Community-Scale Sustainable Practices in the Built Environment: A PRISMA-ScR Review of Spatial, Social, and Governance Mechanisms in Urban Sustainability

Abstract

Community-scale sustainable built-environment practices are increasingly important for linking urban sustainability policy with everyday spatial transformation, yet the evidence base remains fragmented across nature-based solutions, housing retrofit, settlement upgrading, public-space transformation, digital mapping, circular infrastructure, and governance-oriented planning. This scoping review, reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR), maps and synthesizes peer-reviewed evidence on community-scale sustainable built-environment practices, with publication years from 2015 to 2026 and indexed by the final search date of 13 June 2026. Searches were conducted in Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection, yielding 3506 records. After duplicate removal, title-and-abstract screening, and full-text eligibility assessment, 130 studies were included for Spatial–Social–Governance (SSG) coding and thematic synthesis. This review identified eight thematic clusters, led by nature-based and green–blue infrastructure practices, followed by housing, retrofit, and settlement upgrading; neighborhood sustainability assessment and planning; public-space transformation and placemaking; digital tools and mapping; circular neighborhood infrastructures; mobility-related practices; and heritage-led regeneration. The largest concentration of evidence was found in nature-based and green–blue infrastructure practices, followed by housing, retrofit, and settlement upgrading; smaller clusters extended the field towards neighborhood assessment, public-space transformation, digital evidence systems, circular infrastructures, mobility, and heritage-led regeneration. As a review-derived synthesis output, the Spatial–Social–Governance Mechanism Framework does not introduce spatial, social, and governance as new analytical dimensions. Instead, it operationalizes these established concerns as a common comparison structure for heterogeneous community-scale built-environment practices, linking spatial intervention, social embedding, and governance enablement. The framework is neither a general theory nor an effectiveness model; its contribution is an integrative and review-specific analytical instrument.

1. Introduction

Cities and urban settlements are central arenas in which climate risk, social inequality, infrastructure pressures, and sustainability transitions converge. The built environment is not only a physical setting for urban life; it is also a material system through which energy demand, land-use patterns, mobility, public-space access, climate exposure, health, social interaction, and governance capacity are configured. Recent global assessments emphasize that urban climate vulnerability is increasing rapidly, especially where adaptive capacity is limited, while the buildings and construction sector remains a major source of energy demand, resource use, and carbon emissions [1,2]. At the same time, the future of cities is increasingly framed through the need for resilient, inclusive, low-carbon, and well-governed urban development pathways [3]. These pressures have made the sustainable transformation of the built environment a core concern of urban planning, architecture, environmental governance, and sustainability science.

Yet the scale at which sustainable built-environment practices become operational remains contested. City-scale strategies are essential for policy alignment, infrastructure investment, and climate targets, while building-scale interventions remain crucial for energy performance, material efficiency, and indoor environmental quality. Recent research on vernacular courtyard houses under projected climate reclassification illustrates how building-scale adaptation can be evaluated through the compatibility between inherited morphological logics and emerging thermal conditions [4]. However, many sustainability challenges become most visible and actionable at community or neighborhood scale. Heat exposure, access to green space, flood risk, public-space safety, aging-in-place, informal settlement upgrading, retrofit feasibility, local mobility, everyday livability, and social cohesion are experienced locally and unevenly. The community scale can, therefore, function as an operational interface between strategic urban policy and everyday spatial practice [5,6,7]. Conceptually, the community scale is important because it connects three analytical traditions that are often treated separately. From a neighborhood planning perspective, it is the scale at which land use, housing, public space, mobility, green infrastructure, and local services become spatially coordinated. From a local governance perspective, it is the scale at which municipal policy, institutional support, community organizations, and resident participation interact in implementation. From an everyday urbanism perspective, it is the scale at which sustainability is experienced through ordinary practices of dwelling, moving, gathering, maintaining, adapting, and using shared spaces. The community scale is, therefore, not only a spatial unit, but also a relational arena in which built-environment change becomes socially meaningful and governable.

However, this operational role remains insufficiently synthesized across the built-environment literature. The fragmentation is visible at five levels. First, the literature is divided by intervention type, with nature-based solutions, housing retrofit, informal settlement upgrading, public-space transformation, digital participation, circular neighborhood systems, and mobility-oriented public-realm initiatives often examined separately. Second, it is divided by scale, as building-level, neighborhood-level, district-level, and city-level studies are not always connected through a shared community-scale logic. Third, it is divided methodologically, with empirical case studies, planning frameworks, participatory tools, GIS-based assessments, modeling studies, and perception-based research using different forms of evidence. Fourth, it is divided by governance and equity perspectives, with some studies foregrounding municipal implementation and others emphasizing co-production, stewardship, informality, justice, or vulnerable groups. Fifth, it is divided by outcome logic, as environmental performance, climate resilience, livability, inclusion, circularity, public-space use, and long-term maintenance are often assessed through separate indicators. This multi-level fragmentation makes it difficult to compare how different community-scale practices become spatially configured, socially embedded, and institutionally enabled across domains.

Recent research increasingly points to the importance of community-scale practices in producing urban sustainability outcomes. Nature-based solutions and green–blue infrastructure have been positioned as multifunctional urban interventions capable of supporting climate adaptation, biodiversity, stormwater management, heat mitigation, public health, and social wellbeing [8,9,10,11]. A district-renovation study illustrates how technical improvements in energy, accessibility, and infrastructure can be considered alongside resident needs, institutional support, and social acceptability [12]. Public-space and participatory-planning studies frequently treat safety, inclusion, belonging and local perception as substantive dimensions of sustainable urban environments [13,14]. At the same time, neighborhood sustainability assessment tools and city-footprint approaches reveal that measurement systems must become more context-sensitive if they are to support local action rather than only aggregate reporting [6,7].

Recent state-of-the-art research has further clarified why community and neighborhood settings are analytically consequential for built-environment sustainability. A systematic review of community social sustainability identifies communities as practical physical and social units in which spatial attributes, resident experience, and multi-actor collaboration can be examined together [15]. Recent governance- and planning-oriented research similarly conceptualizes community social sustainability through neighborhood robustness, access to everyday services, and governance structures, indicating that local sustainability is conceptualized through the joint contribution of spatial, service, and institutional conditions [16]. At the neighborhood level, place-based transformation research identifies interacting levers across planning processes, mobility, liveliness, spatial allocation, and place, underscoring the need to connect local spatial change with wider transformation dynamics [17]. Community-regeneration research has also operationalized local sustainability through integrated indicator frameworks covering land use, ecological conditions, resource use, transport, buildings, economy, and information management [18]. Finally, recent systematic evidence on public space and social cohesion shows that physical characteristics interact with sociodemographic and perceptual conditions, reinforcing the need to examine spatial configuration and social embedding within the same analytical account [19].

The problem is, therefore, not the absence of relevant research, but the absence of a sufficiently integrated comparative synthesis capable of connecting these intervention, scale, method, governance-equity, and outcome fragments. Nature-based solution research foregrounds ecosystem services, multifunctionality, and co-creation, while the urban experimentation literature emphasizes living labs, real-world experimentation, and transdisciplinary governance [20,21,22,23]. Governance-oriented research highlights actor coordination, institutional capacity, and justice, while the participatory urban development literature focuses on methods of engagement and citizen involvement [13,24,25]. These literatures contribute valuable domain-specific insights, but they do not yet provide a common mechanism-based structure for comparing how diverse community-scale sustainable built-environment practices operate across spatial, social, and governance dimensions.

A key limitation in the existing evidence base is that sustainable built-environment practices are often classified by intervention category rather than by the mechanisms through which they operate. A green–blue infrastructure project, a social-housing retrofit program, a public-space co-design process, a digital crowd-mapping platform, and an informal-settlement upgrading toolkit may appear to belong to different fields, yet each may combine material-spatial change, community-facing processes, and institutional arrangements. This cross-domain observation motivates the SSG coding structure; the three dimensions and their coding rules are formally defined in Section 2.8.

This review responds to the identified synthesis gap by operationalizing a Spatial–Social–Governance (SSG) comparison structure for community-scale sustainable built-environment practices. Spatial, social, and governance concerns are not presented as conceptually novel dimensions; related forms of integration are already established in urban social–ecological–technological systems research, sustainability-transition scholarship, urban-governance analysis, nature-based-solution implementation, and living-lab research [5,20,21,22,23,24]. The bounded contribution of the present review is methodological and synthetic: it translates these established concerns into a common built-environment coding structure whose unit of comparison is the community-scale practice represented in an eligible full-text article. Unlike system-level frameworks, the SSG structure does not provide a comprehensive ontology of urban systems; unlike transition frameworks, it does not explain long-term regime change; and unlike domain-specific implementation frameworks, it is applied across multiple intervention families. It should, therefore, be read as a cross-domain review instrument rather than as a new general theory of urban sustainability.

The analytical structure also intersects with distinct theoretical debates that should not be collapsed into a single integrative vocabulary. Collaborative planning foregrounds deliberation, knowledge exchange, institutional capacity, and place-shaping in fragmented societies, whereas just-city and spatial-justice approaches ask whether planning processes and outcomes redistribute access, benefits, burdens, voice, and recognition [26,27,28]. Urban governance theory directs attention to the institutional configurations through which public, private and civic actors steer urban development and control resources [29]. Urban political ecology further treats socio-environmental intervention as a politically produced transformation whose benefits and risks are unevenly distributed and whose apparently local scale is connected to wider relations of power [30]. Socio-technical transitions scholarship adds a temporal and multi-level perspective by distinguishing local experiments from the regime and landscape dynamics through which wider transformation may occur [31]. The SSG framework draws selective analytical questions from these debates but does not subsume them: it maps how the reviewed studies represent spatial intervention, social embedding, and governance enablement, while questions of power, justice, scale, conflict, and temporal transition require additional theoretical interpretation.

The aim of this scoping review is, therefore, to map and synthesize peer-reviewed evidence on community-scale sustainable built-environment practices with publication years from 2015 to 2026 and availability in Scopus or the Web of Science Core Collection by the final search date of 13 June 2026. Reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) [32], this review focuses on English-language journal articles indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection and uses a structured SSG coding framework to identify how included studies configure spatial, social, and governance mechanisms. To make the alignment between the overall review aim, the analytical framework, and the synthesis procedure explicit,

Table 1. Alignment of the research questions with the review aim, analytical evidence, and synthesis procedure.

