Commentaries

Addressing Building Failures in Flat Developments

Why developers and professionals need to take more responsibility.

The discovery, after the Grenfell Tower fire disaster in 2017, that hundreds of blocks of flats in the UK  had been clad in flammable cladding raises serious questions about the competency of the developers of flats and the legal and regulatory environment in which they operate. Bernard Rimmer (formerly a director of engineering companies and also University of Reading) explains the conditions that allowed developers to create unsafe buildings, and proposals are made to require developers to design and construct to higher standards and to take full responsibility for the safety, durability and performance of the buildings they produce.

5th Anniversary Essays

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.

The Challenges of Evidence-Based Design

Challenges ahead: why urban planning and urban design need robust quantitative evidence for decision making.

While some progress has been made, particularly in areas like healing architecture where the impact of design on human well-being is more directly observable, much work remains to be done to extend evidence-based design to broader fields of architecture, urban planning and design. Meta Berghauser Pont (Chalmers University of Technology) explains the challenges and pathways needed for a shift toward evidence-based design in urban planning and urban design.

Rethinking Construction Product Regulations

Challenges ahead: why robust research and education can help drive the necessary changes in regulating construction products to meet society's demands

Mustafa Selçuk Çıdık (University College London) considers the crucial role that research and higher education need to play in generating evidence and knowledge to shape the complex landscape of construction product regulations, particularly in relation to innovation, safety and performance. Independent, robust research and clear guidance are needed to ensure public safety, technological progress and sustainability. In addition, higher education must prepare future professionals to work within, and critically challenge, these regulatory frameworks.

Integrating Feedback into Research and Practice

Challenges ahead: collecting, managing, integrating and sharing comprehensible findings on actual performance from cradle to grave

Adrian Leaman (Usable Buildings) reflects on the Probe research project, drawing lessons for the architectural and building research challenges ahead. He advocates practice-based, real-world, case-study research with a positive commitment of all concerned to qualitative improvement for the public and private good using a more engaged professional support system. 

A World in Emergency and Emergence

Challenges ahead: how the recent past is shaping the research agenda

Over the last five years, the word 'emergency' has been a recurrent term in different domains of human culture and activities. However, this is more than a grim picture on the many critical issues that our societies nowadays need to face. Sergio Altomonte (Université catholique de Louvain) offers a positive interpretation of this state of 'emergency', moving forward from its common understanding as 'an unexpected and difficult or dangerous situation […] which requires quick action.'

Overhaul the Building Regulations: The Role of Research

Challenges ahead: research has a role to protect the public interest and inhabitants

Susan Roaf (Heriot-Watt University) explains why the building regulatory system is not fit for purpose. Regulations fail to protect the safety, well-being and financial health of inhabitants from both regular occurrences and extreme events. Evidence from research about the safety and performance of buildings needs to form the basis for new regulations.

Creating Circular Built Environments

Challenges ahead: Making the UN's Building Breakthrough a reality

Usha Iyer-Raniga (RMIT University) explains why a systemic and systematic approach is urgently needed to put the built environment on the right path to decarbonization, whilst recognizing countries are at different levels of progress. The UN's Building Breakthrough agenda for a whole life cycle approach to the built environment and decarbonization is a game changer. This can place buildings and construction in a critical pathway towards decarbonisation and align with the long-term impact of decisions made today.

T-Shaped Interdisciplinarity: A Model for Applied Research?

Challenges ahead: how the conduct of research needs to change

The emergence of scientific discovery at the interface of disciplinary fields is not necessarily driven by the academic system - rather, discovery happens despite it. Marilyne Andersen (EPFL) considers the paradoxical characteristics of interdisciplinarity, that is both declared as a needed research approach but is also rarely recognised as an asset in academic practice. In a landscape of conflicting objectives, built environment research may have something unique to offer to the question of academic interdisciplinarity.

