Circular economy strategies in residential developments: a scoping review and evidence void for mixed-use typologies

This study reviews and synthesises current literature on circular economy (CE) strategies in residential developments and assesses the extent to which mixed-use typologies are represented within that literature, with particular attention to developing contexts such as Nigeria. A scoping review was conducted, and using predefined eligibility criteria, 53 studies published between 2015 and 2026 were selected from a structured search of Scopus and Google Scholar, supplemented by a manual search, following the PRISMA extension for Scoping Reviews. The central finding is an evidence void: no study in the corpus takes mixed-use residential development as its primary unit of analysis, despite the prevalence of this typology in rapidly urbanising contexts. The synthesis therefore reports what is known about CE in residential development generally, organised into eight strategy themes and six urban-development perspectives, and specifies where mixed-use evidence is absent rather than inferring it. Design for disassembly, life-cycle performance assessment and adaptive reuse were the most frequently discussed strategies, while implementation is constrained less by technical feasibility than by ownership structures and regulatory policies. Research is concentrated in the Global North, and review papers outnumber empirical studies, with an uneven distribution across the last six years that suggests renewed rather than sustained attention. Policymakers are encouraged to address the barriers caused by complex ownership structures and weak regulatory support typical of developing contexts. Design professionals are advised against the superficial imitation of imported CE methods and encouraged to develop innovative CE strategies suited to the unique socio-economic, political, cultural and environmental context being designed for, with priority placed on addressing urgent housing demand.

Regarded as one of the most resource-intensive industries, the construction industry consumes up to 40% of the world’s raw materials and emits around 38% of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere (Desai, 2020; Adewale et al., 2025). In recent times, the need to progress from the conventional linear take-make-use-dispose paradigm to a more sustainable, waste-free method has increased greatly (Friedman, 2025; Ukaegbu and Fulani, 2019). The need for change is particularly evident in rapidly urbanising contexts, such as Nigeria, where linear construction models result in housing deficits, worsened by the inability to meet the demands of a growing population (Osuizugbo and Ojelabi, 2020; Auwalu and Bello, 2023; Unegbu et al., 2024; Babalola and Sefia, 2025).

In this context, the circular economy (CE) has emerged as a transformative alternative to the linear construction model. It advocates reducing resource use, prolonging the lifespan of materials, and ensuring that waste is reused, repaired, refurbished, recycled and recovered. A widely recognised framework developed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation positions CE as a strategy that fosters heritage conservation, building adaptability and regenerative urban development (Hussein and Alhebsi, 2025). When applied to the residential sector, this approach transforms housing from a resource-intensive project to a more sustainable, resilient urban framework with minimal negative environmental impact (Marchesi et al., 2020). Within the scope of mixed-use residential development, circular implementation is undoubtedly relevant as this building typology integrates multiple functions within a single, shared building space, thereby raising distinct demands for spatial organisation, flexibility and disassembly (Nguyen and Levasseur, 2022).

Nevertheless, CE application in housing remains limited, often lacking the required tools and support for wide-scale adoption (Eberhardt et al., 2020; Pierzchlewicz et al., 2025). Studies further inform that CE fragmentation is typically worsened due to the isolated view professionals use regarding building lifecycle considerations. Building stages tend to be approached individually, rather than as a holistic, interdependent system (Gurusinghe et al., 2025; Timm et al., 2023). Consequently, the circular economy and its impact on residential developments remain elusive. Although diverse studies have explored these concepts, the majority of them provide insights into environmental performance, leaving social and economic factors underexplored (Ossio et al., 2023).

Existing reviews of CE in housing have organised the field mainly around tenure: social housing, affordable housing and owner-occupied housing; or around single-function residential typologies (Gomide et al., 2024a, b; Davis et al., 2025a; Pierzchlewicz et al., 2025; Jegede and Soneye, 2026). Building typology itself has not been used as an organising axis. This matters because mixed-use residential development, which integrates dwellings with commercial and civic functions within a single shared structure, imposes conditions that tenure-based syntheses cannot capture: shared servicing and structural systems across components with incompatible service lives, demands for programmatic flexibility, divided ownership of a single building envelope, and the need for phased rather than wholesale disassembly (Nguyen and Levasseur, 2022). Why this gap persists is itself instructive. CE research has clustered in regulatory environments where institutional landlords and municipalities own housing at scale and where building-level data is already recorded, conditions that make single-tenure stock the most tractable object of study. Mixed-use buildings, by contrast, dominate housing supply precisely in contexts where ownership is fragmented, construction is incremental and self-executed, and record-keeping is weak — the same barriers that make them difficult both to research and to retrofit. The gap is therefore not incidental but structural, reproducing within the literature the very asymmetries that CE in housing would need to address.

This distinction also clarifies how the present study relates to our earlier work. Jegede and Soneye (2026) synthesised 113 studies on CE strategies across social, affordable and public housing. It treated housing as a system defined by tenure, and grouped evidence around the institutional, financial and technical levers that govern the delivery and management of such systems. In short, it asked how CE principles are implemented within social housing systems. This review, however, asks a different question about a different unit. Rather than focusing on tenure, it examines the mixed-use residential building typology. It considers this typology’s unique demands, such as programmatic flexibility, shared services, and phased disassembly, all of which may not be adequately captured by a tenure-focused review. Despite this distinction, the two studies complement rather than duplicate each other. While one interrogates CE within a delivery system, the other deals with a building type. This difference is reflected in their respective inclusion criteria, and the resulting bodies of evidence differ accordingly.

Building on this distinction, the present study reviews existing research on CE strategies in residential development and identifies how well mixed-use residential typologies are represented within it. The study therefore makes three contributions. First, it contributes to current CE discourse by repositioning typology as a critical unit for CE research and practice, and demonstrating how rarely that unit has been adopted in the literature. Second, it reveals that CE adoption is influenced more by ownership structures than technical feasibility. This analytical finding is consolidated in the conceptual framework presented in Section 3.6, which links specific CE strategies to the relevant urban and institutional conditions upon which they depend. Third, it offers a practical contribution by converting the identified gaps into a research agenda for rapidly urbanising contexts, where the benefits of widespread CE implementation are most needed.

