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The Smart Circular City links technology, circular economy, and urban metabolism by using digital tools to optimize material and energy flows in heritage assets. Adaptive reuse and lifecycle-informed interventions extend lifespans, close material loops, and reduce embodied carbon, ensuring heritage-led regeneration contributes to resilient, efficient, and culturally grounded urban systems that operationalize circularity across ecological, social, and infrastructural dimensions. Digital infrastructures, including digital twins, BIM platforms, and real-time monitoring systems, transform heritage buildings into active nodes within regenerative urban systems, enabling lifecycle optimization while safeguarding cultural values. Architectural strategies such as adaptive reuse, design for disassembly, and context-sensitive energy retrofitting demonstrate how conservation ethics can coexist with environmental performance, enhancing long-term urban sustainability. Governance and policy frameworks reveal persistent challenges from siloed regulations, fragmented smart city initiatives, and economic constraints, emphasizing the need for multi-level coordination, lifecycle assessment, and participatory decision-making. Evidence from leading European cities highlights that policy–practice integration, cross-sector collaboration, and community engagement are key to scaling circular interventions. Forward-looking approaches advocate embedding heritage value into digital metrics, incentivizing circular retrofitting, and promoting anticipatory governance to cultivate culturally vibrant, ecologically responsible, and socially inclusive urban futures. The Smart Circular City offers a holistic blueprint for regenerative urban transformation.
Williams Chibueze Munonye (Thu,) studied this question.