Regional Scenarios Supporting Actionable Pathways towards a Biobased Future in the Eindhoven Metropolitan Region
Research Line: Urban–Rural Circularity / Seed Call: September 2025
The Netherlands faces a dual challenge: delivering large-scale housing development while transitioning towards more circular and biobased material systems. With plans to build approximately 100,000 new homes annually and strong ambitions to increase the use of biobased building materials, the demand for regionally cultivated biomass will grow substantially in the coming decades. The Eindhoven Metropolitan Region (MRE) has explicitly committed to this transition through regional covenants and action plans focused on fibre crop cultivation and biobased construction.
This project explores how a regionally embedded, biobased building materials chain can strengthen circularity, enhance urban–rural relations, and contribute to a biodiverse and climate-resilient landscape. By combining spatial design, quantitative resource analysis and stakeholder-driven insights, the project aims to move from abstract ambitions towards actionable regional pathways.
Objectives and Route to Impact
The project adopts a transdisciplinary, mixed-methods case study approach centred on the Eindhoven Metropolitan Region. Its objectives are threefold:
- Develop plausible and desirable future scenarios
Through three collaborative workshops with regional stakeholders, the project will co-create multiple spatial visions for a biobased MRE in 2050. These scenarios explore different guiding narratives (e.g. maximising regional self-sufficiency for specific materials) while explicitly accounting for soil and water conditions (“soil and water as guiding principles”), spatial quality, and trade-offs with other land-use claims. - Assess regional supply–demand dynamics
The envisioned scenarios form the basis for a quantitative analysis of regional demand for biobased building materials and the extent to which this demand could be met through regional biomass cultivation. By comparing scenarios, the project identifies self-sufficiency potentials, bottlenecks and enabling conditions across different material chains. - Lay the foundation for digital decision support
The project investigates stakeholder decision contexts related to procurement, land-use planning and biomass cultivation. Interviews, surveys and in-situ observations are used to translate user needs, constraints and decision points into actionable problem statements and illustrative use cases. These outputs define functional and data requirements for a future digital decision-support platform tailored to regional biobased transitions.
Together, these activities generate spatial scenarios and actionable insights that support municipalities, farmers and regional planners in making informed, coordinated decisions towards a biobased future.
Contribution to Cross-EWUU Collaboration
The project brings together complementary expertise from Wageningen University & Research (landscape architecture and environmental technology) and Eindhoven University of Technology, combined with strong societal embedding through regional stakeholders. This collaboration integrates natural systems (landscape and ecology), resource systems (urban metabolism and material flows), information systems (digital decision support) and societal systems (governance and stakeholder practices).
Close cooperation with Metropoolregio Eindhoven, Nationaal Kenniscentrum Biobased Bouw, and municipal partners ensures that the research remains grounded in real policy and planning contexts. The project thereby strengthens cross-EWUU collaboration at the interface of urban–rural circularity, spatial planning and regional governance.
Team
- Dr ir Ilse M. Voskamp – Wageningen University (Principal Investigator)
- Dr Dujuan Yang – Eindhoven University of Technology
- Prof. dr ir Adriaan Mels – Wageningen University