However, because no retrieved study takes this typology as its primary object, the synthesis reports evidence on residential development in general; claims specific to mixed-use buildings are therefore identified as gaps rather than presented as findings. The study is guided by the following research questions:

What does current research reveal about CE strategies and their applicability to residential development?

How is the influence of urban development on the adoption of CE strategies discussed from diverse research perspectives and different contexts?

To what extent are mixed-use developments represented in CE scholarly works?

Data collection

To answer these questions, we conducted a scoping review guided by and reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses PRISMA guideline for reporting as recommended by Arksey and O’Malley (2005); Moher et al. (2009); and Wolfers and Schneider (2020). A scoping review is a type of review used to summarise insights from a number of studies. Its purpose is to identify gaps in research, scope available knowledge on a certain topic, examine research methodological approaches and clarify concepts (Munn et al., 2018). This review type was selected over the systematic review method because it is useful in providing an overview of CE strategies for residential development, an emerging concept in research and practice (Liu, 2024). Studies were identified through a comprehensive database search strategy. A structured search was conducted across primary academic databases, including Scopus and Google Scholar, to identify relevant studies on CE strategies in residential buildings. This initial process was then refined by a supplementary manual search to minimise the risk of omission and ensure the comprehensiveness of findings.

Two databases were searched. Scopus was selected as the primary source because it indexes the built-environment and sustainability journals in which CE research is concentrated and supports structured Boolean querying with reproducible, exportable metadata. Google Scholar was used as a supplementary source to extend coverage beyond indexed venues, which is material for a review concerned with developing-country contexts whose outputs are less consistently indexed. Searches were confined to these two databases; Web of Science and PubMed were not included, and the coverage implications of this decision are addressed as a limitation.

Selection procedure

In answering the study’s objectives, selection criteria were developed, outlining inclusion and exclusion criteria for the selection process. To avoid suboptimal interpretations, papers selected for the review had to explicitly discuss circular economy strategies, frameworks or principles. Papers that explored other concepts related to CE, e.g., refurbishment, recycling or material recovery, but which did not frame these within the circular economy as a concept, were excluded. Also, unlike existing research that examines CE and housing solely, this review adopts a broader perspective by incorporating mixed-use developments and affordable housing schemes. This allows for further insights into the connections between CE strategies, urban development, housing schemes and sustainability goals, within a rapidly urbanising context with unique socio-economic conditions. As a result, this scoping review helps to identify from research ways in which CE strategies can positively impact environmental and socio-economic conditions in the built environment.

To ensure a comprehensive search, two academic databases were searched due to availability: Scopus, as the primary source and Google Scholar, as a supplementary source. A concept-based search strategy with two sets of keywords: “circular economy” AND (“housing” OR “residential” OR “residential development” OR “mixeduse” OR “dwelling”), and (“design for disassembly” OR “DfD” OR “material recovery” OR “adaptive reuse” OR “material passport” OR “urban metabolism” OR “building reuse” OR “resource efficiency”) were applied in Scopus. Results were also limited to papers written in English, articles, conference papers and reviews published between 2015 and 2026. The Google Scholar search comprised three keyword combinations (“circular economy” “housing” “mixed-use” “building”), (“circular economy” “residential” “design for disassembly”), and (“circular economy” “mixed-use” “material recovery” OR “adaptive reuse”). For each search result, only the first 100 papers were included in the screening process. The search process was executed in June 2026 and cross-checked by a second author to ensure credibility and validity.

The 100-record cap applied to each Google Scholar string reflects the capacities of that platform rather than a random cut-off. Google Scholar ranks results by relevance rather than by a reproducible Boolean match, and does not allow a full structured export of records. As its accuracy drops off further down the list, records past the first 100 are mostly irrelevant matches. This is actually a common practice in research, as seen in Briscoe et al. (2023). Applying the same limit to all search strings keeps the process reproducible while avoiding a massive flood of irrelevant results. This cap was, however, only applied to the supplementary Google Scholar search. The main database of the corpus, Scopus, had no cap at all; all 115 records were screened in full.

This scoping review was focused on capturing the concepts and frameworks that studied the circular economy within residential dwellings, mixed-use and urban developments. Therefore, the search was not extended to other building typologies or concepts not related to “urban development” and “housing,” as specified in our search keywords. Table 1 below contains the specific inclusion and exclusion criteria used in this review.

Zotero was used as a reference manager for the identified records of this study. The Scopus search returned 115 records. The three Google Scholar strings returned 300 records in total, of which 106 remained after internal deduplication, giving a combined pool of 221 records. The initial 221 records were screened for duplication, and 14 duplicates were removed. The 207 unique records were screened in two stages. First, the titles and abstracts were screened, excluding 32 papers as off-topic or out of scope. Second, 116 records were further removed for not meeting the criteria at different levels; 83 were not residential and CE-focused, and 33 papers were conceptual or framework-based. The remaining 59 studies were assessed for full-text availability, and 12 were excluded, leaving 47 full-text accessible studies. Upon further review of the full-text, an additional 11 were excluded; 10 for incidental focus on residential buildings and 1 for being a preprint. A supplemental manual search was conducted to ensure that all relevant studies were included, leading to the addition of 17 papers. The entire screening process resulted in 53 studies retained for the final synthesis. Figure 1 summarises the selection process.

The supplementary manual search followed a pre-specified procedure rather than ad hoc selection. Backward citation chasing was applied to the reference lists of every study retained after full-text assessment, and forward citation chasing was applied to the same studies using Google Scholar’s ‘cited by’ function. Candidate records identified in this way were assessed against the pre-defined eligibility criteria set out in Table 1, and screening decisions were cross-checked by the second author. The comparatively high yield of this stage (17 records) is itself a finding rather than a deficiency of the primary strings: CE terminology in housing research remains unstable, with relevant studies indexed under vocabularies such as ‘urban mining’, ‘material stock’ and ‘industrialised construction’ that no single Boolean string captures exhaustively.

Charting the data

Data-charting, in a review study, involves identifying and recording key findings from the selected research papers, in a bid to answer the research questions (Arksey and O’Malley, 2005). Data from each study were extracted and organised in an Excel spreadsheet with the following headings: title, author(s), year of publication, locational context, study type, circular strategies discussed, and key empirical findings on the impacts of CE strategies on residential development. This process was done to facilitate data screening across existing studies, and the spreadsheet was updated frequently as the articles were reviewed.

