Incremental Urbanism and the Circular City: Analyzing Spatial Patterns in Permits, Land Use, and Heritage Regulations

The construction industry is a major contributor to global resource consumption and waste. This sector extracts over two billion tons of raw materials each year and contributes over 30% of all solid waste generated annually through construction and demolition debris. The movement toward circularity in the built environment aims to replace linear processes of extraction and disposal by promoting policies favoring building preservation and adaptive reuse, as well as the salvage and reuse of building materials. Few North American cities have implemented explicit policies that incentivize circularity to decouple urban growth from resource consumption, and there remain substantial hurdles to adoption. Nonetheless, existing regulatory and planning tools, such as zoning codes and historic preservation policies, may already influence redevelopment in ways that could align with circularity. This article examines spatial patterns in these indirect pathways through a case study of a college town in New York State, assessing how commonly used local planning tools shape urban redevelopment trajectories. Using a three-stage spatial analysis protocol, including exploratory analysis, Geographically Weighted Regressions (GWRs), and Geographic Random Forest (GRF) modeling, the study evaluates the impact of zoning regulations and historic preservation designations on patterns of demolition, reinvestment, and incremental change in the building stock. National historic districts were strongly associated with more building adaptation permits indicating reinvestment in existing buildings. Mixed-use zoning was positively correlated with new construction, while special overlay districts and low-density zoning were mostly negatively correlated with concentrations of building adaptation permits. A key contribution of this paper is a replicable protocol for urban building stock analysis and insights into how land use policies can support or hinder incremental urban change in moves toward the circular city. Further, we provide recommendations for data management strategies in small cities that could help strengthen analysis-driven policies.