Research Question	Link to the Overall Review Aim	Charted Evidence/Analytical Dimension	Synthesis Procedure	Principal Reporting Output
RQ1. What types of community-scale sustainable built-environment practices are represented in the recent peer-reviewed urban sustainability literature?	To map the breadth, characteristics, and principal practice families represented in the eligible evidence corpus.	Evidence type; spatial scale; sustainability practice; intervention type; dominant thematic cluster.	Descriptive evidence mapping and thematic clustering of the included studies.	Section 3.2 and Section 3.3; Supplementary Tables S4, S4a and S7.
RQ2. What spatial mechanisms are used to configure these practices in the built environment?	To identify the material, spatial, infrastructural, and environmental forms through which community-scale practices operate.	Dominant spatial mechanism; secondary spatial mechanisms recorded in the study-level notes; thematic cluster.	Dominant-code descriptive synthesis and cross-tabulation with dominant social mechanisms.	Section 3.4 and Section 3.5.
RQ3. What social mechanisms are used to embed these practices in community needs, perceptions, participation, and everyday use?	To identify the community-facing processes through which spatial practices become locally meaningful, legitimate, and usable.	Dominant social mechanism; secondary social mechanisms recorded in the study-level notes.	Dominant-code descriptive synthesis and spatial–social mechanism matrix.	Section 3.5.
RQ4. What governance mechanisms enable, coordinate, implement, or sustain these practices?	To identify the institutional, organizational, and policy arrangements associated with implementation, coordination, monitoring, and continuity.	Dominant governance mechanism; secondary governance mechanisms recorded in the study-level notes.	Frequency mapping and thematic interpretation of governance pathways.	Section 3.6.
RQ5. What evidence gaps remain in the assessment, transferability, and long-term monitoring of community-scale sustainable built-environment practices?	To identify limitations in the depth, duration, and transferability of the available evidence and define priorities for further research.	Evidence type, coding confidence and study-level mechanism notes; evidence-gap categories were identified interpretively rather than coded as standardized binary variables.	Cross-study interpretive gap synthesis. No corpus-wide gap-frequency analysis was undertaken because the gap categories were not pre-specified as standardized binary variables.	Section 4.9; Section 5, point (5); Supplementary Table S9.

Note. Each row identifies the principal analytical pathway used to address the corresponding research question. Some synthesis outputs contribute to more than one question because spatial, social, and governance mechanisms were examined as related dimensions within the same coded evidence base.

links each research question to the evidence charted, the analytical operation applied, and the principal reporting output.

As a PRISMA-ScR review, this article makes three contributions. First, it clarifies community scale as an operational scale of sustainable built-environment practice rather than a residual category between buildings and cities. Second, it provides a cross-domain synthesis of community-scale practices across nature-based solutions, housing and retrofit, settlement upgrading, public-space transformation, digital mapping, neighborhood assessment, circular infrastructure, mobility, and heritage-led regeneration. Third, it operationalizes the SSG mechanism framework as a review-derived comparison instrument that reorganizes established spatial, social, and governance concerns into a common coding and synthesis structure across heterogeneous practice families. Its contribution lies in cross-domain operationalization and study-level traceability, not in claiming that the three dimensions are themselves conceptually new.

By shifting the analytical focus from intervention categories to review-derived mechanism bundles, this review offers a structured way to compare how the included studies describe spatial, social, and governance dimensions. The synthesis does not establish that any particular mechanism configuration causes more durable or effective outcomes. Rather, it identifies recurrent coded combinations and associated enabling conditions within the reviewed corpus that warrant further empirical examination and may inform future planning evaluation.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Review Design and Research Strategy

This study adopted a scoping-review research strategy documented in the registered protocol and reported in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guideline [32]. This review was also informed by PRISMA 2020, JBI guidance for scoping reviews, and the PRISMA-S extension for reporting the literature searches [33,34,35]. A scoping design was selected because the objective was to map the breadth, thematic structure, and mechanism profile of a conceptually broad and methodologically heterogeneous evidence base, rather than to estimate comparative intervention effectiveness or calculate pooled effect sizes. The primary methodological identity of this study is, therefore, a scoping review; the Spatial–Social–Governance (SSG) framework is treated as a review-derived analytical synthesis output rather than as a separate theory-testing design.

This review scope was structured using the Population/Participants–Concept–Context (PCC) framework documented in the protocol. The Population/Participants component comprised urban communities, neighborhood residents, local users, community groups, stakeholders, public-space users, and local built-environment actors. The Concept comprised community-scale sustainable practices, strategies, interventions, initiatives, and mechanisms in the built environment. The Context comprised urban, neighborhood, district, community, and comparable local-scale built-environment settings. The unit of analysis was the eligible full-text peer-reviewed journal article. The overarching review question was: How are community-scale sustainable built-environment practices spatially configured, socially embedded, and governed in the recent peer-reviewed urban sustainability literature?

The research strategy comprised six linked stages: (1) definition of the review scope, eligibility criteria and data-charting fields; (2) database-specific translation and execution of the four-concept search logic in Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection; (3) record export, duplicate removal, title-and-abstract screening, full-text retrieval, and eligibility assessment; (4) study-level charting of bibliographic, spatial-scale, evidence-type, sustainability-practice, and mechanism data; (5) two-pass assignment and verification of dominant spatial, social, and governance codes, while retaining secondary mechanisms in the study-level notes; and (6) descriptive evidence mapping, thematic clustering, spatial–social cross-tabulation, governance-mechanism synthesis, and development of the SSG framework as an interpretive synthesis output. The alignment between the research questions, charted evidence and synthesis outputs is summarized in Table 1. Because each stage is governed by explicit decision rules and recorded at the study level, the same analytical sequence can be applied in future updates or extensions to additional databases or later publication periods, provided that the eligibility, charting, and coding rules are applied consistently. Detailed procedures and audit-trail documentation are reported in Section 2.2, Section 2.3, Section 2.4, Section 2.5, Section 2.6, Section 2.7, Section 2.8, Section 2.9, Section 2.10 and Section 2.11 and the Supplementary Materials.

2.2. Protocol and Registration

The review protocol was registered on the Open Science Framework on 13 June 2026. The registration occurred after the initial database searches, export, and duplicate removal had been completed, but before completion of final full-text eligibility resolution, final study-level SSG coding, thematic synthesis, and framework development. The protocol specified the review type, databases, time span, language restrictions, publication type, eligibility criteria, screening procedure, data-charting fields, and the Spatial–Social–Governance (SSG) coding strategy. This timing is reported explicitly to clarify which parts of the review process had been initiated before registration and which stages were completed under the registered protocol. The registered protocol listed unavailable full texts among the exclusion criteria. In the final review, however, non-retrieved reports were recorded separately as retrieval failures rather than content-based exclusions. This post-registration clarification is documented in the Protocol Timing and Amendments section and Supplementary Table S1a. The review questions were checked against the registered protocol. In particular, the fifth review question addresses evidence gaps in assessment, transferability, and long-term monitoring, while the SSG framework is reported as a synthesis output derived from the coded evidence base.

Protocol Timing and Amendments

The registered protocol established the review type, databases, time frame, language restriction, document type, eligibility logic, data-charting approach, and SSG analytical focus. The relationship between the registered protocol and the reported review is made explicit in two respects. First, the fifth review question addresses the protocol-defined focus on evidence gaps in assessment, transferability, and long-term monitoring, while the SSG framework is reported as a synthesis output derived from the coded evidence base. Second, the final applied database strings are reported as operational refinements of the protocol search logic, made during database-specific translation to improve retrieval sensitivity without changing the databases, time span, language restriction, document type, eligibility criteria, or analytical focus. These points are reported to make the protocol–review relationship transparent rather than to alter the scope of this review.

Four post-registration clarifications are reported transparently. First, full texts that could not be retrieved were recorded as retrieval failures rather than content-based exclusions, although non-retrieval had been listed among the protocol exclusion criteria. Second, the wording of RQ1–RQ4 was refined to align the questions with the final charting fields and synthesis outputs without changing their substantive objectives. Third, several preliminary charting fields were consolidated into evidence type, dominant and secondary mechanism notes, coding confidence, and thematic synthesis categories during controlled charting. Fourth, the SSG framework was clarified as a review-derived interpretive synthesis output rather than as a theory-testing design or effectiveness model. The detailed amendment record is provided in Supplementary Table S1a.

Table 2. Implemented review parameters and protocol handling.

Protocol Element	Specification Used in This Review
Review type	PRISMA-ScR scoping review
Main objective	To map and synthesize community-scale sustainable built-environment practices through spatial, social, and governance mechanisms
Databases	Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection
Publication-year eligibility	2015–2026; records available/indexed through the final search and export date of 13 June 2026
Language	English
Publication type	Peer-reviewed journal articles
Main unit of analysis	Full-text article
Main coding framework	Spatial–Social–Governance mechanism framework
Synthesis type	Descriptive mapping and thematic mechanism synthesis
Quality appraisal	No formal risk-of-bias appraisal; methodological relevance and evidence type were charted instead
Final handling of inaccessible full texts	Recorded as full text not retrieved; not treated as substantive exclusions
Research question alignment	RQ5 addresses evidence gaps in assessment, transferability and long-term monitoring; the SSG framework is reported as a synthesis output
Protocol registration timing	Registered on 13 June 2026 after initial searches/export and duplicate removal, and before final full-text eligibility resolution, final SSG coding, thematic synthesis, and framework development
Protocol alignment record	RQ5 was aligned with the protocol-defined evidence-gap focus; final applied database strings were reported as operational refinements within the registered four-concept search logic

Note. The table summarizes the review parameters implemented in this study. Post-registration clarifications and their relationship to the registered protocol are reported in Supplementary Table S1a.

summarizes the main protocol parameters used to delimit the review scope.

2.3. Information Sources and Search Strategy

The search was conducted in Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection. The final database searches and exports were completed on 13 June 2026. Accordingly, the 2026 component represents partial-year database coverage defined by the final search date rather than coverage of the complete 2026 calendar year. These two databases were selected because of their broad coverage of urban studies, planning, architecture, built environment, sustainability, environmental sciences, geography, and interdisciplinary social science journals. The search strategy was designed to retrieve studies located at the intersection of the built environment, the community or neighborhood scale, sustainability practices, and implementation mechanisms.

The search combined four concept blocks: built environment and urban space; sustainability and resilience; community or neighborhood scale; and practice, intervention or mechanism. The syntax was translated to the search fields and operators supported by each database.

Table 3. Database-specific final applied search strategy.

