track addresses circular urban transformation through the lens of networks, actor constellations, and innovation processes, with a specific focus on social entrepreneurship, creative practices, recycling-based activities, and bio-based economic models (Carta, 2007; Carta et Al., 2017; Scaffidi, 2024). It explores how circular design and regeneration are enabled by the interaction between public, private, civic, and hybrid actors operating across sectors, scales, and territories (Hossain et Al., 2020; Calzati & De Regibus, 2021).

Circularity is understood here as a relational, socio-economic, and entrepreneurial process, in which value is generated through cooperation, knowledge exchange, and new forms of creative, social, and bio-based entrepreneurship (Carta et Al., 2017; Matei & Matei, 2012; Dorobantu & Matei, 2015; Scaffidi et Al., 2024).Contributions may examine how social innovation, social enterprises, creative industries, recycling-oriented initiatives, and bio-based ventures contribute to circular regeneration by activating local networks, building urban value chains, and fostering inclusive, place-based, and sustainability-oriented innovation.

The track invites critical reflections on how urban networks and entrepreneurial ecosystems shape circular transformation over time, paying particular attention to the role of intermediaries, grassroots initiatives, community-led enterprises, and institutional actors. Contributions are encouraged to analyse how diverse actor constellations support resilient, adaptive, and socially embedded forms of urban transformation, especially through creative reuse, circular production, and bio-based practices across different territorial contexts.

Track 3 — Circular Processes (engagement, governance and urban strategies)

This track focuses on governance as a central and contested dimension of circular urban transformation. It investigates how circular approaches both challenge and expose the limits of conventional planning, regulatory, and management models, calling for more adaptive, collaborative, and participatory governance frameworks capable of supporting long-term regeneration processes (D’Alessandro et al., 2020; Fratini et al., 2019; Marin & De Meulder, 2018, Savini, 2019).

At the same time, the track explicitly addresses the critical dimensions of circularity, including risks of depoliticisation, selective implementation, and the gap between circular narratives and actual transformation drivers (Williams, 2019; Savini, 2025). Circular governance is framed as a dynamic, experimental, and often fragile process, one that reconfigures institutional roles, decision-making mechanisms, and power relations, while also revealing tensions between innovation and regulation, flexibility and accountability, inclusion and control (Korhonen et al., 2018; Scaffidi, 2022, Savini, 2023).

Contributions may explore co-production practices, hybrid public–private–civic arrangements, and new forms of partnership, while critically assessing their capacity to genuinely enable social innovation, collective action, and shared responsibility for urban resources. Particular attention is encouraged towards governance failures, institutional inertia, uneven participation, and conflicts emerging from circular strategies.

The track welcomes contributions that critically examine how governance frameworks can both enable and constrain circular regeneration, addressing issues such as institutional learning, policy experimentation, regulatory lock-ins, and misalignments between design strategies and governance structures. From this perspective, circularity extends beyond spatial and material considerations to become a governance practice whose promises, contradictions, and outcomes must be critically interrogated in the planning and transformation of contemporary cities.

 

ABOUT CiD

The Innovation Alliance Circular Design (CiD) offers a radically new model on how to link design to circularity and urban transformation. The Alliance aims to establish benchmarks for rethinking design in a circular economy, shifting urban design, architecture, product and service design towards carbon-neutral cities, and enhancing bio-based innovation for building. Blueprints for green, resilience, and digital skills are to support the change towards sustainable, inclusive, affordable cities. They boost the turn to a circular construction and design economy driven by culture and creativity.

CiD operates on three levels: the co-creation of knowledge on circular design, the set-up of an innovation ecosystem for circular design, and educational innovation in academia, green entrepreneurship, and continuous learning and upskilling. The CiD Innovation Ecosystem brings together relevant actors from academia, research, business incubators, continuous education, civil society organisations, and enterprises. The evolution of the Alliance’s results, their dissemination and sustainability beyond the project is supported through the involvement of Europe-wide organisations in architectural practice, society, and culture.

Local and Europe-wide observatories set up within CiD aim at including relevant stakeholders to connect the education and research environments with the surrounding socio/economic environment. The Observatories contribute to the framework of challenges for the co-creation and flow of knowledge and to novel models for challenge-based education.

 

PROGRAMME AND MODE

The CiD Conference Hannover is a three-day event around a programme of research sessions, discussions, and invited lectures.

 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

The conference welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions, as well as design-based and practice-led research, including critical reflections on the limits, contradictions, and governance challenges of circularity.

 

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

1. An abstract limited to 3000 characters (incl. spaces) + 5 keywords, max 10 key bibliographic references, 1 graphical abstract and 2 images via Easychair by 15 March 2026.
2. Please include in the abstract a reasoning about the role of skills and the flow of knowledge between research, profession, and education.
3. Abstracts should describe the research objective, research methods, main results and relevance to the conference theme.
4. Multiple-authored abstracts are eligible.
5. Please indicate which track you wish to submit your abstract to.
6. Add a short CV directly in the submission form (800 char).

Submission is through EasyChair, please fill out all the fields of the submission form. The abstract, keywords, references, graphical abstract and 2 images have to bee handed-in as one pdf file without mentioning the author(s) name. The file must be in DIN A4 format and may not exceed a maximum of 5 pages in total and a file size of 5 MB, named with the title of the contribution. Please do not include your name and short CV in the main file you are uploading. While filling in your contact information in EasyChair, please add in the template your short CV.

 

FULL PAPER SUBMISSION

Admissible applications, complying with the points above, will be given into a peer-review process to select participants for the conference. Authors will be supported with feedback for preparing the full paper and presentation.

A first version of the full papers is expected for 15 May 2026.

1. Full papers should have a length between 30,000 and 50,000 characters, including spaces and notes, and excluding the abstract and references.
2. Papers must be structured and clearly numbered, including the following sections: Introduction, Methodology, Theory, Results & Discussion, and Conclusions.
3. Please include in the paper a reasoning about the role of skills and the flow of knowledge between research, profession, and education.
4. Each submission must include an abstract of up to 2000 characters (including spaces). The abstract should be concise and clearly state the research question(s) and problem(s), the main research objective, the methodology, the key results, and the main conclusions.
5. Authors are required to include a graphical abstract, a maximum of 5 keywords, and at least 2 images within the paper.
6. The text must be in British English.
7. All bibliographical references must be listed in alphabetical order and formatted according to the APA citation style.

Papers must be submitted in Word format (.docx). Please and name your file as follows: ‘SURNAME_Name_Track number.docx’ (example: SMITH_John_Track 1. docx)

 

PUBLICATION 

Papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings (open access with DOI and ISBN).

 

VENUE

Leibniz University Hannover, Faculty of Architecture and Landscape

 

FEE

The conference is free of charge.

 

CONTACT

All questions about submissions should be mailed to:

cid2026@conference.uni-hannover.de

 

CHAIRS

Jörg Schröder, Federica Scaffidi

 

ORGANISATIONAL COMMITTEE

Jörg Schröder, Federica Scaffidi, Anna Pape, Jackie Williams, Riccarda Cappeller, Rebekka Wandt