As I head to Europe to start the fieldwork for the Green Industries SA Women in Circular Economy Leadership Fellowship, I'm reminded of two other precinct initiatives I've lived through in my working life: the creative industries precincts of the early 2000s, and the cycling cities that followed a few years later. Both borrowed a model from somewhere dense and tried to install it somewhere that wasn't. I watched cities try to become Copenhagen by painting bike lanes, and I watched regional councils try to become creative precincts by leasing a warehouse to three designers and a café.
That experience leads me to be very specific about what I hope to discover in Europe.
The Fellowship supports field research into the manufacturing and infrastructure models that allow circular textile production to operate at scale, and this trip takes that research across Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Florence and Prato. The itinerary is built around a question that the Factory of the Future at Flinders University shares with a great many places trying to build textile capability from a small base, and that the European textile districts answer only partially: what happens to a circular textile model when you remove the density it was built on?
The problem with borrowing a district
Density is the part that's easiest to overlook and it was one of the areas I used to question, particularly in response to the creative precincts.
Italy is well known for a long and successful textile history and in Prato, outside of Florence, recycled wool is processed through a network of small firms, each performing one step, within a radius short enough to move material by van. Carpi holds the most concentrated knitwear capacity in Europe.
Both are frequently cited as models, and both are also the product of a century of accumulation: the firms, the machines, the intermediaries and the technical vocabulary all built up in the same few square kilometres over generations. Becattini (1990) described this arrangement as the industrial district, a place where a community of people and a population of firms have grown together so closely that the one can't be separated from the other, and Dei Ottati (2018) has since shown how much of the Italian districts' resilience depends on that intertwining.
The discussion of creative industries precincts of the early 2000s often relied on similarly dense and networked cities. Florida (2002) and Landry (2000) described what was already happening in dense inner-city neighbourhoods, and within a few years councils everywhere were trying to install the outcome without the conditions. Peck (2005) and Pratt (2008) both pointed out that the precinct model travelled far better as policy language than as economic mechanism, and Gibson (2002) showed how differently creative work behaves once you take it out of the metropolitan core and into regional Australia.
The cycling cities tell the story from the other side. Pucher and Buehler (2008) are clear that Amsterdam and Copenhagen didn't get their cycling rates from infrastructure alone but from infrastructure sitting inside compact land use, short trip distances and decades of consistent policy. Cities that copied only the lanes generally copied only part of the result.
So when I think about what knowledge this trip can provide, I am very careful to remember that Australia in general and regional areas like the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, have none of this density. Where we have the vestiges of "manufacturing districts" volumes are small, the supply chain is thin, and there are few surrounding districts where we can subcontract further work.
So the useful question isn't how to reproduce Prato, rather it is more likely to be focused on which components of these models still function once the concentration and access is gone.
That question then becomes one of infrastructure - what components do successful hubs rely on and how can we model them for translation to other places? This is a question that I can reliably investigate in person, mapping connections between services, seeking to better understand how an ecosystem supports each elements to create a whole.
Four components, four locations
Following that logic, each location on the itinerary addresses a different part of the model rather than the model as a whole.
Berlin becomes a study of governance. A cooperative hub structure, publicly co-funded and run as a set of distinct programmes rather than as a single shared space, offers one answer to how a hub can be constituted so that it survives the departure of any individual founder. Anyone who has watched a creative precinct quietly fold when its founding director moved on, or seen a cycling programme lose momentum with a change of council, knows why that question comes first.
Amsterdam is the production question. On-demand knitwear, produced against orders rather than forecasts, with a closed-loop supply chain and a published life cycle assessment behind it, tests whether small-batch production can be economically coherent rather than merely virtuous. This is the question the creative precincts rarely asked of themselves, and the reason so many of them ended up as subsidised real estate rather than working economies.
Barcelona is the equipment and training question. Digital knitting machines at a scale a single practitioner can operate, and a fabrication laboratory network that has spent nearly two decades distributing technical education across sites rather than concentrating it in one, both bear directly on how a small studio acquires capability and then passes it on. The fab lab network is, in that sense, the opposite of the precinct: it assumed from the outset that capability would have to travel.
Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna are the feedstock and data questions. Prato houses the recycling infrastructure while Carpi holds a testing laboratory and a regional agency working on traceability and digital product records ahead of the European Digital Product Passport requirement (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781).