The Case for Relational Research

Challenges ahead: why relational research is vital for society and reduces dysfunction and disaster

Sarah Darby (University of Oxford) reflects on relationality and why it matters, urgently. This is based on insights from two events from the same day, in September 2024. One was a family rite of passage; the other, publication of a report into the causes of a wholly avoidable disaster, the destruction by fire of a block of social housing. The case for researchers working with practitioners and developing a common language has never been stronger.

Bridging the Climate Change Research and Education Gap

Challenges ahead: the curriculum in many US built environment courses needs to change

Jesse M. Keenan (Tulane University) comments on the growing disconnect between climate change research and education in the built environment in the United States. Changes to the curriculum and pedagogy have been slow and students lack appropriate knowledge and skills in several key areas for both mitigation and adaptation. The launch of the Climate Syllabus Bank and the Tulane Prize in Climate Change Curriculum in the Built Environment by the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University are steps intended to foster the needed changes to the delivery of a curriculum for built environment students that integrates climate issues.

Net-Zero Requires Improved Collaboration between Researchers and Policymakers

Message to COP29: more effective collaboration is essential

The GHG emissions reduction efforts of governments, industries and societies continue to fall short of what is needed. Responsible researchers recognise the critical role of the built environment  to meet this challenge and  the consequences  of climate change. We need to partner with those at the forefront of decision making affecting the building, construction and real estate sector. Interdisciplinary research and transdisciplinary innovation are needed more than ever to support the decision making and practical action of every stakeholder in the sector, especially those shaping the policy landscape.

When is Demolition Justified?

Demolition has far-reaching consequences for people, nature and the climate. When is demolition and rebuilding appropriate?

Colin Rose (University College London) reflects on the recent Buildings & Cities special issue 'Understanding Demolition'. The answer depends on better understandings of the circumstances for demolition versus refurbishment.  A more transparent, public approach is needed that involves wider environmental, social and cultural costs and benefits.

Populist Dissent and Digital Urbanism

How should the research community engage with populist narratives that undermine social justice?

Robert Cowley (King's College London) reflects the Buildings & Cities special issue Data Politics in the Built Environment and considers a contemporary form of resistance to datafication: the (right-wing) populist, and often conspiratorial, rejection of digital technologies as instruments of oppression. Populism has a potential to distort public discourse and undermine the hopes for progressive alternative approaches. How might built environment academics shape more informed and balanced debates? Social justice will be better served if critical perspectives are supplemented by work that counters the misplaced fears about emerging digital urban technologies.

Why Convergence Research is Needed

Challenges ahead: addressing the complex issues of building performance, public safety, climate change and socio-ecological value

Several systemic failures have occurred across multiple aspects of the built environment in many parts of the world. Brian Meacham (Crux Consulting) explores what can be done to improve this situation. A need to reframe buildings and the built environment as a socio-ecological-technical system means applying systemic thinking and integration across disciplinary boundaries in research, design, construction and regulation.

A Practitioner's Introduction to LCA Databases: EPiC and ICE

By Amalka Nawarathna, Ghada Karaki, Francisco Sierra, Alireza Moghayedi & Alice Moncaster (all at University of the West of England)

This short comparative review of two construction material databases explains their potential use for assessing embodied carbon to designers and practitioners not yet expert in the field. It introduces and examines the Australian Environmental Performance in Construction (EPiC) database (updated in 2024) and the UK Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE) which was significantly updated in 2019.

Community-based Monitoring of Urban Environmental Data

Looking forward: citizen science is changing the research landscape

Environmental data measured by the general public on their immediate local surroundings are providing new sources of fine-grained data in cities. Jonathon Taylor, Anna-Kaisa Viitanen & Alonso Espinosa (Tampere University) explain how this recent phenomenon can lead to a richer understanding of urban form, microclimates and environmental exposures.

Why Research Must Now Prioritise Inhabitants

Challenges ahead: understanding and protecting the end-users of the built environment

The recent flammable cladding crisis has highlighted that inhabitants are not receiving the attention they deserve for better outcomes. Trivess Moore and David Oswald (both at RMIT University) explain why the research community needs to create a research agenda that focuses on the end-users of the built environment: their health, wellbeing, social value and lifestyle needs as well as the avoidance of risks, defects, natural hazards and stranded assets. This will give researchers greater influence on policy, practice and outcomes.