Database	Search Component	Exact Applied Specification
Scopus	Search field	Title, abstract and keywords (TITLE-ABS-KEY)
Scopus	Final applied query	TITLE-ABS-KEY ((“built environment” OR “urban environment” OR “urban space” OR “urban spaces” OR “public space” OR “public spaces” OR neighbourhood OR neighborhood OR “urban design” OR “urban regeneration” OR “neighbourhood regeneration” OR “neighborhood regeneration” OR “green infrastructure” OR “nature-based solution*” OR “urban public space”) AND (“urban sustainability” OR “sustainable urban” OR sustainab* OR “climate adaptation” OR resilience OR “low-carbon” OR circularity OR “circular economy”) AND (“community-scale” OR “community based” OR “community-based” OR “community-led” OR “neighbourhood-scale” OR “neighborhood-scale” OR participatory OR “co-production” OR “co-creation” OR “community participation” OR “community engagement”) AND (practice* OR intervention* OR strateg* OR initiative* OR implementation OR mechanism*))
Scopus	Applied limits	PUBYEAR > 2014 AND PUBYEAR < 2027 AND (LIMIT-TO (LANGUAGE, “English”)) AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, “ar”))
Web of Science Core Collection	Search field	Topic (TS)
Web of Science Core Collection	Final applied query	TS = ((“built environment” OR “urban environment” OR “urban space” OR “urban spaces” OR “public space” OR “public spaces” OR neighbourhood OR neighborhood OR “urban design” OR “urban regeneration” OR “neighbourhood regeneration” OR “neighborhood regeneration” OR “green infrastructure” OR “nature-based solution*” OR “urban public space”) AND (“urban sustainability” OR “sustainable urban” OR sustainab* OR “climate adaptation” OR resilience OR “low-carbon” OR circularity OR “circular economy”) AND (“community-scale” OR “community based” OR “community-based” OR “community-led” OR “neighbourhood-scale” OR “neighborhood-scale” OR participatory OR “co-production” OR “co-creation” OR “community participation” OR “community engagement”) AND (practice* OR intervention* OR strateg* OR initiative* OR implementation OR mechanism*))
Web of Science Core Collection	Applied filters	Publication years: 2015–2026; document type: article; language: English
Both databases	Final search and export date	13 June 2026

Note. The table reports the final applied database-specific search syntax. Quotation marks, truncation symbols, Boolean operators, field codes, and spelling variants are reproduced as applied. The four-concept search structure is detailed in Supplementary Table S1, while the relationship between the registered protocol and the final applied strategy is documented in Supplementary Table S1a. The asterisk (*) is a truncation wildcard used to retrieve multiple word endings.

reports the database fields, exact final applied queries, filters, and final search/export date. The underlying concept-block structure is documented in Supplementary Table S1.

The search procedure, applied filters, and export decisions were recorded in the screening workbook to support transparency and reproducibility. The final applied queries were checked against the registered OSF protocol. The databases, time frame, language restriction, document type, and four-concept search logic remained unchanged. Database-specific operational refinements included plural and spelling variants, closely related neighborhood and regeneration terms, and community-oriented implementation terms. These refinements improved retrieval sensitivity without changing the eligibility criteria, review scope, or analytical focus on spatial, social, and governance mechanisms. Supplementary Table S1a provides the complete protocol-alignment record.

2.4. Eligibility Criteria

Eligibility criteria were defined to retain studies that made a substantive contribution to understanding community-scale sustainable built-environment practices. Studies were included when they addressed a built-environment or urban spatial practice at the community, neighborhood, district, public-space, or comparable local scale; engaged with sustainability, climate adaptation, resilience, circularity, environmental performance, social sustainability, or livability; and provided enough evidence to identify at least one spatial, social, or governance mechanism.

Table 4. Inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Criterion	Inclusion	Exclusion
Publication type	Peer-reviewed journal article	Book chapter, editorial, conference-only paper, short note, research note, report, thesis, non-peer-reviewed material, or review article. Review articles were used only for background contextualization and citation checking
Language	English	Non-English
Time period	2015–2026	Before 2015 or after 2026
Spatial scope	Community, neighborhood, district, public-space, settlement, or local urban scale	No identifiable community/local spatial scale
Built environment relevance	Urban planning, architecture, public space, housing, settlement upgrading, green–blue infrastructure, mobility, circular neighborhood infrastructure, or urban regeneration	No substantive built-environment or spatial planning relevance
Sustainability relevance	Sustainability, climate adaptation, resilience, low-carbon transition, circularity, livability, health, social sustainability, or equity	No sustainability-related focus
Evidence type	Empirical study, participatory case study, framework, method, toolkit, survey/perception study, simulation, or model-based study with urban/community relevance	Insufficient evidence to chart mechanisms
Mechanism relevance	At least one identifiable spatial, social, or governance mechanism	No identifiable mechanism relevant to SSG coding

Note. Prepared by the authors based on the protocol-defined eligibility criteria.

presents the inclusion and exclusion criteria applied during screening and full-text eligibility assessment.

Studies were excluded when they were not peer-reviewed journal articles, were not in English, were outside the 2015–2026 period, were not located in the urban or built-environment domain, did not address a community-scale or local spatial mechanism, were purely rural without urban transferability, or did not provide sufficient empirical, conceptual, or methodological evidence for SSG coding.

2.5. Record Management and Screening

Database records were exported into a structured screening workbook. Metadata fields included authors, title, year, source title, DOI, DOI URL, open-access status, database source, suggested PDF name, retrieval status, full-text decision, exclusion reason, and notes. Duplicates and non-relevant records were removed before full-text retrieval. Full-text retrieval was attempted for all 146 reports that met the title-and-abstract screening criteria, irrespective of open-access status.

The database searches identified 3506 records in total, comprising 1856 records from Scopus and 1650 records from Web of Science. Records from both databases were consolidated in a structured screening workbook before screening. Duplicate removal was conducted before title-and-abstract screening by matching the DOI where available. For records without a DOI or with incomplete DOI information, duplicate status was checked using normalized title, author, publication year, and source-title information. When duplicate records referred to the same article, one record was retained for screening and the duplicate entry was removed. This process removed 1317 duplicate records and left 2189 unique records for title-and-abstract screening. After title-and-abstract screening, 146 reports were selected for full-text retrieval and eligibility assessment. This staged procedure ensured that the full-text corpus was derived from a transparent and reproducible screening process rather than from ad hoc selection. The 3506 records constituted the identification set rather than the analytical corpus. They included 1317 duplicate records and 2043 records that did not meet the title-and-abstract eligibility criteria; a further 15 reports were excluded after full-text assessment. Because the unit of analysis was the eligible full-text article, analyzing all identification records would combine duplicate and out-of-scope records with eligible evidence and would not permit reliable SSG coding. Accordingly, the size of the synthesis corpus was determined by the predefined eligibility process rather than by an a priori numerical target, consistent with the mapping purpose of a scoping review [32,34].

Screening was conducted using a structured screening workbook and the protocol-defined eligibility criteria. Initial title-and-abstract screening identified records for full-text retrieval, while full-text eligibility assessment determined final inclusion for SSG coding. Records that could not be decided confidently in the first pass were marked as uncertain and retained for conservative rechecking before final inclusion or exclusion. Full-text screening was conducted using a three-level decision structure:

• Include: The article met the eligibility criteria and provided sufficient evidence for SSG coding.
• Exclude: The article did not meet the scope, document type, intervention, scale, or built-environment relevance criteria.
• Uncertain: The article required rechecking because the fit was borderline or the evidence did not clearly support a full include or exclude decision.

All uncertain cases were subsequently rechecked against the same eligibility criteria and resolved before synthesis. This rechecking step was used as a consistency safeguard to ensure that borderline records were not included or excluded on the basis of a single-pass judgement. Inaccessible full texts were not coded as exclusions. They were recorded separately as full-text retrieval failures. The complete PRISMA-ScR study-selection process, from database identification to final inclusion, is visualized in Figure 1. This procedure created a traceable screening pathway from database retrieval to final inclusion. Records were not selected for narrative relevance after reading; rather, they moved through a staged eligibility process in which retrieval status, full-text decision, exclusion reason where applicable, and final inclusion status were recorded before SSG coding.

2.6. Full-Text Retrieval and Eligibility Outcome

The full-text retrieval pool consisted of 146 reports. Of these, 145 full texts were retrieved and assessed. One report could not be retrieved despite repeated access attempts and was retained as full text not retrieved. After full-text eligibility assessment and conservative rechecking of uncertain cases, 130 studies were included for SSG coding, 15 reports were excluded, and no uncertain records remained. Open-access status was recorded as a bibliographic characteristic but was not used as an inclusion or exclusion criterion. Of the 146 reports sought for retrieval, 145 (99.3%) were retrieved and assessed, while only one report (0.7%) remained unavailable after repeated access attempts. The selection process was, therefore, not restricted to open-access journals. Nevertheless, as with any database-based full-text review, residual bias associated with database coverage, language, publication type, and document accessibility cannot be completely excluded.

2.7. Data Charting

A structured data-charting form was developed to extract bibliographic, methodological, and analytical information from each included study. The charting process followed an iterative but controlled procedure. Initial fields were defined in the protocol; additional clarification fields were added only when needed to support transparent synthesis. The final charting fields covered bibliographic data, scale, evidence type, sustainability practice, intervention type, spatial mechanism, social mechanism, governance mechanism, mechanism notes, evidence confidence, and final thematic cluster. The spatial scale was coded from the principal spatial unit explicitly named and substantively analyzed in each full text. The registered protocol and data-charting form specified categorical urban-scale fields rather than the standardized physical-area or population measurements, and comparable numerical size data were not consistently available across the included studies. Accordingly, retrospective km², population, radius, or comparable physical-size thresholds were not imposed on the corpus. To provide a common scale ruler for cross-study synthesis, the existing spatial-scale categories were instead mapped onto a standardized ordinal measure of analytical extent: Level 1 represented a discrete site or street setting; Level 2 represented a local neighborhood or community unit; Level 3 represented a district or other multi-neighborhood sub-city unit; and Level 4 represented a citywide or multi-area urban analytical frame. Explicitly multi-scalar studies connecting a defined local intervention or evidence base with a wider urban system, strategy, or policy were designated as nested local-to-city configurations linking Level 2 (local) and Level 4 (urban/city). The ordinal ruler, therefore, standardizes relative analytical extent across heterogeneous planning systems without implying equivalent physical area or population size. For the aggregate spatial-scale reporting, the two study-level labels occupying Level 2—neighborhood and community—were combined into a single harmonized category, local neighborhood/community. This reduced the aggregate spatial-scale profile from six to five categories, while preserving the original study-level labels for auditability. Neighborhood and community, therefore, remain distinguishable in the study-level Supplementary Data, but contribute jointly to the Level 2 local category. The remaining categories correspond to Level 1 (public space/street), Level 3 (district), Level 4 (urban/city), and the explicitly multi-scalar nested local-to-city category linking Level 2 (local) and Level 4 (urban/city). At the study level, the source-facing spatial-scale labels were operationalized using mutually exclusive decision rules based on the principal spatial unit substantively analyzed in each article. Public space/street was used for a discrete public-realm site, street segment, or corridor. Neighborhood was assigned only when the principal analytical unit was a geographically bounded, named, or functionally coherent sub-city area. Community was assigned when the principal unit was a place-linked social, user, stakeholder, or service catchment that was not delimited as a neighborhood in this study. District was reserved for a formal or functional sub-city unit comprising multiple neighborhoods or local intervention areas, whereas urban/city was reserved for citywide or multi-area analyses in which a specific community-scale intervention, process, or mechanism remained identifiable. Studies that explicitly analyzed a defined local intervention together with a wider urban system, strategy, or policy were classified as nested local-to-city rather than as an intermediate physical-size category. Where more than one scale term appeared in the full text, the assignment followed the scale at which the intervention, evidence, and analytical claims were principally developed, so that each study contributed to one spatial-scale category only. The data-charting and codebook fields are summarized in Supplementary Table S6, and the completed study-level SSG coding matrix is provided in Supplementary Table S7.