The part that's easy to leave out
Of those four, Carpi will be an interesting investigation. The district held somewhere near 4,100 firms at the start of this century and fewer than 1,800 two decades later. That isn't a story of a thriving model to be copied, rather it is a narrative of contraction, and of a district building measurement and traceability capability partly because the older basis for its position has eroded.
Importantly, this changes how the investigation is framed. European districts aren't stable examples against which Australian efforts should be measured. Several are under considerable pressure, which I assume is one of the reasons that Dei Ottati (2018) is careful to ask whether the district itself is adapting to the global economy or coming to the end of its usefulness.
The precinct literature went through the same reckoning a decade after its peak, and the cycling cities are now being asked what their infrastructure is worth once the trip patterns it was built for start to shift. In each case the relevant lesson turned out to be about what allows a capability to persist through a downturn. This turns out to be a more useful question for a place starting from a small base than any account of a district at its peak.
What this connects to
Persistence, then, is what I'm really looking for, and three strands of future work depend on what I am able to find.
The first is the Digital Pathway Knit Studio at the Factory of the Future, opening in October, where recommendations about floor area, equipment, servicing and the sequence of acquisition are currently made from estimates rather than observation of comparator studios. It is one of the reasons that I have held off completing procurement for the Studio - I want to be absolutely certain that what we buy today has relevance 5 years from now.
The second is the FM Circular Fashion IQ Index, which addresses Digital Product Passport compliance for Australian brands. The European regulatory requirement arrives regardless of whether local infrastructure is ready for it, and the organisations currently running traceability pilots are providing some excellent data and insights to ensure that the Index meets the needs of both brands and procurers.
The third is transferability. If a knit studio at the Factory of the Future becomes a model for small-scale innovation, it needs to be described in terms that separate from what is specific to its location in a university. That separation is also what makes the work a contribution to sovereign manufacturing capability rather than a local experiment: a hub that can be described structurally can be built again, somewhere else, by someone else.
Afterwards
Findings will be reported through the Green Industries SA fellowship and prepared for publication. Anyone working on similar questions, in Australia or elsewhere, is welcome to make contact.
I wrote the application 18 months ago and I feel that I now have more questions than I started with. That said, I can't pretend not to be excited, especially as I've managed to talk my son, who lives in Europe, into travelling with me. I'll write along the way and please contact me if you would like more information.
References
Becattini, G. (1990). The Marshallian industrial district as a socio-economic notion. In F. Pyke, G. Becattini, & W. Sengenberger (Eds.), Industrial districts and inter-firm co-operation in Italy (pp. 37–51). International Institute for Labour Studies.
Dei Ottati, G. (2018). Marshallian industrial districts in Italy: The end of a model or adaptation to the global economy? Cambridge Journal of Economics, 42(2), 259–284. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bex066
European Parliament and Council. (2024). Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 establishing a framework for the setting of ecodesign requirements for sustainable products. Official Journal of the European Union, L 2024/1781.
Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class. Basic Books.
Gibson, C. (2002). Rural transformation and cultural industries: Popular music on the New South Wales far north coast. Australian Geographical Studies, 40(3), 337–356. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8470.00184
Landry, C. (2000). The creative city: A toolkit for urban innovators. Earthscan.
Peck, J. (2005). Struggling with the creative class. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(4), 740–770. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2005.00620.x
Pratt, A. C. (2008). Creative cities: The cultural industries and the creative class. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 90(2), 107–117. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0467.2008.00281.x
Pucher, J., & Buehler, R. (2008). Making cycling irresistible: Lessons from the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Transport Reviews, 28(4), 495–528. https://doi.org/10.1080/01441640701806612
Angelina Russo, PhD, MBAHEM is the Founder, Fleurieu Made, a circular knitwear label using vintage yarns, and the FM Circular Fashion IQ Index, a procurement verification platform for circular fashion practice. She is a 2025 Green Industries SA Women in Circular Economy Leadership Fellow, currently undertaking field research at circular textile hubs. Her fellowship research is examining the manufacturing and infrastructure models that support circular textile production at scale. Adelaide University 2025 Venture Catalyst Alumna. Contact angelina@fleurieumade.com | www.fleurieumade.com