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5th Anniversary Essays
It's B&C's 5th year of publication. Celebrate with us by reading these thought-provoking essays.
These commissioned essays from Buildings & Cities' authors and readers explore how the research landscape is changing. New essays are continuously being added to the collection during 2024 as part of B&C's anniversary.
Collectively, these essays offer fresh insights into the processes and issues that are currently inadequate or missing in the built environment research landscape. A wide perspective from different disciplines and geographies creates a positive, collective vision for shaping the research agenda. Recommendations are made for what needs to change.
We hope this will provoke and inspire research funders, researchers and other stakeholders to discuss, reflect and act. Ideas range from systemic change to key research questions to improving engagement to change of focus.
Overview and reflections on key built environment research challenges raised in B&C's anniversary essays
Why the built environment research community is vital for policy and strategy implementation
Strategies for decolonising street names: top-down by city authorities or bottom-up by local communities?
Nature-based design, combined with the transformation of underlying worldviews, can enhance urban resilience.
Why a coordinated programme of built environment research needs to be based on the public good
How building research can harness AI for mass decarbonisation
Understanding the interactions between urban form, outdoor and indoor spaces, and local climate requIres interdisciplinary interaction
Why large cities will need to contract or be abandoned altogether
Why the next industrial revolution needs to be based on nature and not "technology"
Both research and practice have a key role in developing positive, shared visions for the built environment
Why a just transition to sustainable cities depends on quality, affordable housing
Why urban innovation is not enough to create sustainable cities
The destruction of cultural heritage is a war crime. Should peacetime destruction or displacement be a crime too?
Observations from 15 years of built environment reuse research about how change occurs
Partnering with NGOs and integrating local knowledge can enable researchers to develop effective and context-specific solutions
Why research funders, institutions and academics need to frame research agendas that are locally responsive
Challenges ahead: why urban planning and urban design need robust quantitative evidence for decision making.
Challenges ahead: why robust research and education can help drive the necessary changes in regulating construction products to meet society's demands
Challenges ahead: collecting, managing, integrating and sharing comprehensible findings on actual performance from cradle to grave
Challenges ahead: how the recent past is shaping the research agenda
Challenges ahead: research has a role to protect the public interest and inhabitants
Challenges ahead: Making the UN's Building Breakthrough a reality
Challenges ahead: how the conduct of research needs to change
Challenges ahead: why relational research is vital for society and reduces dysfunction and disaster
Challenges ahead: the curriculum in many US built environment courses needs to change
Message to COP29: more effective collaboration is essential
Challenges ahead: addressing the complex issues of building performance, public safety, climate change and socio-ecological value
Looking forward: citizen science is changing the research landscape
Challenges ahead: understanding and protecting the end-users of the built environment
Challenges ahead: why research must focus on potential problematic consequences and provide proactive built-in fail-safes
Challenges ahead: sustainable design is much more than addressing climate change
Challenges ahead: framing urban research as a commons activity and as a research agenda
Challenges ahead: how the conduct of research needs to change
Latest Commentaries
Two Key Messages for COP31
Space Heating & Cooling in NDCs 4.0: Nationally Determined Constributions (NDCs) are at the heart of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement. NDCs embody each country's efforts to reduce their emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change. So it is essential to include the building stock (particularly space heating and cooling) in the next NDCs.
Realistic Retrofit: Residential buildings are major users of energy and emitters of CO2. What constitutes realistic retrofit? Affordable, practical low-carbon policies for homes are described for both the Global North and Global South.
Thomas Lützkendorf and Nick Eyre send their messages to COP31: prioritise the building stock in NDCs and implement policies for practical retrofit. Watch their videos - for links to the videos click on "More" below:
Practitioners’ Views of POE
Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is widely valued but weakly embedded in practice. Ant Marsh, Kate van Someren, Lara Clarke and Tom Randall (Arup Building Performance and Commissioning Services) explain the findings from a survey and focus groups with UK construction industry practitioners. They identified fragmented responsibility, split commercial incentives and a persistent fear of “bad news”. Making POE routine requires a shift from producing reports to a focus on improving outcomes by owning and acting on learning.