OrchestOrchestrating Circular Fashion in the Productive City: A Digital Platform Ecosystem Framework

The resurgence of urban manufacturing presents new opportunities for innovative governance and planning strategies, especially in fostering circular economy practices and localized resource flows. A key challenge, however, is how ecosystems of heterogeneous actors, including manufacturers, designers, waste managers, and residents, can effectively collaborate to advance circular production and consumption at the local level. Addressing this challenge requires a renewed approach to thinking about intermediation and ecosystem management in urban planning practice. This article proposes that new technology in the form of digital platforms offers a critical governance tool to facilitate and coordinate such complex ecosystems. Drawing on industrial management literature, particularly the concept of platform ecosystem orchestration, we develop a typology of orchestration strategies used by circular fashion platforms and analyze how each type coordinates participant interactions to support localized resource flows. Our focus is on the fashion and textile sectors, which present significant opportunities to keep clothes and textiles circulating at their highest value within the city’s economy. Our analysis of circular fashion platforms identifies four main types of platform orchestration: marketplaces for residual textile exchange, supply chains for textile recycling, cross‐sector networking, and supply chain data analytics. We examine the orchestration dimensions of platform orchestration, the varying degrees of localized interactions they generate, and opportunities to further enhance socio‐spatial outcomes through platform orchestration. Overall, this exploratory study aims to foster future dialogues on the potential of digital platforms as governance tools for building sustainable and inclusive productive cities.