2.8. Spatial–Social–Governance Coding Framework

The main analytical procedure was SSG coding. For the purpose of mutually exclusive cross-study aggregation, each included article was assigned one dominant thematic cluster and one dominant code within each SSG dimension. Dominance was used as a prioritization rule rather than as a claim of mechanism exclusivity. The selected code represented the mechanism most directly supported by the article’s stated aim, intervention or object of analysis, empirical material, analytical emphasis, and reported contribution. Where more than one mechanism appeared central, the coding decision was reconsidered during the second-pass review against the same criteria and the codebook.

This single-label strategy enabled each study to contribute once to each aggregate frequency distribution and prevented the same article from being counted repeatedly within a dimension. It also introduced an intentional analytical compression. The resulting frequencies represent the primary analytical emphasis assigned to each study; they do not represent every mechanism reported in the full text or the prevalence of those mechanisms in real-world practice. Mechanisms that were substantively present but not selected as dominant may, therefore, appear less frequently in the aggregate tables. This effect is particularly relevant to cross-cutting mechanisms—such as equity, stewardship, health and wellbeing, lived-experience evidence, partnership, and monitoring—that may operate alongside a more explicit primary intervention or governance emphasis.

Secondary mechanisms were retained in the study-level narrative notes in Supplementary Table S7 and were used to preserve contextual complexity during interpretation. They were not treated as standardized multi-label variables and were not added to the aggregate frequency tables. Consequently, low or zero values in the dominant-code tables and matrices should not be interpreted as evidence that the corresponding mechanism or relationship was absent from all underlying studies.

Table 5. Spatial–Social–Governance coding framework.

SSG Dimension	Canonical Definition
Spatial mechanism	The material, spatial, infrastructural, or environmental form through which a practice intervenes in or represents change in the built environment.
Social mechanism	The community-facing process through which a practice is interpreted, negotiated, experienced, accepted, used, or socially embedded.
Governance mechanism	The institutional, policy, organizational, or decision-making arrangement through which a practice is enabled, coordinated, implemented, monitored, maintained, or sustained.

Note. These definitions constitute the canonical SSG terminology used throughout this manuscript. Elsewhere, the shortened labels “spatial intervention”, “social embedding”, and “governance enablement” are used to avoid repetitive definition. Developed by the authors for this review and applied to the included full-text corpus.

provides the canonical definitions used for the three SSG dimensions throughout this manuscript.

2.9. Thematic Synthesis

The synthesis proceeded in three stages. First, included studies were grouped by dominant thematic cluster. This produced eight thematic categories: nature-based and green–blue infrastructure practices; housing, retrofit and settlement upgrading; neighborhood sustainability assessment and planning; public-space transformation and placemaking; digital tools, mapping, and monitoring; circular neighborhood infrastructures; streets, mobility, and walkability; and heritage-led regeneration.

Second, the dominant spatial, social, and governance codes were summarized descriptively. These distributions were constructed as mutually exclusive counts so that each study contributed once within each SSG dimension. They were interpreted as distributions of primary analytical emphasis rather than exhaustive mechanism-prevalence estimates. Secondary-mechanism notes informed the qualitative interpretation of clusters and representative studies but were not used to populate frequency tables or calculate co-occurrence rates. Third, a dominant spatial–social mechanism matrix was constructed to compare the primary pairings assigned to the included studies. The matrix and the governance distribution informed the development of the SSG framework by identifying recurring primary configurations. Accordingly, the framework organizes the most visible dominant-code patterns in the reviewed corpus; it does not constitute a complete network of all mechanisms reported across the 130 studies.

The synthesis was descriptive and interpretive rather than statistical. No meta-analysis was conducted because the included studies were heterogeneous in design, evidence type, intervention form, scale, and outcome reporting. This is consistent with the aim of a scoping review, which is to map the extent, range, and nature of the evidence and to clarify concepts and knowledge gaps.

2.10. Quality Appraisal and Evidence Confidence

Consistent with scoping review methodology, this study did not conduct formal risk-of-bias appraisal or intervention-effect assessment, because the review aimed to map the range, structure, and mechanisms of the evidence base rather than estimate comparative effectiveness [32,34]. Methodological relevance was instead addressed through evidence-type charting and an author-developed coding-confidence assessment, which indicated whether the spatial, social, and governance mechanisms were clearly identifiable from the full text.

High confidence was assigned when the article clearly described the intervention, context, community scale, and implementation mechanism. Medium confidence was assigned when the article was relevant, but one mechanism dimension was less explicit. Low confidence was reserved for borderline cases; these were rechecked before final inclusion or exclusion. No uncertain records remained in the final synthesis. The resulting confidence distribution is reported in Supplementary Table S8. Coding confidence assessed the clarity with which mechanism evidence could be identified in the full text. It was not an inter-rater reliability statistic, a test of alternative dominant-code assignments, or a sensitivity analysis of the single-label coding strategy. A high-confidence rating, therefore, indicates clear evidence for the assigned profile, not that other plausible secondary mechanisms were absent.

2.11. Methodological Transparency and Reproducibility

All screening decisions, retrieval outcomes, exclusion reasons, SSG codes, and synthesis categories were recorded in a structured screening and coding workbook. The workbook was organized to preserve a methodological audit trail from database retrieval to final synthesis. It included separate sheets for database export, duplicate removal, title-and-abstract screening, full-text retrieval, uncertain-case resolution, full-text eligibility decisions, PRISMA summary, SSG coding, codebook, thematic synthesis, mechanism matrix, and evidence profile. This structure ensured that each included study could be traced from its bibliographic record to final inclusion, thematic cluster, SSG mechanism codes and synthesis category.

The Supplementary Materials provide the corresponding external documentation for this process, including the search strategy and protocol-alignment note, the PRISMA-ScR checklist, the full screening and retrieval summary, the full included-studies list, the representative study-level evidence by thematic cluster, the excluded full-text reports with reasons, the SSG codebook, the study-level SSG coding matrix, the evidence-confidence summary, and the evidence-gap audit supporting RQ5. Together, the PRISMA flow diagram, Section 2, and Supplementary Materials document how the final corpus of 130 included studies was screened, coded, and synthesized.

3. Results

3.1. Search, Retrieval, and Full-Text Selection Outcome

The screening and eligibility process produced a final synthesis corpus of 130 included studies. These studies were not used as illustrative examples for a narrative review; each was entered into the SSG coding structure and assigned study-level values for evidence type, spatial scale, thematic cluster, spatial mechanism, social mechanism, governance mechanism, and coding confidence. The results reported below are derived from this coded evidence base. Unless otherwise stated, mechanism frequencies and cross-tabulations in the following sections refer to dominant codes. They describe the primary coded emphasis of the included studies and should not be read as counts of every mechanism mentioned or substantively present in the full texts. This section, therefore, moves from descriptive mapping to mechanism-based synthesis by reporting the evidence profile, scale distribution, thematic clusters, spatial–social mechanism matrix, and governance mechanism frequencies generated through SSG coding.

3.2. Profile of the Included Evidence Base

The included evidence base was strongly oriented towards applied, empirical, and participatory research. Empirical articles and mixed-evidence studies formed the largest group, followed by participatory case studies. Framework, toolkit, and method papers also formed a substantial part of the corpus, indicating that the field includes practice-oriented instruments, implementation methods, and decision-support approaches alongside evaluations of interventions. Survey and perception-based studies were also represented, while simulation or model-based studies were uncommon.

This distribution is important for interpreting this review. The evidence base does not represent the conventional technical intervention literature alone; it also includes studies in which participation, local perception, stakeholder negotiation, governance arrangements, and implementation tools form part of the analytical focus.

In the harmonized five-category spatial-scale profile, Level 2 local neighborhood/community studies formed the largest component of the corpus (n = 82, 63.1%). This aggregate category combines studies originally charted as neighborhood (n = 48) or community (n = 34), while retaining those original study-level labels in the supplementary audit trail. Urban/city studies accounted for 26 studies (20.0%), followed by nested local-to-city studies (n = 11, 8.5%), public-space/street studies (n = 7, 5.4%), and district studies (n = 4, 3.1%). The five-category harmonization was used to simplify cross-study comparison on the standardized spatial ruler and did not alter the underlying study-level eligibility or scale evidence.

Table 6. Evidence-type and operational spatial-scale profile of included studies.

