A key tension in social and environmental sustainability is that, for sustainable practices to be effective, they need to be connected to a specific place, yet for them to scale, they need to be disconnected from specific places. In this paper, we investigate sustainable placing: how sustainable businesses connect and disconnect from places, and how this influences scaling and sustainable value creation. We empirically investigate circular construction businesses in North-Western Europe, as circular construction businesses have explicit spatial implications and sustainability goals. On the basis of 50 interviews, we identify two loops for sustainable placing. Connecting business practices was linked to deepscaling and regenerating value but was difficult to scale up, while disconnecting business practices was linked to upscaling and reducing harm but could also exacerbate harm. We also develop an integrated loop where protecting – an intrinsic valuing of place – is the linchpin for both loops, combining connecting and disconnecting practices, enbaling both to scale up and scale deep, and to regenerate value and reduce harm. By developing an integrated model of sustainable placing, we address calls to deploy disconnecting in theorizing on sustainability, and we extend recent developments in sustainability by calling attention to the interplay between regeneration and harm reduction.