Themes were derived inductively from the charted data rather than imposed a priori. Following charting, the ‘circular strategies discussed’ field for each study was coded descriptively; codes referring to the same underlying strategy were merged into themes, and a theme was retained only where it was addressed substantively in at least two studies. Both authors reviewed the resulting scheme against the full-text records and resolved disagreements by discussion until an agreement was reached. This procedure yielded the eight strategy themes (T1–T8) reported in Section 3.2. A similar round of coding applied to the ‘locational context’ and ‘key empirical findings’ fields yielded the six urban-development perspectives (P1–P6) reported in Section 3.4. Because a single study frequently addresses more than one strategy, the studies counted in Figures 2, 3 sum to more than the 53 included studies.

The characteristics of the reviewed studies

Distribution and trend

A time restriction of 2015 to 2026 was applied to the search process to consider the effect of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s (EMF’s) ReSolve framework on CE research in 2015; however, the majority of the studies used in this review were published in 2021 and 2025. This trend reveals an uneven distribution of studies focused on CE and housing in the last 6 years. This indicates that this is not a well-established or common research area, but a new one. The 2021 rise comes after momentum from the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, and the 2024–2025 revival is driven by action and review work. The apparent decline in 2026 is an artefact of the search window rather than a reduction in research activity: the search was executed in June 2026, so that year is represented by partial-year indexing only and should not be read as a downward trend. The publication distribution is shown graphically in Figure 4.

Geographic scope

The selected studies in this review covered 20 geographical contexts, shown in Figure 5. There is a concentration of studies in Western Europe, led by the Netherlands (10), Canada (4) and Spain (4). Australia, Denmark, Italy and the United Kingdom are each responsible for 3, while Brazil and Finland account for 2 each. The remaining nine contexts, outlined in the chart below, each have 1 study. Multi-context studies from Europe and from other countries are 5 each. This suggests that circular-housing research and practice are concentrated in contexts with well-established, regulated housing systems. Global South contexts account for only 5 of the 53 studies (Brazil, Egypt, Nigeria and Sri Lanka), and accounts from rapidly urbanising African settings are limited to a single study.

Study design and publication venue

The reviewed studies were charted by research design and publication venue in order to characterise the methodological composition of the evidence base. By evidence type, the corpus divides into 34 empirical or applied studies and 19 reviews or desk-based syntheses. This distribution substantiates the observation developed in Section 4 that the field currently produces proportionally more synthesis than primary evidence: reviews account for over a third of the retained literature (19 of 53, 36%), a high percentage for a research area that has a recently increasing empirical evidence base. Within the empirical group, 21 studies report applied or field-based evidence, 6 are case studies (including two life-cycle costing cases and one design-challenge case), 3 are methodological or modelling studies, 2 use Delphi panels, 1 applies qualitative content analysis and 1 develops a digital standardisation framework. The review group comprises 11 narrative or comparative reviews, 5 systematic reviews, 2 combined review–case studies and 1 desk-based review. By document type, journal articles predominate (29 of the corpus), followed by review articles (19) and conference papers (5). Retrieval was weighted toward the primary database: 47 records were identified through Scopus and 6 through Google Scholar, consistent with the role assigned to each source in Section 2.2.

Publication venues are dispersed rather than concentrated. Sustainability was the single most frequent outlet (9 studies), followed by the Journal of Cleaner Production (5) and by Resources, Conservation and Recycling and Sustainable Cities and Society (4 each). The IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science accounted for 3, and Energies, Circular Economy and Sustainability and Buildings for 2 each. The remaining studies appeared in 22 further venues, each represented once, spanning architectural technology, construction management, urban planning, materials science and heritage journals. This dispersion is itself informative. CE research on housing has not consolidated around a dedicated venue or scholarly community; it is distributed across the disciplinary boundaries it seeks to cross, which plausibly contributes to the fragmentation of lifecycle thinking noted in Section 1 and to the terminological instability that made the supplementary search necessary.

Citation analysis

In response to reviewer comment 1.5, the influence of the reviewed literature was examined through a citation analysis. Citation counts for all 53 studies were retrieved from Scopus on 22 August 2026, with Google Scholar counts recorded for the studies not indexed in Scopus and labelled accordingly. Because citation accrual is strongly time-dependent and more than half of the corpus was published in 2025–2026, counts are reported alongside a citations-per-year figure that normalises for the length of time each study has been in circulation; without this adjustment, older studies would appear more influential purely by virtue of age. Counts drawn from different databases are not pooled, since Scopus and Google Scholar index different source sets and are not directly comparable.

The most-cited studies in the corpus are listed in Table 2. Citation influence is concentrated in a small number of methodological and indicator-focused contributions: the seven most-cited studies are all quantitative or review works addressing life-cycle assessment, circularity indicators, material passports or resource-efficiency measurement, rather than design- or policy-oriented papers. The single most-cited study, Eberhardt et al. (2020), is a systematic review of building-level CE strategies (264 citations), followed by two studies published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling: Cottafava and Ritzen (2021), which proposes a building-scale circularity indicator (181), and van Stijn et al. (2021), a circular-economy life-cycle assessment model (160). Empirical/applied and review studies attract comparable citation levels on average (means of 41.4 and 31.1 respectively), indicating that the field’s reliance on review work noted in Section 3.1.3 is not explained by reviews being disproportionately cited.

Citations are unevenly distributed across the corpus. Across the 53 studies, total recorded citations amount to 2,004, with a mean of 37.8 and a median of 17 per study; nine studies (17%) had no recorded citations at the time of retrieval, and the ten most-cited studies together account for 68% of all citations. Because citation counts were drawn predominantly from Scopus (47 studies), with six studies not indexed there recorded from Google Scholar and labelled accordingly in Table 2, and because the two source sets are not directly comparable, cross-source ranking is treated with caution; the seven most-cited studies are, however, all Scopus-indexed, so the head of the distribution is internally consistent. Such concentration is characteristic of a young and rapidly expanding field, in which a small number of early contributions establish the vocabulary that later work adopts; it is consistent with the publication trend reported in Section 3.1.1, where 45 of the 53 studies appeared from 2021 onward.