Profile Dimension	Category	Standardized Spatial-Ruler Position	Operational Description	n	% of Included Studies
Evidence type	Empirical article/mixed evidence	—	—	43	33.1
Evidence type	Participatory case study	—	—	33	25.4
Evidence type	Framework/toolkit/method paper	—	—	23	17.7
Evidence type	Empirical case study	—	—	15	11.5
Evidence type	Survey/perception study	—	—	14	10.8
Evidence type	Simulation/model-based study	—	—	2	1.5
Evidence type subtotal		—		130	100.0
Spatial scale	Public space/street	Level 1—Site/street	A discrete public-realm setting such as a square, park, street segment, street corridor, or comparable local open-space intervention, with the principal analytical unit located at site, block, street-segment, or corridor level.	7	5.4
Spatial scale	Local neighborhood/community	Level 2—Local	A local-scale analytical unit represented in the source study either as a geographically bounded neighborhood or as a place-linked community, user, stakeholder, or service catchment. The two source-facing labels were combined for aggregate reporting because both occupy the same Level 2 position on the standardized spatial ruler; their original study-level classification remains separately traceable in the Supplementary Data.	82	63.1
Spatial scale	District	Level 3—District/sub-city	A formally designated or functionally coherent sub-city unit comprising multiple neighborhoods or local intervention areas. This category was used where the principal analytical unit remained below citywide scope.	4	3.1
Spatial scale	Urban/city	Level 4—Urban/city	Citywide or multi-area evidence retained only when the study contained an identifiable community-scale intervention, process, or mechanism. This category was used where the principal analytical frame was citywide or cross-area rather than a sub-city district.	26	20.0
Spatial scale	Nested local-to-city scale	Levels 2 and 4—Nested multi-scalar	An explicitly multi-scalar design connecting a defined local community intervention or evidence base with a wider urban system, strategy, or policy. This category denotes an analytical relationship between local and city scales rather than a broad or intermediate physical-size category.	11	8.5
Spatial-scale subtotal		—		130	100.0

Note. The evidence type and spatial scale represent two separate descriptive dimensions of the same 130-study corpus; each dimension, therefore, totals 130 studies independently. The spatial-scale classification originated from the principal spatial unit substantively analyzed in each full text. For aggregate reporting, the standardized spatial ruler comprises five categories: Level 1 = public space/street; Level 2 = local neighborhood/community; Level 3 = district/sub-city; Level 4 = urban/city; and nested local-to-city = an explicitly multi-scalar configuration linking Level 2 (local) and Level 4 (urban/city). The original neighborhood and community study-level labels were combined within Level 2 because both represent the local analytical extent of the harmonized ruler, while their original classification remains traceable in the supplementary study-level data. Nested local-to-city denotes an explicitly multi-scalar analytical design and is not an intermediate physical-size category. The ruler is ordinal and should not be interpreted as a km², population, or other universal physical-size threshold, because comparable numerical size data were not consistently reported across the included studies. The percentages may not sum exactly to 100.0 because of rounding.

consolidates the evidence-type profile and the harmonized operational spatial-scale profile of the included studies.

Overall, the evidence profile indicates that community-scale sustainability in the built environment is not primarily represented as a single project type. Rather, it appears as a field of spatially situated practices in which technical, ecological, social, and governance dimensions are combined at different scales of urban action.

3.3. Thematic Distribution of Community-Scale Sustainable Built-Environment Practices

The thematic synthesis identified eight major clusters of community-scale sustainable built-environment practices. These clusters do not represent mutually isolated domains. Instead, they indicate the dominant entry point through which each study approached community-scale sustainability. Figure 2 visualizes the thematic distribution of the 130 included studies across the eight clusters identified through SSG coding.

Figure 2 shows that the evidence base is not evenly distributed across practice families. More than half of the included studies are concentrated in nature-based and green–blue infrastructure, while housing, retrofit, and settlement upgrading form a substantial second cluster. The remaining categories are smaller but analytically important because they extend the field toward assessment tools, public-space transformation, digital evidence systems, circular neighborhood infrastructures, mobility, and heritage-led regeneration.

The largest cluster was nature-based and green–blue infrastructure practices, accounting for 67 of the 130 included studies. Within the reviewed corpus, community-scale sustainability was most frequently framed through urban greening, nature-based solutions, blue–green infrastructure, urban heat mitigation, flood adaptation, coastal resilience, stormwater management, and local environmental stewardship. These studies typically connected spatial interventions to participation, risk awareness, perception, co-design, or local stewardship, rather than treating green infrastructure as a purely ecological or engineering solution.

The second-largest cluster was housing, retrofit, and settlement upgrading, with 28 studies. This cluster included social housing renovation, neighborhood retrofit, district-scale energy renovation, informal settlement upgrading, slum settlement management, and housing-related livability interventions. These studies were especially important because they linked the built environment to vulnerability, health, access, affordability, institutional support, and everyday quality of life.

Neighborhood sustainability assessment and planning formed the third cluster, with 12 studies. These studies developed or applied assessment tools, planning indicators, suitability analyses, GIS-supported evaluation methods, or decision-support frameworks. Their contribution lies less in direct physical intervention and more in structuring how neighborhood-scale sustainability is measured, prioritized, and translated into local planning decisions.

Public-space transformation and placemaking accounted for 10 studies. These studies focused on tactical urbanism, temporary public-space transformation, placemaking, heat adaptation, participatory design, public-space safety, accessibility, and everyday social use. These studies frequently represented relatively small-scale spatial changes as relevant to how public spaces are occupied, perceived, and governed.

Digital tools, mapping, and monitoring formed a smaller but analytically important cluster of five studies. These studies used crowd mapping, participatory digital mapping, vulnerability mapping, spatial data, digital monitoring, or immersive tools to generate community-relevant evidence. Their significance lies in the way they translate lived experience and spatial perception into data that can inform governance and design.

Circular neighborhood infrastructures accounted for four studies and included local circularity, food systems, circular hubs, and neighborhood resource loops. Streets, mobility, and walkability accounted for three studies, while heritage-led regeneration appeared as one study. Although smaller in number, these clusters broaden the corpus towards mobility justice, low-traffic environments, cultural heritage, temporary reuse, and everyday public-space activation.

Table 7. Thematic synthesis of included studies.

Theme	n	%	Dominant Spatial Logic	Dominant Social Logic	Dominant Governance Logic
Nature-based and green–blue infrastructure practices	67	51.5	NbS, urban greening, blue–green infrastructure, flood/heat/coastal adaptation	Participation, perception, risk awareness, stewardship	Municipal climate adaptation, local implementation, monitoring
Housing, retrofit, and settlement upgrading	28	21.5	Retrofit, housing renovation, informal settlement upgrading	Resident needs, equity, health, livability	District renovation governance, retrofit policy, community-led upgrading
Neighbourhood sustainability assessment and planning	12	9.2	GIS, planning indicators, suitability analysis	Participation, satisfaction, social sustainability	Decision support, assessment criteria, planning frameworks
Public-space transformation and placemaking	10	7.7	Tactical change, public-space redesign, heat adaptation, placemaking	Inclusion, safety, accessibility, belonging	Co-design, municipal support, living-lab implementation
Digital tools, mapping, and monitoring	5	3.8	Crowd mapping, digital monitoring, spatial intelligence	Lived-experience data, perception, marginalized voices	Data-informed governance and monitoring
Circular neighbourhood infrastructures	4	3.1	Circular hubs, food systems, reuse infrastructure	Local value creation, everyday practice change	Circular economy governance and partnerships
Streets, mobility, and walkability	3	2.3	Street transformation, walkability, mobility access	Safety, acceptance, lived experience	Transport policy and institutional coordination
Heritage-led regeneration	1	0.8	Historic public-space reuse and temporary greening	Collective responsibility and cultural activation	Stakeholder collaboration and municipal transition management
Total	130	100.0

Note. The authors’ synthesis, based on thematic clustering and SSG coding of the included studies.

summarizes the thematic synthesis of the included studies.

Article-level traceability is retained in Supplementary Table S4a, which presents representative included studies for each thematic cluster and summarizes how they support the thematic interpretation. The complete list of all 130 included studies is provided in Supplementary Table S4, while the full study-level SSG coding matrix is provided in Supplementary Table S7.

3.4. Spatial Mechanisms

At the level of dominant coding, the corpus was distributed across eight primary spatial-mechanism categories. Green–blue infrastructure and nature-based spatial intervention was the most frequent dominant spatial code. This mechanism appeared across studies addressing climate adaptation, flood risk, heat mitigation, stormwater management, ecological restoration, urban greening, and community stewardship. Its prominence suggests that, in the recent literature, ecological infrastructure is increasingly treated as a socio-spatial system rather than as a purely environmental asset.

The second major spatial mechanism was housing, building, settlement upgrading, or retrofit. These studies foregrounded the material conditions of everyday living: housing quality, energy performance, accessibility, informal settlement infrastructure, social housing renewal, and district-scale renovation. The spatial mechanism here is not only technical retrofit but also the reconfiguration of housing and settlement environments in ways that affect health, vulnerability, social inclusion, and long-term livability.

Neighborhood-scale spatial planning and assessment formed a third mechanism. These studies did not always implement physical change directly, but they provided the spatial intelligence through which community-scale sustainability can be diagnosed and prioritized. They typically relied on mapping, indicators, planning criteria, or decision-support tools.

Public-space transformation and placemaking formed a fourth mechanism, involving tactical or designed changes to squares, streets, parks, open spaces, and everyday gathering places. These studies described relatively small spatial modifications in relation to broader sustainability aims, commonly alongside social embedding and institutional support.

The remaining spatial mechanisms were digital spatial assessment and monitoring, circular neighborhood infrastructure, street and walkability intervention, and heritage-led regeneration. These were smaller in frequency but important for expanding the field beyond ecological or housing-led interventions.

3.5. Social Mechanisms

Participation, co-design, and community engagement were the most frequent primary social emphases in the dominant-code distribution. This frequency does not indicate that participation was the only social mechanism in these studies or that secondary mechanisms such as equity, perception, wellbeing, or stewardship were absent. This mechanism appeared across all major spatial clusters and was particularly visible in nature-based infrastructure, housing/upgrading, and public-space transformation studies. Participation was not treated merely as consultation. In studies with more explicitly developed participatory designs, participation was described as supporting needs identification, co-production of knowledge, shared prioritization, acceptance building, capacity development, stewardship, or community ownership.

Community social sustainability and social cohesion formed a second major mechanism. These studies emphasized belonging, trust, local identity, livability, everyday interaction, and social support. This mechanism was particularly visible in neighborhood planning, housing/upgrading, circular infrastructure, and community-based initiatives.

Health, wellbeing, and age-inclusive social sustainability formed a third mechanism. Studies in this group connected spatial interventions to thermal comfort, aging, accessibility, safety, physical activity, health risk reduction, or wellbeing. This mechanism is analytically significant because the reviewed studies linked sustainability to everyday bodily and social experience.

Perception, acceptance, and lived-experience evidence formed a fourth mechanism. These studies used surveys, interviews, mapping, crowd-sourced data, or participatory evaluation to reveal how residents experience environmental risk, public-space quality, urban safety, green infrastructure, mobility or retrofit proposals. This mechanism is especially relevant to the synthesis because the reviewed studies frequently treated perceived legitimacy and local meaning as additional evaluative dimensions alongside technical performance.

