Introduction: The embeddedness of circularity in everyday slum living in Global South cities -- Linking informal settler practices and circular principles in Global South: Lessons from Asian and Latin American Cities -- Modern Vernacular Architecture and Circular Economy in Informal Settlements -- Exploring Circular Economy Awareness, Perceptions and Practices in Selected Urban Slums in Kigali City of Rwanda -- Recycling from Construction and Demolition (C&D) Waste: Exploring the Scope of Circular Management in Constructing Slum Dwellings of Dhaka -- Circularities in Housing Transformation Practices: A Synergetic Review -- Circular economy in Africa’s informal cities: A review of residents' value retention practices and their implications for participatory urban planning -- Circularizing livelihoods: Transforming agricultural residues to electricity in low-income periurban areas of Uganda -- Metropolitan Cartography: A novel approach for assessing how new morpho-types solutions impact the circular city agenda. The Ouagadougou Case Study -- Closing the policy-implementation gaps in e-waste management: Implications for circular economy and sustainability in urban Ghana -- Towards Just Circular Transitions in the of Slums Global South Cities.

This book takes a theoretical and empirical distance from urban slums/low-income settlements as a threat to environmental sustainability and recast them as places where environmentally rehabilitative and circular practices occur—drawing on the theoretical lens of the circular economy (CE). CE is defined as regenerative system that minimizes waste, emission, and energy leakage by slowing, closing, and narrowing material and energy loops. In principle, CE departs from the traditional linear model of take-make-use-dispose. As conceived in urban contexts, circular cities offer possibilities to regenerate natural systems, design out waste, and keep products in use. While the CE key principles of reduce, repair, and reuse are essential to the sustainable and inclusive interventions in urban slums, there is lack of case studies exploring the role of place and agency, especially the slum living-CE nexus in global south contexts. In inequitable urban transitions, a nuanced understanding of the synergies between urban slums and the circular economy is not only theoretically relevant for reconceptualizing the slum in urban sustainability discourses but also exert policy and practice ramifications to decidedly figure out how the urban slum phenomenon can foster the sustainable and inclusive development of marginal areas through contextual and people-centered initiatives.