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We recognize the urgent need for sustainable, resource-efficient solutions in the built environment and are committed to fostering knowledge, innovation, and real-world impact. By bringing together researchers from diverse disciplines, we create a vibrant platform for collaboration, debate, and exchange of ideas that drive circularity in construction, design, engineering, and urban development.

A circular economy is an economic and environmental framework that aims to eliminate waste and keep materials, products, and resources in use for as long as possible. Unlike the traditional linear economy, which follows a take-make-dispose model, the circular economy focuses on refuse, reduce, renew (regenerate), reuse, repair, reuse, refurbish, remanufacture, repurpose, recycle and recover. In the context of the built environment, this means transforming the existing, designing buildings, infrastructure, and materials with longevity (lifetime extension), adaptability, and resource efficiency in mind.  

A circular built environment is related and constituted through diverse: 

• spatial scales: buildings and infrastructures, their materiality, details, components, and as well neighborhoods, cities and regions 

• temporal scales: from past and immediate impact, life cycle, to intergenerational perspectives. 

• contextual enablers: cultural entanglements, economical and legal frameworks, certification, liability and insurance policies, and other underpinning value systems. 

We embrace system thinking, complexity and uncertainty and create positive visions and future scenarios to help in making these scenarios tangible, discussable and bringing clear steps forward that we could already act on in the present.  

Circular strategies include: design with reuse, design with biodegradables, design for reuse and detachability, design for repair and maintenance, design for refuse, design for flexibility, adaptative reuse und transformation, digital tools for material tracking, and innovative business models such as take-back models and track-and-trace systems. By transitioning to a circular economy, we can reduce environmental impact, enable responsible material use, minimize resource depletion, and create resilient sustainable building and urban systems that benefit both society and the planet. We are working on making the circular transition a ‘just transition’, where costs and benefits are fairly distributed, where people have a chance to take part in decision making, and where intergenerational justice is addressed.

Through our collaborative efforts, the Circular Built Environment Group at ºÚÁϸ£ÀûÍø aims to be a leading force of innovation and a center of excellence in shaping a future where circularity is the foundation of the built environment.