Equity, inclusion, and vulnerable-group support formed a fifth mechanism. These studies addressed gender, aging, disability, low-income communities, informal settlement residents, climate-vulnerable groups, or marginalized publics. Finally, resilience, adaptation, and community preparedness appeared as a narrower but important mechanism in climate-risk and disaster-oriented studies.

Table 8. Spatial–social mechanism matrix.

Spatial Mechanism	Participation, Co-Design, and Engagement	Social Cohesion	Health and Wellbeing	Perception and Lived Experience	Equity and Inclusion	Resilience and Preparedness
Green–blue infrastructure and nature-based intervention	41	8	3	8	5	2
Housing/building/settlement upgrading or retrofit	15	4	4	2	3	0
Neighborhood-scale planning/assessment	7	2	2	0	0	1
Public-space transformation/placemaking	7	2	0	0	1	0
Digital spatial assessment/mapping/monitoring	3	2	0	0	0	0
Circular neighborhood infrastructure/hub	1	2	1	0	0	0
Street, mobility, and walkability intervention	2	0	0	0	1	0
Heritage-led urban regeneration	0	0	1	0	0	0

Note. Matrix values indicate the number of included studies assigned to each dominant spatial–social code pairing. Each study contributes to one matrix cell only. The matrix is, therefore, a mutually exclusive summary of primary analytical emphases, not a multi-label co-occurrence network or a count of every spatial–social relationship reported in the full texts. Low or zero cell values do not establish that a relationship was absent from the underlying studies, because secondary mechanisms were retained in narrative study-level notes rather than counted in the matrix. Full study-level dominant codes and secondary-mechanism notes are reported in Supplementary Table S7.

cross-tabulates the dominant spatial and dominant social codes to show the most frequent primary pairings within the coded corpus.

Within the dominant-coded corpus, the most frequent primary spatial–social pairing was green–blue infrastructure and participatory engagement (n = 41). The next most frequent pairing was housing or settlement upgrading and participation (n = 15), while public-space transformation and participation occurred as the dominant pairing in seven studies. These values identify recurring primary emphases in the included literature; they do not measure the strength, completeness, or real-world prevalence of the corresponding relationships. Because each article was placed in one matrix cell, studies containing several spatial or social mechanisms were necessarily compressed into a single pairing. Sparse cells may, therefore, reflect the coding rule, as well as the distribution of emphases in the literature. The matrix was used to support comparative interpretation and framework construction, not to infer exclusive or causal mechanism relationships.

3.6. Governance Mechanisms

Governance coding classified the primary institutional or organizational emphasis assigned to each study. Municipal planning, policy, and governance was the most frequent dominant governance code, assigned to 79 studies. This count indicates the prominence of municipal and policy framing as the primary governance emphasis; it does not imply that partnership, community stewardship, monitoring, or other governance arrangements were absent from the same studies. Within the reviewed corpus, this distribution indicates that community-scale practices were commonly framed through institutional, as well as local arrangements. Municipal planning, public policy, zoning, funding, climate-adaptation strategies, regeneration programs, and local-government coordination were frequently reported as primary or secondary governance conditions.

Local implementation and institutional support formed the second governance mechanism, appearing in 26 studies. These studies highlighted the importance of institutional capacity, implementation support, local intermediaries, municipal departments, community organizations, project teams, and technical assistance.

Data-informed decision support and monitoring appeared in 11 studies. This governance pathway linked spatial indicators, mapping, digital platforms, monitoring tools, and community-generated evidence with planning action in the reviewed studies. The pattern suggests an association between community-scale sustainability research and the production of usable evidence for decision-making; it does not establish such evidence as a necessary condition.

Stakeholder partnership and living-lab governance appeared in 10 studies. These studies typically involved universities, municipalities, local authorities, NGOs, professional actors, residents, technical experts, or project consortia working together through experimental or co-productive governance formats. Finally, community-led stewardship and ownership appeared in four studies. Although smaller as a dominant category, this mechanism is analytically relevant because it records instances in which local communities were described as moving from participation towards ownership, maintenance, monitoring, or self-organization.

Table 9. Governance mechanism frequency.

Governance Mechanism	n	% of Included Studies
Municipal planning, policy, and governance mechanism	79	60.8
Local implementation/institutional support	26	20.0
Data-informed decision support/monitoring	11	8.5
Stakeholder partnership/living-lab governance	10	7.7
Community-led stewardship and ownership	4	3.1
Total	130	100.0

Note. Frequencies report one dominant governance code per included study and, therefore, sum to 130 by design. They represent the principal governance emphasis assigned during coding rather than all governance arrangements described in each article. Secondary governance mechanisms were retained in the study-level notes in Supplementary Table S7 and were not added to these counts. Smaller dominant categories should, therefore, not be interpreted as evidence that the corresponding mechanisms were rare or absent in the wider set of practices.

summarizes the frequency of dominant governance mechanisms across the included studies.

At the level of dominant coding, the governance profile is concentrated in municipal planning, policy, and institutional implementation categories. This indicates that the primary governance framing of the reviewed articles is predominantly institutionally anchored. It does not establish that community-led, partnership-based, or data-informed arrangements were unimportant; these arrangements may appear as secondary components in studies assigned to a different dominant governance category. The distribution should, therefore, be interpreted as a map of the literature’s principal governance emphases rather than as a complete inventory of governance relations in community-scale practice.

3.7. Spatial–Social–Governance Mechanism Framework

The synthesis yielded a review-specific Spatial–Social–Governance mechanism framework for organizing dominant codes and mechanism bundles across the eligible corpus. The framework does not constitute an independently validated theory and does not imply that spatial, social, and governance dimensions originated in this review. Its empirical basis is the coded distribution and combination of dominant mechanisms in the 130 included studies. The framework is organized around three analytical statements.

Because the aggregate synthesis was based on one dominant code per SSG dimension, the framework foregrounds recurring primary configurations in the corpus. It does not reproduce the complete internal complexity of each intervention or every secondary relationship documented in the study-level notes. Secondary-mechanism notes informed the interpretation and naming of the mechanism bundles, but they were not converted into a standardized multi-label matrix. The resulting framework should, therefore, be understood as a parsimonious comparative structure shaped by the dominant-code strategy, rather than as an exhaustive relational model of all mechanisms present in the reviewed studies.

Figure 3 organizes the coded evidence into three linked analytical positions already defined in Section 2.8 and Table 5: spatial intervention, social embedding, and governance enablement. This section, therefore, focuses on how these positions are combined within the synthesis rather than redefining the dimensions. The figure summarizes the relationships represented in the reviewed corpus and should be interpreted together with the coding definitions and decision rules reported in the Section 2.

Figure 3 presents an interpretive synthesis of how the reviewed studies connect spatial intervention, social embedding, and governance enablement. The framework does not demonstrate that the simultaneous presence of all three dimensions produces stronger sustainability outcomes. Instead, it provides a heuristic for examining whether and how these dimensions are represented and related within a reported or proposed intervention. The potential weaknesses associated with spatial intervention without social embedding, social mobilization without material change, or governance support without local participation should, therefore, be read as analytical prompts derived from recurring concerns in the literature, not as causal effects tested by this review.

3.8. Synthesis Statement

Across the included studies, the dominant SSG codes can be organized into recurring mechanism bundles rather than treated only as isolated intervention categories. The most frequent coded configuration combined green–blue or nature-based spatial intervention, participatory engagement, and municipal or institutional governance. Other recurring configurations connected housing or settlement upgrading with resident needs and implementation support, and neighborhood assessment tools with lived-experience evidence and planning decision support. These configurations summarize primary analytical emphases within the reviewed corpus; they do not establish that the bundles are complete, superior, or causally effective.

Table 10. The mechanism-bundle typology and associated enabling conditions in the reviewed corpus.

Mechanism Bundle	Main Spatial Mechanism	Main Social Mechanism	Main Governance Mechanism	Enabling Conditions Associated with the Bundle in the Reviewed Studies
Green–blue participatory adaptation bundle	Green–blue infrastructure and nature-based intervention.	Participation, co-design, perception, stewardship, or risk awareness.	Municipal climate adaptation, local implementation, or monitoring.	Reported alongside community engagement, local perception, stewardship capacity, and municipal implementation or monitoring.
Housing and settlement upgrading bundle	Housing retrofit, district renovation, or settlement upgrading.	Resident needs, equity, health, wellbeing, or livability.	District renovation governance, retrofit policy, or community-led upgrading.	Reported alongside attention to everyday vulnerability, affordability, habitability, institutional support, and resident participation.
Public-space and lived-experience bundle	Public-space transformation, tactical urbanism, or placemaking.	Safety, accessibility, inclusion, belonging, or lived-experience evidence.	Co-design, municipal support, or living-lab implementation.	Reported alongside user-experience evidence, inclusive participation, and arrangements for maintenance or adaptation.
Evidence-to-planning bundle	Neighborhood assessment, GIS, digital mapping, or monitoring.	Lived-experience data, perception, or community-generated evidence.	Data-informed decision support, planning frameworks, or monitoring.	Reported where community-scale evidence was connected to planning decisions, prioritization, monitoring, or institutional learning.
Circular and stewardship-oriented bundle	Circular hubs, reuse infrastructure, food systems, or heritage/public-space reuse.	Local value creation, everyday practice change, or collective responsibility.	Partnership, community stewardship, or municipal transition management.	Reported alongside stewardship, local organizational capacity, maintenance resources, and cross-sector coordination.

Note. The typology is interpretive and based on dominant SSG codes, secondary-mechanism notes, and representative study-level evidence. The associated conditions indicate recurring relationships reported in the reviewed corpus; they are not tested moderators or determinants of the intervention outcomes and do not rank comparative effectiveness.

presents the resulting typology and the enabling conditions most commonly associated with each bundle in the included studies.

Table 10 indicates that the reviewed articles frequently described spatial change together with social and governance conditions. This pattern supports an interpretive shift from cataloguing intervention objects towards comparing how studies frame intervention, participation, and implementation. It does not demonstrate that community-scale sustainability is produced only through SSG alignment or that more closely aligned bundles are more effective. Such propositions require outcome-based comparative or longitudinal testing.