Aggregated by publication venue, citation impact is concentrated in a small number of specialist journals rather than in the venues that publish most frequently. Resources, Conservation and Recycling carries the highest total (532 citations across 4 studies; mean 133), followed by Sustainable Production and Consumption (142 across a single study) and Sustainable Cities and Society (209 across 4 studies; mean 52). Sustainability, the most frequent outlet with 9 studies (Section 3.1.3), accumulates a comparable total (327) but a far lower mean (36), indicating that frequency of publication and citation impact are only weakly aligned in this field. When citations are normalised by publication age, the ranking shifts in an instructive way: Cottafava and Ritzen (2021) and Çetin et al. (2022) reach roughly 30 citations per year despite differing raw totals, and Çetin et al. (2023) attains 35.5 per year on a shorter window, indicating that several recent indicator- and passport-focused studies are accruing influence at a rate the raw counts understate.

Circular economy strategies for residential and mixed-use developments

This section presents the results in response to the first research question: what current research reveals about CE strategies and their applicability to residential and mixed-use developments. Across the 53 papers, it is clear that circular economy strategies are applicable within residential development contexts. However, certain strategies were strongly emphasised in the literature. The strongest claims relate to strategies such as design for disassembly (DfD), reuse, modular/biobased design, and adaptive reuse. Several authors quantified the carbon reduction effects of these strategies to range from 15 to 63%. However, AlJaber et al. (2025) argue that residential buildings are the least feasible building typology for CE as a result of complex ownership structures, regulatory constraints, and lack of awareness and false perceptions on the part of the owner.

The eight themes were derived through the inductive coding procedure described in Section 2.3. Because the boundaries between circular strategies are frequently blurred in the literature, Table 3 sets out the scope of each theme explicitly, together with the number of studies assigned to it. A study addressing more than one strategy is counted under each relevant theme, so the total sum of the studies in Table 3 below exceeds the 53 included studies.

Theme 1 (T1): design for disassembly (DfD)

Design for disassembly (DfD) was the most prominent CE strategy cited in the selected papers. This is evinced by a dedicated systematic review of DfD in residential buildings (Çetin and Jaeger, 2026) and a research study of a DfD apartment block (Joensuu and Saari, 2026). Eberhardt et al. (2020) revealed that the concept of assembly/disassembly is mentioned 32 times in 34 peer-reviewed publications, a rate that occurs more than any other strategy. It was also noted that while recycling is mentioned 47 times, reuse appears 111 times. Jayawardana et al. (2023) conducted an LCA of a Sri Lankan modular unit and observed that DfD has a global warming and human toxicity reduction potential of 63 and 90%, respectively. Similarly, Hosseini et al. (2026) stated emphatically that enhancing recycling will not necessarily result in lower environmental impacts, and the reuse strategy has to be prioritised. Zaman et al. (2018) assessed a house deconstruction project and recovered enough materials to create 400 new products. This demonstrates the substantial environmental and financial benefits of reuse. Friedman (2025) and Cellucci (2021) translate DfD from a theoretical concept to practical housing design strategies such as mechanical connections, bolted joints, modular partitions, and 60–80% material recoverability targets. Additionally, Braakman et al. (2021) show empirically that a Dutch one-family house can double its Building Circularity Indicator from 0.20 to 0.41, simply by replacing skin and space-plan components with disassembly-friendly alternatives. The principal limitation is that DfD pays its environmental dividend only if the disassembly actually happens decades later, a problem highlighted by Eberhardt et al. (2020), who also flag that just 8 of 34 reviewed studies quantified the predicted benefit. Additionally, Torres et al. (2025) and Pronk et al. (2022) provide contrary arguments that mechanical fasteners cause damage to modular panels and reclaimed timber formwork is too complicated to use. Cottafava and Ritzen (2021) also found that measuring a building’s circularity using the Building Circularity Indicator (BCI) can be difficult because different assessment methods generate different results for the same structure.

T2: retrofit and adaptive reuse

Similar to the DfD, emphasis was also placed on the retrofit, refurbishment and adaptive reuse as an applicable CE strategy applicable to residential developments, particularly where they are the only option (Ghoz, 2025). de Souza Rocha et al. (2024) and Gomide et al. (2024a) reveal that 76% of European buildings were constructed before energy regulations and standards were developed, and 85% of the buildings that will be used in 2050 are already existing. Ghoz (2025) and Raut et al. (2025) suggest that their limited implementation is the result of weak economic and governmental support. Carrigan et al. (2024) also agree, proposing strategic retrofit programs, such as building product warranties, retrofit passports for renovation records and future upgrade needs, and reusable façade systems. Tillner and Peverini (2021) provide information on a notable CE programme, the Blocksanierung programme. Started in 1984, this program has upgraded over 7,400 residential units since 1984, thereby reducing heat demand by 1,157 GWh/year. de Souza Rocha et al. (2024) provide another example of a Copenhagen project, where 95% of structural walls and 65% of structural members were reused. Potential benefits have been reported to include resource conservation, rural rehabilitation, carbon reduction and poverty alleviation (Barbosa et al., 2025; Mourão, 2026; Sánchez-Teba et al., 2026). Cellucci (2021) further proposes that buildings should be adapted at different scales, i.e., individual room-scale, entire house-scale and neighbourhood-scale. Regarding rating systems, Lucas and Löschke (2024) and Tondelli and Marzani (2025) highlight that none of the sustainability rating systems they examined (Living Building Challenge, Green Star or BASIX) have adequately outlined circular renovation standards. Tondelli and Marzani (2025) also suggest that reusing what’s available and building nothing from scratch is the most important consideration for circular city planning.

