Members of the CiRBEC community brought forward a shared discussion on how education must evolve to support the transition towards a circular and regenerative built environment in a special session hosted by Prof. Birgul Colacoglu (ITU) at ReSBE 2026.
The transition towards a circular and regenerative built environment asks more from education than simply adding sustainability content to existing curricula. Four contributions presented during the session explore this challenge from complementary perspectives. Olga Ioannou (TU Delft) examined case-study and making pedagogies, showing how peer learning, collaboration with makers, hands-on experimentation and reflection can help students understand circularity as a systemic rather than purely technical challenge. Burcu Kismet Conk, Sevil Yazici and Birgul Colakoglu introduced Challenge-Based Circular Learning, connecting circular economy principles and digital technologies with real urban challenges and municipal collaboration to develop systems thinking, circular awareness and community-oriented design skills. Nurhan Abujidi, Poorya Eghtesadi and colleagues at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences took this systemic perspective to the curriculum level, proposing circularity as an organising principle structured around Flow, Process and Design, and using Urban Living Labs to connect education with governance, construction practice and regional transformation.
Moving from circularity towards regeneration, Johannes Staudt, Carsten Schade, Arno Denk and Werner Lang (Technical University of Munich) focused on adaptive reuse and early-stage programming. Their approach brings architecture and engineering students together to develop systems, target and transformation knowledge, encouraging them to see existing buildings not as constraints but as resources with social, spatial and material potential. Across these different approaches, a shared direction emerges: students need to learn not only about circularity and regeneration, but how to participate in systemic transformation. This means working across disciplines and scales, engaging with real places and stakeholders, experimenting with materials and existing buildings, and learning through making, negotiation and reflection. If we expect future professionals to transform the systems through which we design and build, our educational environments must themselves become more systemic, experimental and collaborative.
You can download all papers here
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