Circular economy strategies for the design of a social housing system: a PRISMA-based systematic review
Résumé
The convergence of an increasing global housing affordability crisis and critical climate decarbonisation targets calls for a fundamental paradigm shift in the planning, design, construction and management of social and public housing across the life cycle. The conventional housing delivery cycle is a destructive linear trajectory: raw materials are extracted, components are manufactured, dwellings are constructed and ultimately demolished and disposed of to landfill, generating disproportionate waste and greenhouse gas emissions at each stage. This systematic review synthesises peer-reviewed evidence on the integration of Circular Economy (CE) principles in social, affordable and residential housing systems following the PRISMA 2020 framework and a review question structured with PICOS (Section 2.1). A systematic and comprehensive search was performed in Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar on 05 July 2026, which identified 1,888 records (Scopus n = 1,455; Web of Science n = 125; Google Scholar n = 308). After removing duplicates ( n = 107), 1,781 unique records were screened. 136 reports were sought, 135 full texts were assessed and 103 studies met all eligibility criteria. A further 17 candidates were identified through an open citation-searching route, of which 10 were included, resulting in a final synthesised corpus of 113 studies. Throughout, a strict housing-focused rule of eligibility was applied: only studies in which housing is the object of the CE application were included, whereas construction-sector-wide CE literature is cited as background evidence but not counted in the corpus. The review clusters the identified themes into six clusters: 1) Modular and industrialised construction, 2) Design for Disassembly and adaptability, 3) Adaptive reuse, circular renovation and building conversion, 4) Circular business models, Product-Service Systems and tenant agency, 5) Digital enablement through BIM, housing passports and digital product passports, and 6) Procurement reform, circular finance and policy enablement. The embodied-carbon advantage of circular renovation and adaptive reuse over demolish-and-rebuild is the most convergently evidenced finding (savings of 50–80% in circular deep-renovation cases). Quantitative performance claims for modular and DfD strategies are primarily from design-stage simulations and pilot cases and should be read as conditional. Scalability is still hindered by procurement frameworks that favour lowest capital cost, fragmented regulation and an ongoing circular–social trade-off between institutional sustainability goals and low-income tenants’ liveability needs. This review proposes a three-tier strategic framework for the transition from linear to circular social housing systems at macro (institutional/policy), meso (financial instruments) and micro (technical design) levels as a guide for policy makers, municipal housing authorities, architects and built environment professionals.
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