T3: prefabricated and biobased housing

Another principal strategy identified from research is Prefabrication and biobased materials. Oorschot and Asselbergs (2021) studied three Dutch innovative housing concepts designed to provide 1 million sustainable and affordable residences by 2030. Their analysis revealed timber units made by robots, recycled concrete, and furniture that can be assembled and disassembled to be major characteristics of the housing models. Friedman (2025) quantified the benefits of this strategy. Compared to conventional construction, prefabrication reduces labour costs by 40%, time of construction by 30–50% and waste by 5 to 15%. Friedman also found that row housing consumes 64% less energy than single-family units. Additionally, Hosseini et al. (2026) compared different structural materials for a mid-rise housing in Quebec. Their findings showed that light timber-frame yields the lowest environmental impact, and mass timber has the greatest reuse and circularity potential. Gomide et al. (2024a) also argue that Industrialised Building Systems and bio-based materials offer affordable housing benefits. Jayawardana et al. (2023) provides empirical insights through an LCA analysis that positions DfD as technically and environmentally superior to on-site, conventional methods. While AlJaber et al. (2025) agree with the benefits of prefabrication, they reveal that its implementation is limited by homeowners’ awareness. Similarly, Davis et al. (2025a), Davis et al. (2025b), and Kedir and Hall (2021) reveal that recovery in circular industrialised housing remains neglected, while Metic et al. (2026) reveal that circular residential construction can lead to a rebound effect of inadequate resources due to the desire to build larger homes.

T4: social or affordable housing demands

A significant number of studies are anchored on social housing as a suitable testing platform for CE implementation, suggesting that scholars view CE as a tool capable of driving social change. The increased attention on social housing was tied to two things: large-scale housing projects are catalysts for urban transformation, and social housing models support circular business models. However, despite this attention, Davis et al. (2025a) inform that very few studies focus on social or affordable housing. Similarly, Çetin et al. (2021) interviewed Dutch professionals in social housing organisations and found that although none of them had fully undertaken a circular housing project, about 80% were experimenting with pilot projects. The professionals stated that top-down management support is a critical factor for the success of the pilot projects. Some suggestions were made to improve CE in social housing, such as AI-assisted design processes and bio-XLAM timber additions that can be reconfigured, remanufactured and recycled (Errante and de Capua, 2021; Tabrizi et al., 2025). Within the Nigerian context, Suleman et al. (2024) argued that CE strategies in the Global North cannot be copied into developing contexts without adequate context-specific modifications.

Eikelenboom et al. (2021) also revealed that there is more emphasis on the environmental aspects of circular housing projects, while the social benefits are often overlooked. They argued that true sustainability does not exist till community relationships are intentionally considered. Marchesi and Tweed (2021) reviewed 56 social innovation cases and proposed a new CE strategy to the ReSOLVE framework: “Engage and Empower”. This includes involving residents in the decision-making process and fostering communal ownership.

Similarly, technical innovation was deemed to be insufficient if not paired with user social factors (Marchesi and Tweed, 2021). In delivering truly affordable circular housing, Tillner and Peverini (2021) and Gomide et al. (2024b) suggest housing cooperatives as an effective strategy. Notable examples such as La Borda in Spain, Uruguay’s FUCVAM, and cooperative housing in Kenya were listed.

T5: digital passports

A number of papers argued that if buildings are going to be reused in the future, it is imperative that accurate information on these buildings is available through the use of digital passports. Keena et al. (2025) created a massive digital database, the Housing Passport Knowledge Graph, which contains approximately 62 million points of data on 1.2 million residential buildings in five Canadian cities. This undertaking proves that digital tracking can and should be implemented at the city scale. Similarly, Çetin et al. (2022) showed the current application of AI and digital tools that enable reuse and maintenance; however, they relate its limited adoption to technological, cultural, market and regulatory factors. Furthermore, Çetin et al. (2023), from participants’ interviews and a Dutch test case, explicitly state that missing data is the primary reason for this challenge and propose the use of data templates as a solution. Other studies explored this strategy at various scales. The Dutch housing units studied by Oorschot and Asselbergs (2021) were revealed to include building passports within their modular system, making disassembly and reuse much easier. Çetin et al. (2021) proposed the use of renovation and material passports as a crucial emerging CE strategy for EU housing initiatives. Gomide et al. (2024a), however, reveal that this CE strategy, while valuable, is one of the more under-implemented practices in social housing. Jayawardana et al. (2023), therefore, recommend that Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) be used to track building components throughout their lifecycle. Collectively, the reviewed studies argue that digital passports are a prerequisite for circular housing developments; however, they state that the lack of universal data standards strongly limits their implementation.

T6: policy integration and governmental support

The role of policy intervention in urban-scale CE integration emerged as a frequently discussed topic across the studies. Tondelli and Marzani (2025) developed four guiding principles and thirty-five strategic objectives to be embedded within the EU’s Environmental assessment process. The principles include numbering retrofitted residential buildings and allocating a portion of renewable energy for housing. Beyond principles and frameworks, Cellucci (2021) informs that CE interventions occur at three levels: the micro level (individual components), the meso level (buildings and neighbourhoods) and the macro level (cities). Gomide et al. (2024a), however, found that policy and governance support are instrumental to CE in social and affordable housing. A notable example is the housing developer competition in Vienna that evaluates proposals against predefined CE requirements (Tillner and Peverini, 2021). AlJaber et al. (2025), on the other hand, identify owners/clients and designers as the most influential stakeholders in CE adoption, and planning and design stages as the most important stages in CE housing. These studies, therefore, demonstrate that sincere efforts toward CE implementation can be significantly limited without proper policies and government support. van den Berghe and Vos (2019) further support this notion by repositioning governance from an external support role to a critical determinant. This shows that literature is shifting focus from buildings alone to systems, where CE and affordable housing schemes require the input of diverse interconnected factors.

T7: life-cycle performance assessment

Fifteen papers discuss assessment models for evaluating CE in housing. Studies reveal that while CE strategies sound promising, evidence of their adoption, alongside the quantified benefits they provide, is limited in research. Eberhardt et al. (2020) point out that only 8 studies out of 34 reviewed CE papers quantified performance using LCA. They stated that the present CE decisions are based more on intuition than on data-driven facts. Braakman et al. (2021) used a method called Building Circularity Indicator (BCI), alongside Life Cycle Costing (LCC), to find out how much of an impact circularity has on costs. The findings show that opting for circular building strategies does not necessarily increase overall costs. van Stijn et al. (2021), however, argue that conventional LCA is unsuitable for CE assessment because the LCA evaluates a building over a single life-cycle, while CE materials can be reused multiple times. Therefore, they proposed a CE-LCA model that allows for multiple assessment cycles. To verify its effectiveness, the model was also validated by 44 experts and tested on a circular kitchen project. Joensuu et al. (2022) also provide an interesting debate regarding LCA for carbon benefits. The study attempted to answer the question: If a beam was used three times, who gets the carbon credit, the first, second, third or all the buildings? This supports arguments by Davis et al. (2025b) and Cottafava and Ritzen (2021) that state that LCA is highly assumptive and fragile.

