RE-CYCLING VIII International Conference Ecological intelligence for a circular and transformative architecture

The leafcutter bee cuts small pieces of leaves and sometimes uses petals or old plant materials to build its nest. Instead of creating new materials, it reuses natural resources already available in the environment. Contemporary architecture should imitate the leafcutter bee: working with what already exists, recognizing latent value in discarded matter, transforming inherited structures, and constructing new habitats through intelligent forms of ecological interdependence. The seventh edition of the Re-cycling International Conference, held in 2026 at the Universitat Politècnica de València, marks a significant step in the evolution of a research field that, over the last decade, has progressively widened its theoretical horizons, operational tools, and disciplinary boundaries. What initially emerged as a debate focused on waste reduction, material recovery, and technological innovation in construction has evolved into a broader reflection on architecture’s role within the contemporary ecological crisis. The call for papers for this edition explicitly proposed a radical shift toward forms of ecological intelligence capable of interpreting the built environment as a living reservoir of materials, memories, energies, infrastructures, and relationships. Within this perspective, reuse, recycling, adaptive transformation, and regenerative design become central cultural practices for rethinking architecture in a time defined by climate instability, resource depletion, demographic change, and territorial fragility. The contributions received for this edition can be broadly summarised within three interrelated thematic clusters: Closing the Loop: Circular Materials, Recycling and Upcycling Strategies; Living Territory: Adaptive Reuse and Circular Urban Transformations; and BioIntelligent Futures: Ecological Design and Learning Environments. Several contributions explore innovative strategies for extending the life cycle of building materials and components through reuse, upcycling, and technological experimentation. Research on brick waste recovery, alkaliactivated materials derived from industrial sludge, nanoengineered cementitious matrices, reversible wind infrastructure, and biobased retro-fitting materials demonstrates how construction materials are increasingly conceived not as static products but as temporary configurations within longer cycles of transformation. Parallel investigations into digital twins, material passports, life cycle assessment methodologies, and traceability systems underline the growing importance of datadriven approaches in managing future reuse scenarios. In these contributions, waste ceases to represent the end of a process and instead becomes the beginning of a new material biography. At the same time, historical investigations on vernacular architecture in El Cabanyal, Monte Testaccio in Rome, postwar debris recycling in Milan, temporary housing systems of the twentieth century, and ancient reuse practices in Amiternum show that circular logics have long been embedded in architectural culture. Scarcity, necessity, pragmatism, and cultural adaptation have historically generated sophisticated reuse practices that contemporary design is now rediscovering under new environmental imperatives. Adaptive reuse becomes a strategy for preserving built heritage and activating new forms of social, cultural, and environmental regeneration. Contributions focused on industrial heritage, Mediterranean productive landscapes, abandoned infrastructures, inland regions, and fragile rural environments show how existing spatial resources can be reactivated through circular strategies capable of generating new economies, collective identities, and local resilience. The hyperlocal design approaches in fragile territories such as inland Abruzzo, where architecture become a catalyst for slow tourism, local production chains, community participation, and ecological stewardship demonstrate that circularity cannot be reduced to material efficiency alone; it must also engage with questions of geography, mobility, governance, and social inclusion. In this sense, circularity becomes a lens through which to rethink territorial justice, everyday practices, and longterm forms of care. Similarly, contributions addressing urban governance, GISbased ecological mapping, and territorial risk management indicate that circularity increasingly requires systemic thinking. Urban metabolism, infrastructure networks, hydrological resilience, and spatial justice emerge as crucial dimensions of circular urban transformation. The city and the territory are thus reimagined as evolving metabolic systems, whose cycles of matter, energy, information, and meaning need to be realigned with ecological limits. At the same time, emerging research on biomaterials, living systems, additive manufacturing, and naturebased solutions points toward increasingly hybrid relationships between architecture and biological intelligence. Studies on living walls, bioinspired materials, adaptive manufacturing processes, and biomimetic construction suggest a future in which architecture operates less as an act of domination over nature and more as a process of collaboration with ecological systems. In this view, design becomes an art of negotiating with other forms of life, embracing uncertainty, adaptation, and coevolution. Architecture can become a pedagogical device: educational buildings become laboratories where sustainability is made visible through construction systems, water cycles, reversible assemblies, and material transparency. Design-build workshops, self-construction experiments, university laboratories, and international educational programs show that circularity must be learned through direct engagement with matter, labour, and environmental systems. This volume underlines a profound cultural transformation in the way architecture understands growth, permanence, innovation, and responsibility in which ecological intelligence becomes a new ethical and cultural framework of built environment.