This systematic review examines the role of arts places in fostering urban sustainability and resilience, investigating how these spaces contribute to long-term urban development goals. By synthesizing 79 peer-reviewed articles published between 2013 and 2024, this review identifies the mechanisms through which art spaces promote sustainability and resilience across economic, social, environmental, and cultural dimensions. Urban resilience is achieved through civic engagement and empowerment, as well as the repurposing the spaces to adapt to new uses within the community and strengthening cultural heritage and identity. Similarly, urban sustainability in different aspects, such as economic, environmental, and social, is fulfilled by new revenues from tourism income, as well as educational promotion on ecological issues through art. The findings reveal how arts places—ranging from permanent museums and galleries to temporary and public art installations—stimulate community engagement, economic revitalization, and environmental stewardship. This study provides a theoretical framework that illustrates the connections between the types of arts places, their initiators, and their intended outcomes. The results also highlight challenges such as gentrification and the tension between artistic and commercial purposes. Implications for urban planners and policymakers include integrating arts places into urban regeneration strategies. Future research should focus on quantitative measures of the long-term impact of arts places and their role in mitigating urban inequities.

Embedding circular economy (CE) principles in early design requires iterative evaluation across multiple lifecycle phases, with trade-offs between objectives complicating the identification of best solutions. This paper puts forward methods to automatically discover diverse, yet well-performing solution types within complex multi-objective CE design optimisation models. Working with a parametric model derived from a furniture design for CE case study, a comparison is made between weighted-sum single objective optimisation and multi-objective optimisation augmented with clustered solution types targeted by the reference point-based NSGA-II optimisation algorithm. Efficiency of optimisation, quality of results and distinctiveness of solution types presented by each method is compared in an effort to understand which will best assist designers to manage complexity in CE design. The generalisability of the presented methods to larger scale CE design problems is discussed and future areas of work on computational design for CE are extrapolated from the presented results.