Despite its limited scholarly focus, a few studies produced findings from LCA analysis. Hasselsteen et al. (2025) produced waste data from a multifamily housing project in Denmark, Kakkos et al. (2020) assessed the benefits of urban mining, and Panizza et al. (2025), as well as Bellini et al. (2024), found that reuse can double material recovery as opposed to recycling alone. From the Global South, Marey et al. (2024) used system dynamics modelling to evaluate fly-ash and recycled aggregate green-concrete scenarios for a residence in Egypt. Two studies also conducted relevant LCA studies that revealed an impact reduction of 63%, and the superiority of timber as a circular material (Jayawardana et al., 2023; Hosseini et al., 2026). Offering a unique perspective, Friedman (2025) conceptualised LCA within financial performance. Friedman claimed that a single building, built with CE strategies, can save up to 25–30% on maintenance costs over 50 years. This supports earlier studies that found reusing concrete to reduce GHG by 15–21% over 1–2 lifecycles, DfD and upcycling reduced impacts by 36 and 46%, respectively (Eberhardt et al., 2020).

T8: urban mining and material-stock assessment

Another notable finding was in the reframe of CE in housing from a design or renovation goal to an optimisation of what already exists. Authors proposed that CE in housing can be achieved when designers are aware of what reusable materials exist and how they can be identified, measured and recovered. Kakkos et al. (2020) delved into this approach and developed methods to determine what exists, how much can be recovered and the benefits of recovery, treating existing residential buildings as a material bank. Using a case study approach, Panizza et al. (2025) developed an archetype for residential buildings in Montreal, and Devos et al. (2025) assessed the building envelopes in social housing contexts to estimate how much material can be recovered and reused. It was also revealed that about 9.1% of material delivered to the site is wasted, and timber formworks can be reused as load-bearing materials rather than being discarded (Hasselsteen et al., 2025; Pronk et al., 2022). These studies outline the importance of monitoring material flows in order to reuse waste materials for high-value applications.

Major findings

Across all the reviewed studies, three key strategies were emphasised. First, reuse was emphasised as a more effective CE strategy than recycling (Jayawardana et al., 2023; Hosseini et al., 2026; Joensuu et al., 2022; Eberhardt et al., 2020; Çetin et al., 2021; van Stijn et al., 2021). Secondly, the authors stated that the design and planning stage is critical in CE design and accounts for approximately 70–80% of lifecycle impact (AlJaber et al., 2025). Lifecycle analysis was also mentioned a substantial number of times across the studies, providing data-based insights into the impact of CE strategies within that context (Kakkos et al., 2020; Panizza et al., 2025; Bellini et al., 2024; Jayawardana et al., 2023; Hosseini et al., 2026). Lastly, there is a consensus amongst the scholars that CE strategies are ineffective when governance, financial resources and community involvement are lacking (Marchesi and Tweed, 2021; Marchesi and Tweed, 2021; Eikelenboom et al., 2021; Gomide et al., 2024a; Tillner and Peverini, 2021; AlJaber et al., 2025). Figure 2 below depicts the distribution of themes across the reviewed studies. DfD emerged as the most discussed theme (16 studies), followed closely by life-cycle performance assessment (15) and retrofit and adaptive reuse (13). This suggests a strong focus on reuse and lifecycle extension in research and practice. Urban mining and material-stock assessment was the least represented theme (5 studies), with digital passports (7) also thinly evidenced, revealing significant research gaps to be explored.

Urban development and circular economy strategies

This section discusses the second research question: how urban development influences the adoption of CE strategies, as outlined from diverse research perspectives and different contexts. Major themes related to this question were identified from the 53 studies and were categorised into six perspectives, discussed in detail below.

Perspective 1 (P1): the existing housing stock perspective

The studies explained that adaptive reuse and retrofit are typically the only choices for expansion in developed cities. For instance, de Souza Rocha et al. (2024) inform that Europe is filled with old buildings, most of which will still exist by 2050. The study indicates that the most appropriate solution, in such contexts, is to upgrade and improve the energy performance of the existing structures (Davis et al., 2025c). Tillner and Peverini (2021) cited Vienna’s Blocksanierung, a large-scale renovation program that has reduced carbon emissions by 371,400 t CO2 per year, as an example. However, Ghoz (2025) and Mourão (2026) argue that the reuse of existing stock is hindered by economic conditions. Overall, research outlines that in contexts that are already built, demolishing is an impossibility, leaving adaptive reuse as the only alternative. Similarly, Devos et al. (2025) and Panizza et al. (2025) recommend that existing stocks have enough recovery potential to support reuse as an end-of-life option.

P2: housing density and typology perspective

A number of studies highlighted that the effectiveness of CE strategies is heavily dependent on the type and density of housing in an urban space. There is evidence that CE strategies are more effective in apartment buildings and row houses rather than low-density, single units (Friedman, 2025; Hosseini et al., 2026; Kedir and Hall, 2021; Davis et al., 2025a). Oorschot and Asselbergs (2021) provide a similar argument, linking large-scale urban development goals as key catalysts for prefabrication, modular design and material reuse. They inform that it is usually during high-density projects that the resources needed are made available; therefore, densification propels CE adoption (Li et al., 2023; Joensuu and Saari, 2026). Hasselsteen et al. (2025) also show that waste monitoring is more tractable in multifamily units.

P3: governance and policy perspective

In this case, literature states that CE adoption is contingent on the planning laws and regulations of a city. For CE to become a standard building practice, it needs to be a key part of building regulations (Van den Berghe and Vos, 2019) and should be connected to market-gap conditions (Sáez-de-Guinoa et al., 2022). Research also suggests that CE strategies be implemented on a neighbourhood or city level, and not on a single-building level alone (Tondelli and Marzani, 2025). AlJaber et al. (2025) emphasised that CE adoption is most critical at the initial stages of a project, and external support is required the most at this phase. However, certain regulatory barriers to CE adoption were outlined, such as fire safety codes and technical standards (Çetin et al., 2021; de Souza Rocha et al., 2024).

