Abstract
Climate emergency demands absolute reductions in global carbon emissions while millions of marginalised people dream about decent housing and infrastructure. With the unprecedented level of consumption, urban built environment remains the largest sink for material resources, making it a top priority for achieving material efficiency and production associated emission reductions across the globe. The concept of circular economy may offer a pathway to achieve both, the socioeconomic development and ambitious emission cuts. Hence, this thesis first develops methods to investigate the status, progress and opportunities for the circular economy in cities by combining multidisciplinary data, design and sustainability methods. It then investigates the buildings sector for the urban mining of building components and end-of-life reuse driven circularity opportunities. This thesis argues that premature obsolescence of buildings in cities could drive an affordable and more sustainable supply of building components for low-cost housing in developing countries and contribute in solving the global housing challenge. With decreasing lifespan of buildings, recovery and reuse of building components at their end-of-life could be a major sustainability contributor. This research develops a systematic approach to estimate the recoverable building components, costs and environmental benefits of recovery process, and subsequent ease of designing with reuse. The challenges associated with implementation of reuse driven building construction in urban and rural settings have thus been properly identified and addressed. Overall, this research contributes in developing a roadmap for systematically upscaling the practice of end-of-life reuse and circular economy in the built environment.