The circular city and the building sector

The essay deals with the issue of urban circularity understood as a subset of the Circular Economy paradigm, highlighting potential and limits of an emerging new model spreading on a global scale. The critical reasoning starts from a very recent production of institutional documents and the still reduced scientific production around and over this topic to propose an unorthodox interpretation on the relationship between circularity and city. The building industry is considered as a key sector to promote and improve circularity in cities and some experimental case studies are presented as a proof of the relevant potentials. The essay attempts a synthetic revision of the state of the art in Italy.