Circular Industrialised Housing: Insights from Solar Decathlon Europe 2022

The latest policy and research recommendations focus on advancing transition of housing to the circular economy framework to tackle environmental and affordability challenges. A key strategy for this is industrialised construction, which combines controlled manufacturing methods with strategies that facilitate future disassembly, allowing for adaptations, maintenance, and material reuse. Despite its importance, long-term housing solutions that integrate both industrialised construction and disassembly remain rare. This study obtained insights into circular industrialised housing from the Solar Decathlon Europe competition through interviews and observations with fifteen participating teams in Wuppertal, Germany, in 2022. The competition’s build challenge provided a unique opportunity to examine the practical application of both industrialised and disassembly approaches, where teams developed highly energy-efficient, affordability-conscious, and scalable housing systems. On-site interviews with team members from diverse disciplines took place midway through the competition’s assembly phase. These were further informed by observing team Azalea’s housing disassembly in Spain, which took place shortly before reassembly in Germany. Thematic and content analyses were conducted using a predefined framework based on holistic factors and lifecycle processes. Our results reveal the critical impact of Cultural factors, particularly during the (re)design process and provide new data to aid our understanding of the (dis)assembly process. This study contributes towards the development of a circular industrialised housing framework.