P4: ownership and involvement perspective

Several studies found that CE implementation is easier when the housing units are owned or managed by large organisations rather than individuals. Key examples listed include Dutch social-housing organisations, municipalities, and cooperatives (Çetin et al., 2021; Çetin et al., 2022; Çetin et al., 2023; Eikelenboom et al., 2021; Gomide et al., 2024b; Tillner and Peverini, 2021). In this regard, Marchesi and Tweed (2021) argue that CE frameworks need to engage and empower the users at an individual level. Barbosa et al. (2025) suggest that landlords can pair CE practices with poverty relief goals. This helps to involve residents in the decision-making process and reframe ownership as an enabler, thereby encouraging circular practices. However, this is sparsely done, making residential housing be regarded as the most difficult sector to apply CE strategies (AlJaber et al., 2025).

P5: rapid urbanisation perspective

It is interesting to note that the Global South papers viewed urban development and CE adoption from a different perspective. They highlighted housing deficits and rapid urbanisation as the major determinants of CE implementation, specifically in developing contexts (Gomide et al., 2024a; Suleman et al., 2024; Marey et al., 2024). These studies revealed that housing structure in such contexts is usually informal and self-executed. Therefore, they propose that housing systems be integrated into a formal sector with experienced developers, external support, incremental development, and community involvement (Jayawardana et al., 2023; Sánchez-Teba et al., 2026).

P6: digital perspective

Similar to the section on digital passports, studies argue that effective reuse is impossible without proper data and records. A few papers explored the influence of digital, renovation, and material passports on CE adoption (Çetin et al., 2021; Keena et al., 2025). Çetin et al. (2022), Çetin et al. (2023), and Tabrizi et al. (2025) further highlight the need for AI-assistance and data specificity in treating existing stock as a reuse site. In general, these studies suggest that when detailed digital inventories are available and accessible, the existing urban scape can be treated as a potential reuse site rather than structures to be demolished.

Findings summary

Figure 3 below provides a visual illustration of the distribution of the themes across the reviewed studies. Ownership and Involvement (P4) emerged as the most frequently discussed influence of CE adoption. This suggests that while institutional ownership drives large-scale CE adoption, fragmented individual ownership hinders it. Governance and Policy support were also highly cited in research, indicating that CE adoption is strongly influenced by the regulations put in place within a particular context. Conversely, rapid urbanisation (P5) received the least attention. This could be as a result of the limited studies conducted in the Global South, rather than the unimportance of that theme itself. Digital Perspective (P6) was also sparsely mentioned, indicating that research on digital infrastructure, record-keeping, and circular urban development remains limited.

A conceptual framework for circular economy implementation in residential development

The thematic and perspectival findings reported above are not independent of one another: the strategies proposed in the literature (T1–T8) are enabled or obstructed by the urban and institutional conditions (P1–P6). Figure 6 integrates the two sets into a single framework. The first layer highlights the eight strategy themes (T1-T8); major CE strategies applicable to residential development are identified from current research. The second layer repositions the six perspectives not as parallel topics but as mediating conditions: ownership structure (P4), governance capacity (P3), the composition of existing stock (P1), density and typology (P2), digital infrastructure (P6) and the pace of urbanisation (P5). Each regulates whether a strategy in the first layer can be realised in practice. The third layer expresses the review’s central comparative finding. Where the conditions in Layer 2 align, CE implementation is feasible and effective, an outcome frequently described in the majority of Global North Studies. However, where ownership is fragmented, enforcement is weak, and housing is typically produced informally and incrementally, CE strategies become constrained irrespective of their technical merit, a condition reported in the small number of Global South studies. This explains why the direct transfer of CE strategies between the two contexts fails. The strategies themselves are transferable, but the mediating conditions that make them work are not. The final band records the void this review identifies: the absence of mixed-use residential development as a primary unit of analysis, a typology in which the mediating conditions of the second layer are most demanding and least understood.

While this review provides valuable insights into CE for large-scale affordable housing and urban development, several gaps have been identified. These gaps and proposed future research directions are outlined in this section. Firstly, there is a high concentration of studies in the Global North (approx. 81%), and Sub-Saharan Africa is represented by only one study. This indicates that CE in residential development is more studied in developed nations. Contexts with high housing demands, on the other hand, remain significantly understudied. The most consequential result of this review is not a finding within the corpus but an absence across it. The search strategy was designed explicitly to capture studies on mixed-use housing and CE, yet no study meeting that description was retrieved. This gap is therefore positioned as the primary contribution of the review, and no finding drawn from single-function or tenure-based studies has been presented as evidence about mixed-use development. This leaves room for future research on the CE strategies applicable in mixed facilities with shared services and multiple functions. Regarding ownership, most of the studies propose solutions with formal, certified structures. The Global South is presently dominated by informal, self-built housing provisions. It is therefore crucial that CE frameworks be developed in consideration of the unique socio-political conditions of developing countries. Instead of completely faulting the system, solutions on how to specifically address these challenges should be explored. Studies that analyse building codes and embed CE standards are also largely missing from research, particularly in developing countries. It is necessary for scholars to assess the compatibility of building and planning laws with CE strategies. Current research also leans more heavily on reviews than on primary empirical evidence. While original insights exist from the empirical studies conducted, there are a number of underexplored methodologies, such as longitudinal case analysis, questionnaire distribution among stakeholders, interviews conducted with experts and lawmakers, and document analysis. Future studies that quantify the financial, environmental, and social benefits of CE adoption are also encouraged. Overall, these gaps reveal that the findings from Global North contexts cannot be directly transferred to developing countries. The primary enablers, institutional structure and developed urban landscape are evidently missing in the Global South, and research currently lacks adequate findings tailored to the African continent. These research gaps therefore suggest that priority be placed on conducting context-specific empirical studies in Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa. Lifecycle assessments of locally available, biobased materials should also be explored by researchers. Such studies should maximise AI tools and computational decision models to enhance data-driven decisions on material selection and energy use (Tabrizi et al., 2025). Echoing findings of Hamida et al. (2025) and Van den Berghe and Vos (2019), it is also recommended that studies be conducted using mixed-use developments as the primary building typology, providing insights on which CE strategies are easily implemented in multi-functional spaces and neighbourhood-level CE adoption. There is also a need for longitudinal studies that verify the effectiveness of DfD and adaptive reuse over a period of time, and locally-adapted building passports or recording techniques. Through such research, primary evidence from a rapidly urbanising context would be contributed to the literature. This would in turn support models of sustainable urban development suited to resource-constrained contexts. In doing so, the warnings of Metic et al. (2026) should be properly considered, and CE-driven behavioural rebounds that can counter efficiency gains should be critically monitored and prevented.

