Circular economy in urban and environmental valuation

Economy is one of the most extensive and pervasive forms of social reality as it affects—with the functions of production, exchange, consumption, and accu-mulation of wealth—most of the activities of the individual and social subject, and the choices that it makes in the short and long term. Among the artifacts produced by organised communities, the city is the most significant one, as evidenced by its omnipresence in space and time and, again, the one that has accumulated in stable forms, allocated and transmitted most of the surplus of social product that the economic activity has achieved with the organisation of the aforementioned functions. In the scientific context of the urban and land economy—and with specific reference to the density of the functions that cities attract and retain—economics identifies the spectrum of the possible directions of the development model and the related growth opportunities by referring to two fundamental dialectics, be-tween man and nature (thus between social system and environment), and be-tween man and man (thus between the different social sub-systems). These dialectics play the role of basic interfaces at the individual and collective levels. The emergence of the environmental issue has brought out a third dialectic, that between present and future, which envelops the first two ones and gives them further meanings. These three dialectics are, nowadays, the raw material of contemporary eco-nomic thought, which connects the underlying scientific observations and technical planning with the overlying political debate, regarding the development model at all political-administrative levels and on different territorial scales. Accordingly, value, as a general economic category overarching those of cost and price, is the raw materials of the discipline known as “Science of Valuation”. The integration between the economic and evaluation aspects of the circular economy highlights that its essentially firm-centred definition takes into ac-count mainly costs and secondly prices, which are relevant to the extent that they incorporate the values of sustainability. This extent depends on many factors that keep prices and values apart; among these, public sensitivity towards the environmental issue, shared information on the sustainability of products and lifestyles, the marginal utility of income that supports the willingness to pay for sustainability, etc. The relationship between cost, price, and value is significant in relation to the relevance of the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and the related economic measurements carried out with the Life Cycle Cost (LCC) of production processes and territorial and urban transformations—the house-city-landscape system. This tool is part of the approaches through which environmental economics faces the issue of market failure in terms of sustainability, which derives from the more general problem of the transformation of values into prices and therefore of coherence and consequentiality of ethics and economy. This chapter provides first some economic-sociological premises of Circular Economy (CE) from the perspective of the most advanced Science of Valuation issues, and then the main methods and tools of the urbanenvironmental valuation in the prospect of the urban heat stress reduction policies, with reference to Life Cycle Analysis and Assessment in its diverse declination and articulations.