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.

Circular Industrialised Housing, underpinned by the systematic design of building components for future disassembly and reuse, offers valuable opportunities to deliver sustainable and affordable homes at scale. However, research interlinking these approaches remains thin, and critical socio-economic dimensions are often overlooked. This paper addresses these gaps through a systematic review of 65 publications spanning Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. Six key factors inductively emerged: cultural, governance, financial, site and logistics, construction system, and building information. Building on these findings, a four-step circular process framework is proposed—(re)planning, (re)designing, (re)manufacturing, and (dis)assembly—capturing the full housing lifecycle. Fifteen themes and 36 sub-themes were identified. Mapping barriers and enablers reveals a disproportionate emphasis on the (re)designing process (55 %), with significantly less attention to (re)manufacturing (20 %), (re)planning (13 %), and (dis)assembly (12 %). The strongest relationship identified was between the construction system and (re)designing, with sub-theme ‘theoretical design’ dominating the literature. Most literature gaps pertained to governance, particularly in relation to (dis)assembly. Few studies investigated social and affordable housing. Only six studies included interviews or surveys with practitioners. Overall, this review contributes a holistic perspective on Circular Industrialised Housing, offering a structured, process-driven lens to inform interdisciplinary research, policy design, and industry adoption. By illuminating how and where key factors intersect across the housing lifecycle, the framework serves as a roadmap for systematically advancing the field towards resource-efficient, regenerative and equitable housing outcomes. Future research can apply the framework to specific case studies to develop and refine its practical relevance.