4. Discussion

4.1. From a Catalogue of Practices to a Mechanism-Based Interpretation

The Results established the distribution of practice families and dominant SSG codes; the central interpretive question is, therefore, not which category is numerically largest, but whether heterogeneous practices can be compared through a common mechanism logic. Across otherwise distinct domains, the reviewed studies frequently represented material or spatial intervention alongside community-facing processes and institutional arrangements. This pattern supports the use of mechanism bundles as a cross-domain comparison lens, while not implying causal equivalence or comparative effectiveness.

From a planning-theory perspective, participation and co-design should not be treated as self-validating indicators of social embedding. Collaborative planning foregrounds dialogue, knowledge exchange, and institutional capacity, but the just-city tradition cautions that procedurally inclusive processes may still generate or preserve unequal outcomes [26,28]. The frequency of participation in the reviewed corpus, therefore, raises questions about who enters the process, whose knowledge becomes authoritative, how disagreement is handled, and whether participation changes material priorities or primarily legitimizes decisions defined elsewhere.

Accordingly, SSG functions as a first-order structure for organizing evidence across intervention families. Its value lies in making comparable questions visible—what changes spatially, how communities are engaged or affected, and how implementation is enabled—while broader planning and justice theories remain necessary for assessing the quality, power relations, and consequences of those processes.

4.2. The Community Scale as an Operational Scale of Urban Sustainability

Community and neighborhood scales are analytically important because they connect everyday spatial conditions with wider planning and governance processes. Locally experienced issues, such as access, heat exposure, housing quality, public-space safety, maintenance, and stewardship, are addressed through arrangements that commonly extend beyond the immediate intervention site.

The community scale should not, however, be treated as a politically neutral or self-contained spatial container. Urban political ecology interprets environmental change as a socio-natural process shaped by power and by the politics of scale, while the spatial-justice scholarship emphasizes that injustice is produced and reproduced through spatial arrangements [27,30]. Relevant questions, therefore, include who gains access, who bears financial or displacement-related costs, which territories receive investment, and how local projects are connected to citywide land, infrastructure, and fiscal decisions.

Within the reviewed corpus, community scale should consequently be understood as an operational and relational level rather than as evidence that local-scale approaches are inherently more effective. Its analytical relevance lies in making visible the translation between lived experience and formal planning, while the consequences of intervention remain connected to wider institutional and territorial relations.

4.3. Nature-Based and Green–Blue Infrastructure as the Dominant Practice Family

The analytical significance of the nature-based and the green–blue infrastructure literature lies not in its numerical predominance, which is already reported in the Section 3, but in the way it commonly brings ecological intervention, participation, stewardship, justice, and municipal implementation into the same analytical field. The dominant-code matrix suggests that participatory framing is particularly visible in this practice family, but it does not establish that participation causes effectiveness or that relevant social mechanisms are absent where they were not selected as dominant. This interpretation is consistent with work on co-creation, governance, and environmental justice in nature-based solutions [20,23,36,37,38].

The cluster’s prominence should also be read partly as a feature of contemporary research agendas and indexing vocabularies. Practices framed through maintenance, repair, informality, circularity, cultural continuity, or heritage may be less visible because they are named and documented differently. The size of the cluster, therefore, supports analysis of how ecological interventions are represented in the indexed literature, but it does not establish their substantive priority over less consistently labelled practices.

4.4. Housing, Retrofit, and Settlement Upgrading as Socially Embedded Sustainability Practice

The housing and upgrading literature is analytically important because it locates sustainability within ordinary conditions of dwelling, affordability, energy burden, accessibility, and maintenance. The interpretive point is not the size or internal composition of the cluster, but the recurring association of technical intervention with resident vulnerability, institutional support, and local implementation capacity [12,39,40,41,42,43].

This pattern broadens built-environment sustainability beyond environmental performance and indicates why retrofit and upgrading cannot be assessed solely through physical outputs. At the same time, the heterogeneity of study designs and the limited availability of longitudinal outcome evidence prevent causal conclusions about which social or governance factors determine implementation quality or long-term results.

4.5. Public Space, Safety, and Lived-Experience Evidence

Public-space and digital-evidence studies are relevant less because they constitute separate practice clusters than because they expose the difference between formally designed space, and lived spatial experience. Safety, accessibility, belonging, and exclusion become analytically visible when user-generated and perception-based evidence is treated as part of spatial assessment [14,44,45].

Within the SSG structure, lived-experience evidence is, therefore, both a social mechanism and an evidence source, not proof of intervention success. Its value lies in revealing evaluative dimensions that technical indicators and formal policy measures may overlook, while questions concerning representation, digital access, data bias, and institutional uptake remain unresolved.

4.6. Governance as the Enabling Condition of Community-Scale Practice

The governance distribution is interpreted here not by restating category frequencies but by examining what institutional prominence means. The visibility of municipal and institutional codes indicates that many studies framed community-scale action through formal planning, delivery, and coordination arrangements.

Urban governance theory complicates a simple interpretation of this institutional prominence. Governance concerns not only the presence of local government but the configurations through which actors, resources, interests, and policy priorities are coordinated [29]. Municipal involvement may encompass managerial delivery, welfare-oriented provision, growth-oriented coalitions, or partnership arrangements whose democratic and distributional consequences are not equivalent. Stakeholder partnership should likewise not be equated automatically with shared authority. Critical interpretation requires attention to agenda-setting, resource control, accountability, conflict, and the capacity of community actors to influence decisions rather than merely participate in them.

The limited number of studies assigning community stewardship or ownership as the dominant governance code should, therefore, be interpreted as limited visibility as a primary analytical emphasis, not as evidence that community ownership is inherently marginal or unsustainable. The corpus identifies hybrid combinations of municipal support, institutional continuity and community agency as one recurring governance configuration rather than endorsing a universal governance model.

4.7. The Conceptual Positioning and Bounded Contribution of the SSG Framework

The SSG framework requires positioning in relation to established integrative approaches in sustainability research. Its three dimensions have clear antecedents: social–ecological systems research connects resources, users, governance arrangements, and outcomes; urban social–ecological–technological systems research examines interdependent social, ecological, and technological components; the multi-level perspective explains long-term socio-technical change through interactions among niches, regimes, and landscapes; and the Connecting Nature Framework structures the planning, delivery, and stewardship of urban nature-based solutions [5,20,31,46,47]. The SSG framework does not replace these approaches.

Table 11. Positioning of the review-derived SSG framework in relation to established conceptual frameworks.

Framework	Principal Analytical Object	Core Analytical Logic	Primary Purpose	Relationship to and Distinction from SSG
Social–Ecological systems framework [47]	Resource systems, resource units, governance systems, users, interactions, and outcomes.	Diagnostic analysis of the institutional and ecological conditions associated with system sustainability.	To identify variables and action situations influencing the sustainability of coupled social–ecological systems.	Shares attention to social and governance relations, but offers substantially greater institutional and resource-system diagnostic depth. SSG places the material built-environment intervention more explicitly at the center and is used for cross-study review coding rather than full system diagnosis.
Urban Social–Ecological–Technological systems framework [5,46]	Interdependent social, ecological and technological components of urban systems.	Cross-system interactions, feedbacks, resilience, multifunctionality, and scale.	To understand urban systems and ecosystem services as coupled and interdependent systems.	Provides a broader urban-system ontology. SSG is narrower: it codes how a reported built-environment practice is spatially configured, socially embedded, and institutionally enabled. Its spatial dimension is not equivalent to the technological subsystem in SETS.
Multi-Level perspective on socio-technical transitions [31]	Socio-technical systems and long-term transformation processes.	Interaction among niche innovations, socio-technical regimes, and the wider landscape over time.	To explain how major system transitions emerge, accelerate, or become stabilized.	SSG does not model temporal transition pathways, niche–regime dynamics or landscape pressures. It provides a cross-sectional comparison of community-scale practices represented in the reviewed literature.
Connecting Nature Framework [20]	Nature-based-solution projects and implementation processes.	Iterative planning, delivery, governance, financing, monitoring, and stewardship.	To guide the mainstreaming and implementation of urban nature-based solutions.	Offers a richer and more prescriptive implementation process but is domain-specific. SSG is less operationally detailed but can be applied across nature-based solutions, housing, retrofit, public space, digital tools, circular infrastructure, mobility, and regeneration.
Review-derived SSG framework developed in this study	Community-scale sustainable built-environment practices represented in eligible full-text studies.	Comparison of spatial intervention, social embedding, and governance enablement through dominant codes, secondary notes, and mechanism bundles.	To organize and compare a heterogeneous review corpus through a common built-environment mechanism structure.	Its contribution is integrative and methodological: it provides cross-domain comparability, an explicit spatial-intervention axis and a traceable study-level coding structure. It is not proposed as a comprehensive urban-system ontology, transition theory, institutional diagnostic framework, or implementation manual.

Note. The comparison distinguishes the analytical purpose and scope rather than ranking the frameworks. Prepared by the authors based on the social–ecological systems framework, urban SETS research, the multi-level perspective, and the Connecting Nature Framework [5,20,31,46,47].

clarifies the different analytical objects, explanatory purposes, and scopes of these frameworks.

Taken together, these theoretical debates identify four limits and extensions of the SSG framework. First, planning theory distinguishes procedural inclusion from substantive planning outcomes; social embedding should, therefore, not be reduced to the presence or frequency of participation. Second, urban governance distinguishes institutional coordination from democratic control; governance enablement does not by itself indicate accountability, redistribution, or community power. Third, political ecology and spatial-justice approaches show that spatial interventions redistribute environmental goods, risks, visibility, and investment across groups and territories; the spatial dimension must, therefore, be read through power and distribution rather than material form alone. Fourth, transition theory introduces temporality, path dependence, and multi-level change; a cross-sectional SSG profile cannot establish whether a local intervention challenges, reproduces, or becomes incorporated into an existing socio-technical regime [26,27,28,29,30,31].

These theoretical lenses do not require expanding SSG into a comprehensive theory. Instead, they specify the second-order questions that should accompany its first-order mapping function: Who participates and with what influence? Who receives benefits and who bears costs? Which institutions control resources, implementation, and accountability? At what spatial and temporal scales does change occur? Used in this way, SSG provides a structured description of the relationships represented in the reviewed corpus, while planning, governance, political-ecology, justice, and transition theories provide explanation, critique, and normative evaluation.

The comparison indicates that the defensible contribution of SSG lies neither in the invention of three previously unrecognized dimensions nor in the replacement of established sustainability theories. Its narrower contribution consists of three elements. First, it makes the material or spatial form of built-environment intervention an explicit coding axis. Second, it applies the same comparison logic across intervention families that are normally reviewed separately. Third, it links aggregate mechanism bundles to a study-level audit trail in which dominant and secondary mechanisms remain traceable.

