Partnership and collaboration with city of Leuven

The secret to Leuven’s success is its radical embrace of the power of collaboration. In Leuven, people work together and form a thriving innovation ecosystem, from government, academia, industry, and civil society.

The city’s approach involves empowering isolated initiatives by facilitating their collective organisation towards a common vision in order to tackle challenging issues like climate change. Evidence of Leuven’s culture of collaboration can be found in the way its city-wide climate network Leuven 2030 drafted and is implementing its Roadmap 2025 · 2035 · 2050, a comprehensive document laying out what is needed to reach climate neutrality. The Roadmap consists of 13 programmes.

The Circular Economy Programme, Leuven Circulair, is structured around five strategic objectives:

1. Circular entrepreneurship in Leuven
2. Circular construction
3. Repair, share and reuse
4.  Sustainable and circular consumption
5. Data, monitoring and policy

For each objective, targets and actions are set out and defined in close collaboration with key stakeholders, united in the Leuven Circular platform. The focus for Leuven is on upscaling to generate maximal impact by facilitating new local value chains in a systemic approach while engaging citizens to be actively involved in the transition.

Developing of the Circular Economy monitor and leveraging the city’s own policies, such as procurement and building regulations, remain high on the agenda. In 2020, Leuven won the European Capital of Innovation Award. Recently, it was nominated by the European Commission for the mission ‘100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030’.