Lean-digital-place integration for circular housing design

Circular economy strategies are increasingly promoted to reduce material waste, embodied carbon, and lifecycle environmental impacts in the built environment. However, practical adoption in housing remains limited due to fragmentation across process, information, and regional infrastructures. Existing studies emphasise design strategies or digital tools but do not appropriately consider the production system conditions required for circular workflows. A structured narrative literature review was conducted across three domains: Lean Construction, digital construction technologies (including BIM, Digital Twins, and AI), and circular economy. Based on this synthesis, the paper proposes a Lean-Digital-Place (LDP) framework that conceptualises circularity as an emergent property of aligned production processes, digital information infrastructures, and regional material ecosystems. The framework extends Lean Construction thinking from the project-level toward lifecycle and regionally embedded production systems. A research agenda and evaluation indicators are proposed to guide empirical validation and support the development of scalable circular housing systems.