This finding carries a further implication: the conditions that make CE researchable and feasible in developed contexts are precisely the conditions that mixed-use developments in resource-constrained contexts lack. A mixed-use residential building not only distributes ownership across various parties but also combines multiple functions within the same shared facility (Odeyale and Bello, 2026). The resulting spatial and organisational complexity complicates coordinated upgrades, frustrates joint decision-making and impedes formal data tracking, all of which raise the cost of CE implementation (Bhanye et al., 2024). Moreover, these complexities do not usually emerge in tenure-based research. This implies that conducting broader CE research would not necessarily fill the mixed-use gap. Future research therefore needs to take the multi-owner, multi-function building as its primary unit of analysis.

The findings also echo our earlier review (Jegede and Soneye, 2026), in which a similar pattern emerged despite the use of different databases and inclusion rules: CE housing research is concentrated in the Global North rather than the Global South. That two reviews with different search strategies converge on the same distribution suggests a genuine gap in the field rather than an artefact of either method.

Limitations

This review synthesised studies on CE and its applicability in housing and impact on urban development; however, there are some limitations. Circular economy is regarded as a debatable concept in research, with diverse contextual interpretations. Although the defined eligibility criteria enhanced the accuracy and relevance of the search and selection process, disparate opinions on the concept of CE still exist. Scholars continue to question the boundaries of CE within diverse fields, suggesting that insights from other contexts can be interchanged. However, this review limits the scope to CE within the built environment, specifically residential buildings. Also, this review only studied papers published in English, thereby excluding insights and valuable findings published in other languages. Future studies will be conducted to fill this gap. Lastly, this review excludes studies from other sources, such as grey literature, i.e., theses, dissertations, government reports, and industry publications. CE practice is usually documented in such channels, particularly in developing contexts; therefore, its exclusion may have heightened the Global North bias of this review. It is therefore recommended that these write-ups be reviewed in future studies. Nevertheless, the selected research papers offer notable insights and comprehensive findings into CE and urban development, making it a suitable representative of the field.

Three methodological limitations follow from the search design and should be weighed when interpreting the findings. First, retrieval from Google Scholar was capped at 100 records per string; although this cap was pre-specified and applied uniformly, and although the Scopus search was uncapped, relevant records ranked below that threshold may have been missed. Second, 17 of the 53 included studies (32%) were identified through citation chasing rather than the primary strings, which indicates that no single Boolean vocabulary reliably captures this field and that coverage is therefore contingent on the reference networks of the studies already retrieved. Third, the searches drew on two databases only, Scopus and Google Scholar; Web of Science was not accessible under the authors’ institutional subscriptions and was therefore excluded. This may have reinforced the Global North concentration observed in Section 3.1.2, as Web of Science indexing is known to favour English-language, high-impact-factor journals disproportionately based in these regions. All in all, these limitations affect the final corpus; they do not undermine our main findings, as the absence of mixed-use studies emerged across all three independent search methods used in this study.

This scoping review gathered key insights on CE and residential development from scholarly literature. Our findings show that empirical studies on CE as a pathway to sustainable residential provisions are limited. While review papers are abundant, longitudinal studies with quantified performance assessments remain scarce. It was also observed that research is concentrated in developed countries, and contexts in the Global South are underexplored. In an emerging economic state with severe housing deficits, such as Nigeria, it would be difficult to directly imitate European CE strategies. It is therefore suggested that CE strategies be adjusted to fit local conditions such as the self-construction of residential buildings, limited government budgets and the increasing demand for houses. In general, digital infrastructure and data recording as a CE tool are gaining more attention in recent times, but they need to be prioritised more by theorists and designers. Additionally, a notable divergence was identified in the studies. While the majority of the papers outlined the benefits of CE in affordable and social housing, a few scholars argued that the complex ownership structure typical of residential buildings impedes widespread CE adoption. Solutions addressing fragmented ownership and technological limitations are urgently required by researchers, lawmakers, educators, and design professionals. It is also important that these solutions be combined with more robust research methods to derive an in-depth, evidence-driven understanding of the feasibility and effectiveness of CE strategies in urban developments. Finally, expanding the scope of residential studies to mixed-use building typology will promote understanding of spatial flexibility, adaptability, efficiency and community-focused solutions.

Four research priorities follow directly from these findings.

Empirical studies are needed that study mixed-use residential developments directly rather than as a secondary/implied theme.

Longitudinal designs are required to test whether CE strategies such as design for disassembly and adaptive reuse deliver their predicted benefits in practice, since the present evidence base rests largely on modelled simulations rather than realised outcomes.

Research situated in Sub-Saharan Africa and comparable rapidly urbanising regions is needed to establish which CE strategies remain viable where ownership is fragmented, and construction is incremental, and to develop locally adapted material and renovation passports that do not presuppose mature digital infrastructure.

Studies analysing the compatibility of building codes and planning law with circular practice would address a gap that is significantly lacking in developing-country contexts.

The societal implications of closing these gaps are substantial. In contexts facing acute housing deficits, circularity is more than a means of environmental regeneration; it is also a way of extending scarce material and financial resources. Adaptive reuse, for instance, can reduce both the import dependence and the cost volatility that constrain housing delivery. Retrofitting existing stock can also deliver habitable units considerably faster than new construction. This has implications for policymakers and regulatory bodies, as the primary constraint identified in this study is institutional, not technical. This study therefore recommends cooperative ownership structures, incremental-build standards, and the formal recognition of informally produced housing within regulatory frameworks. In everyday practice, design professionals and management teams are encouraged not to superficially transfer CE strategies from the Global North to developing contexts where such supporting conditions do not exist. Addressing the mixed-use void, therefore, matters beyond the literature: it is the typology through which much of the Global South’s urban housing will actually be delivered, and the evidence needed to make that delivery circular has yet to be produced.