These advantages are accompanied by clear limits. SSG does not provide the systems depth of SETS, the institutional diagnostic granularity of the SES framework, the temporal explanation of the multi-level perspective, or the implementation specificity of the Connecting Nature Framework. It should, therefore, be treated as a review-specific heuristic and comparison instrument whose usefulness requires further testing through multi-label coding, comparative application, and empirical validation in different urban and governance contexts.

4.8. Implications for Planning, Policy, and Practice

The findings offer provisional planning and policy prompts rather than validated prescriptions. The SSG framework may be used as a heuristic for examining whether a proposed or reported intervention addresses a material or spatial component, community-facing processes, and implementation or governance arrangements. Such use should remain diagnostic because this review does not demonstrate that the presence or alignment of all three dimensions causes better outcomes.

Rather than restating each mechanism bundle, practical appraisal can be organized around four questions: What spatial or material change is proposed? Whose knowledge, needs and experience shape the intervention? Which actors control resources, decisions, delivery and monitoring? How will maintenance, adaptation, and institutional continuity be addressed? These questions translate the synthesis into an evaluative prompt without treating the reviewed associations as tested determinants of performance.

Equity should similarly not be treated merely as an additional outcome. Just-city and spatial-justice perspectives require separate consideration of who participates and exercises influence, how benefits and burdens are distributed, and whose needs and identities are recognized [27,28]. Urban political ecology adds questions concerning displacement, land-value change, and the rescaling of environmental benefits and risks beyond the immediate project boundary [30]. These constitute normative and critical extensions of the SSG synthesis, not effects established by the descriptive review.

4.9. Limitations and Future Research

In relation to the fifth review question, the synthesis also identifies several evidence gaps concerning assessment depth, transferability, long-term monitoring, and post-implementation performance. These gaps were identified through a cross-study interpretive audit of evidence type, study-level mechanism notes, and coding-confidence records, rather than through standardized binary gap variables; the audit logic and representative Study IDs are reported in Supplementary Table S9. This review has limitations that should be acknowledged. The synthesis is based on the final retrieved and assessed full-text corpus. One report could not be retrieved despite repeated access attempts and was, therefore, not assessed substantively. Under the final handling documented in Protocol Timing and Amendments Section and Supplementary Table S1a, this record was treated as a retrieval failure rather than as a content-based exclusion. This review also focused on the English-language peer-reviewed journal literature indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. This improves transparency and reproducibility but may underrepresent local reports, municipal documents, community-produced evidence, and the grey literature, where many community-scale practices are documented.

The final set of 130 studies should, therefore, be understood as the eligible full-text synthesis corpus generated by the predefined review procedure, not as a statistical sample selected from 3506 otherwise comparable studies. The identification set contained duplicate and out-of-scope records that could not validly serve as SSG analytical units. Including these records in the mechanism analysis would have introduced non-eligible evidence and reduced methodological validity. Although the near-complete full-text retrieval rate reduces concern about access-related selection, the corpus may still underrepresent studies published outside Scopus and Web of Science, the non-English evidence, the grey literature, and practices described through alternative disciplinary vocabularies.

A second limitation concerns the use of one dominant spatial, social, and governance code for each study. This strategy established a consistent denominator, prevented repeated counting of the same article within a dimension and enabled comparison across a highly heterogeneous corpus. Its principal trade-off is analytical compression: complex interventions containing several interacting mechanisms were represented by the mechanism judged most central to the article’s aim, evidence, and contribution. The aggregate frequencies should, therefore, be interpreted as distributions of primary analytical emphasis, not as exhaustive counts of mechanism presence.

This compression may influence the synthesis in several ways. Broad or explicitly stated mechanisms may be more likely to receive dominant status, while cross-cutting mechanisms, such as equity, stewardship, health, lived experience, partnership, or monitoring, may be underrepresented when they operate as secondary components. Similarly, sparse or zero cells in the spatial–social matrix may result partly from the requirement that each study occupy only one cell. Because the SSG framework was developed from these dominant distributions, it necessarily foregrounds recurring primary configurations and simplifies the more extensive relational complexity contained within individual studies.

Secondary mechanisms were retained in the study-level narrative notes to reduce information loss and support interpretive reading. However, these notes were not coded as a standardized set of binary multi-label variables. They, therefore, cannot be converted retrospectively into valid secondary-mechanism frequencies without re-examining and recoding all 130 studies under explicit multi-label decision rules. An ad hoc keyword count of the narrative notes would produce inconsistent and non-comparable results and was not undertaken. Future extensions should conduct pre-specified multi-label or relational coding, report both dominant and secondary mechanism distributions, and compare whether the resulting network materially changes the prominence of mechanism categories or the structure of the SSG framework.

A further limitation concerns uneven thematic representation in the corpus. Circular neighborhood infrastructures, heritage-led regeneration, and informality-oriented practices were less visible than nature-based and green–blue infrastructure studies. This should not be read as evidence that these domains are marginal to community-scale sustainability. The findings should, therefore, be generalized to the wider community-scale built-environment field with caution, because the most visible patterns in the corpus partly reflect the prominence of nature-based and green–blue infrastructure within the indexed peer-reviewed urban sustainability literature. Less visible domains may be less consistently indexed through the search terms used in bibliographic databases, more frequently documented in the grey literature or municipal reports, or framed through alternative vocabularies, such as repair, reuse, upgrading, everyday infrastructure, cultural continuity, or informal governance. Future reviews could address this limitation by combining bibliographic database searches with targeted grey-literature searches, broader regional databases, and more explicit informality-related search terms.

A third limitation concerns outcome evidence. Many included studies describe participatory processes, planning frameworks, toolkits, or intervention designs, but fewer provide long-term evidence on maintenance, institutionalization, behavioral change, equity outcomes, or post-implementation performance. This is a critical gap. Future studies should move beyond short-term intervention evaluation and examine how community-scale sustainability practices evolve over time, especially after project funding, pilot phases, or research involvement ends.

This gap also points to the need for a more critical account of implementation failure. Community-scale sustainable built-environment practices may fail not because the spatial idea is weak, but because maintenance responsibilities remain unclear, municipal support declines, community participation is not sustained, monitoring systems are not institutionalized, or short-term pilot funding ends before practices become embedded in everyday governance. Future research should, therefore, examine not only successful implementation but also partial implementation, non-adoption, discontinuation, maintenance burden, and post-project decline. Such evidence is necessary for understanding which SSG mechanism bundles remain durable after the initial design, pilot, or engagement phase.

Future research should test the SSG framework across different urban contexts, income settings, governance regimes, intervention families, and degrees of community control. Comparative, longitudinal, and post-implementation designs are needed to assess whether, how, and under what conditions particular mechanism configurations are associated with implementation continuity, maintenance, equity, and other reported outcomes. Future systematic or scoping reviews could also combine the peer-reviewed literature with municipal plans, project reports, and community-generated datasets. Such work would extend the evidence base and permit effectiveness-related propositions to be evaluated rather than inferred from descriptive frequency patterns.

5. Conclusions

This scoping review mapped and synthesized 130 eligible peer-reviewed studies on community-scale sustainable built-environment practices with publication years from 2015 to 2026 and available in the searched databases by the final search date of 13 June 2026. To distinguish findings derived directly from the coded corpus from interpretive propositions and future-oriented implications, the conclusions are organized in five points.

• Empirical finding—practice-family distribution. Eight thematic clusters were identified within the eligible corpus. Nature-based and green–blue infrastructure formed the largest cluster, comprising 67 studies, followed by housing, retrofit, and settlement upgrading with 28 studies. Neighborhood sustainability assessment and planning, public-space transformation and placemaking, digital tools and mapping, circular neighborhood infrastructures, mobility-related practices, and heritage-led regeneration were represented by smaller clusters. This distribution describes the thematic profile of the English-language, indexed, and eligible literature included in this review; it does not measure the prevalence or relative importance of these practices in the wider built environment.
• Empirical finding—operational spatial scale. Under the harmonized five-category spatial-scale profile, Level 2 local neighborhood/community evidence constituted the largest component of the corpus, comprising 82 of the 130 studies (63.1%). Urban/city, nested local-to-city, public-space/street, and district studies represented progressively smaller components of the coded evidence base. The Level 2 aggregate combines the original neighborhood and community study-level labels for cross-study comparison while retaining their source-level distinction in the supplementary audit trail. This pattern identifies local settings as recurrent analytical and implementation contexts in the reviewed literature; it does not establish that local-scale approaches are more effective than building- or city-scale strategies.
• Empirical finding—dominant SSG relationships. The dominant-code synthesis identified recurrent relationships among the three SSG dimensions. Within the eligible corpus, participatory social processes, and municipal or institutional governance were frequently associated with the principal spatial-intervention categories. These patterns represent primary coded emphases rather than exhaustive mechanism presence, real-world prevalence, or tested causal relationships. Secondary mechanisms retained in the study-level notes indicate that individual interventions were often more complex than the mutually exclusive frequency distributions suggest.
• Conceptual proposition—review-specific SSG framework. The principal interpretive output is a review-derived Spatial–Social–Governance comparison framework. The spatial, social, and governance dimensions are not conceptually novel in themselves. The proposed contribution lies in operationalizing these established concerns as a common built-environment coding and comparison structure across heterogeneous practice families. The framework should, therefore, be understood as a parsimonious analytical heuristic, not as an effectiveness model, a comprehensive urban-system ontology, or a universal theory of sustainability. Its theoretical use is diagnostic rather than comprehensive: planning, governance, political-ecology, spatial-justice, and transition perspectives remain necessary for interpreting power, distribution, institutional conflict, scale, and temporal change that the three SSG coding axes do not themselves explain.
• Practical implications and future research. The SSG framework may be explored as a heuristic for examining whether a proposed or reported intervention addresses spatial, social, and governance dimensions, but this review does not establish that alignment among these dimensions causes more effective, durable, or equitable outcomes. Future research should strengthen longitudinal and post-implementation assessment; examine maintenance, governance continuity, implementation failure, and distributional outcomes; apply pre-specified multi-label or relational coding; and test mechanism configurations across different urban, regional, and institutional contexts. Comparative evidence is required before the interpretive propositions generated by this review can be treated as explanations of intervention performance.

Accordingly, points (1)–(3) report empirical patterns derived from the eligible coded corpus, point (4) presents the bounded conceptual proposition developed through the synthesis, and point (5) identifies provisional implications and priorities for future testing.