The vulnerability of buildings faces further scrutiny as gaps in design, construction, operation, and maintenance remain. Although there has been noticeable progress in the field, the frequency and magnitude of building damage during natural events highlight the fact that sustainable infrastructure has not yet reached all targets. In this study, sustainability aspects of vulnerable buildings are revisited to propose more robust measures to prevent damage and a lack of functionality. Those measured are underpinned by the merging of environmental and structural sustainability for one novel integrated approach. The method devises structural intervention scenarios based on damage levels and service period. It also aims at reducing resource use and embodied impacts through the discretization of standard life cycle analysis into customized stages. The integrated method to evaluate sustainability is tested on two vulnerable buildings in Turkey and Mexico, built with different codes of practice and having experienced low to medium damage during severe earthquake events. Research findings indicate that although embodied impacts form a minor part of the building life cycle environmental impacts, sustainable structural interventions can further reduce both embodied impacts and demands on natural resources. Hence strengthening vulnerable buildings can provide an advantage to help the sustainable transformation of cities.

Policies on sustainability of buildings have been progressively gaining importance throughout the world. Turkey is a part of such international movements and is now striving to address its energy performance, by reducing emissions of contaminants derived from energy consumption of buildings, and through the protection of the environment. The present paper links these two elements of development, through the revision of building policies and strategies that take place in Turkey while contextualising worldwide sustainability targets and key trends. This is demonstrated with the aim of identifying the environment and energy goals that underpin the construction sector. As a result, specific actions, regarding policy and implementation arise. These could enable the reduction of energy usage and emission of pollutants, partially through the increase of renewable energy use and the promotion of building certification, as dictated by existing legislation.

The frequency of disasters recorded around the globe, combined with inadequate enforcement of design codes, the natural deterioration of the existing built fabric and poor use of land due to rapid urbanisation make urban infrastructure vulnerable to experience damage. This eventually creates the need for building retrofitting, which triggers further environmental degradation. Furthermore, the lack of a well-defined approach to guarantee sustainable structural recovery derives on structural interventions focusing on strengthening elements to improve their performance only, hence ignoring the plethora of building deficiencies associated to post-disaster retrofit. The aim of this investigation is therefore to embed structural upgrading within the principles of sustainability while developing the metrics to enable structural damage reduction. This will contribute to optimising post-disaster building interventions. The proposed approach is applied to a pilot case to illustrate identified alternatives for improving the performance of otherwise vulnerable infrastructure from a life-cycle perspective.

Construction and demolition waste (CDW) has been globally recognized as one of the most challenging waste streams, while simultaneously offering significant potential for valorization as secondary material resource. To effectively utilize these sources in their end-of-life stage, systematic characterization and robust management strategies are essential. In this context, this study comparatively evaluates the current state of CDW management approaches across the selected EU member states (Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Romania, and Slovenia), Switzerland, and Türkiye, with the objective of supporting the development of CDW material passport systems. The study includes characterization of the CDW streams, analysis of waste statistics and identification of good management practices within these countries, to develop realistic baselines for secondary material indicators at an international level. Furthermore, emergency action plans implemented during uncontrolled demolition scenarios, including natural disasters, are benchmarked to identify the operational gaps between standard waste management procedures and crisis response mechanisms. Consequently, the study highlights the urgent need to develop specialized management frameworks that prioritize each component of CDW, even when present in a mixed state, enabling their treatment as valuable secondary resources rather than a burden.

Circular economy business incubators can reposition real estate from static assets to venture platforms that generate, test, and scale circular business models in urban regeneration. This creates an opportunity to make adaptive reuse and urban development projects more innovative, productive, and financially viable. Yet many so-called circular economy hubs are still treated mainly as places where circular activities happen, not as operating models that turn circular intent into replicable ventures and feasible business outcomes. This study asks how adaptive reuse and urban development projects can be configured as circular economy incubators, and what role digitalisation plays in that process. Using a synthesized taxonomy of 40 circular economy business model archetypes, the study compares three European real estate hubs selected for their contrasting governance models, scales, and explicit incubator or accelerator design. The results identify three incubator configurations: curated industrial symbiosis within a single asset; circular construction coworking combined with a no-equity incubator centred on partnerships and procurement pilots; and a public-private eco-industrial park with specialist labs that bridge lab-to-pilot scaling. Across all three, digitalisation emerges as a key enabler of value creation because it makes circular flows visible, traceable, and manageable. AI-enabled Building Information Models, digital twins, material passports, asset databases, and reuse-matching platforms function as trust infrastructure for tracking, verifying, and coordinating these flows. The study contribution is a scalable “urban circular economy venture project” model that reframes real estate as a venture platform for circular innovation.

The high consumption of raw materials and the generation of construction and demolition waste (CDW) represent significant sustainability challenges. The circular economy (CE) offers a promising pathway but requires effective legislation. Although considerable attention has been devoted to the technical and economic aspects of CE, comparative analyses of national regulatory frameworks remain scarce. This study addresses this gap by conducting a comparative analysis of the regulatory environments of nine countries: Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Türkiye. With a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture based on a large language model (LLM), national and regional legal texts were analysed and fact-checked by experts. The results reveal substantial differences in regulatory maturity, enforcement mechanisms, and data platforms, resulting in the identification of three country clusters. The findings indicate that effective CDW management depends on legislative harmonisation, institutional capacity, data openness, and economic incentives. In addition, the study suggests that LLMs can serve as powerful instruments for comparative legal analysis in multilingual sustainability research.