Construction Management Research: The Challenge of Consequences

Challenges ahead: why research must focus on potential problematic consequences and provide proactive built-in fail-safes

Everything has consequences. Indeed, a fundamental goal of much construction management (CM) research is precisely to create consequences and bring about positive change. However, exactly how such consequences will manifest is not always predictable, which also makes them highly challenging. Fred Sherratt (University of Colorado, Boulder) explains why CM research needs to shift its focus from questions of 'if we can' to 'if we should' in order to embrace consequential consideration.

Designing Beyond Climate Change

Designing Beyond Climate Change

Challenges ahead: sustainable design is much more than addressing climate change

Humanity is changing the Earth's climate quickly and substantially. Huge impacts are now evident on the weather, oceans, ecosystems and certainly on buildings and cities. So much remains to be done around the world to reshape our infrastructure for the ongoing and coming impacts from human-caused climate change. Ilan Kelman (University College London) explains why the challenge is doing so without losing sight of other minor and major dangers.

Latest Peer-Reviewed Journal Content

Journal Content

Generative AI: reconfiguring supervision and doctoral research
P Boyd & D Harding

Exploring interactions between shading and view using visual difference prediction
S Wasilewski & M Andersen

How urban green infrastructure contributes to carbon neutrality [briefing note]
R Hautamäki, L Kulmala, M Ariluoma & L Järvi

Implementing and operating net zero buildings in South Africa
R Terblanche, C May & J Steward

Quantifying inter-dwelling air exchanges during fan pressurisation tests
D Glew, F Thomas, D Miles-Shenton & J Parker

Western Asian and Northern African residential building stocks: archetype analysis
S Akin, A Eghbali, C Nwagwu & E Hertwich

Lanes, clusters, sightlines: modelling patient flow in medical clinics
K Sailer, M Utley, R Pachilova, A T Z Fouad, X Li, H Jayaram & P J Foster

Analysing cold-climate urban heat islands using personal weather station data
J Taylor, C H Simpson, J Vanhatalo, H Sohail, O Brousse, & C Heaviside

Are simple models for natural ventilation suitable for shelter design?
A Conzatti, D Fosas de Pando, B Chater & D Coley

Impact of roofing materials on school temperatures in tropical Africa
E F Amankwaa, B M Roberts, P Mensah & K V Gough

Acceptability of sufficiency consumption policies by Finnish households
E Nuorivaara & S Ahvenharju

Key factors for revitalising heritage buildings through adaptive reuse
É Savoie, J P Sapinski & A-M Laroche

Cooler streets for a cycleable city: assessing policy alignment
C Tang & J Bush

Understanding the embodied carbon credentials of modern methods of construction
R O'Hegarty, A McCarthy, J O'Hagan, T Thanapornpakornsin, S Raffoul & O Kinnane

The changing typology of urban apartment buildings in Aurinkolahti
S Meriläinen & A Tervo

Embodied climate impacts in urban development: a neighbourhood case study
S Sjökvist, N Francart, M Balouktsi & H Birgisdottir

Environmental effects of urban wind energy harvesting: a review
I Tsionas, M laguno-Munitxa & A Stephan

Office environment and employee differences by company health management certification
S Arata, M Sugiuchi, T Ikaga, Y Shiraishi, T Hayashi, S Ando & S Kawakubo

Spatiotemporal evaluation of embodied carbon in urban residential development
I Talvitie, A Amiri & S Junnila

Energy sufficiency in buildings and cities: current research, future directions [editorial]
M Sahakian, T Fawcett & S Darby

Sufficiency, consumption patterns and limits: a survey of French households
J Bouillet & C Grandclément

Health inequalities and indoor environments: research challenges and priorities [editorial]
M Ucci & A Mavrogianni

Operationalising energy sufficiency for low-carbon built environments in urbanising India
A B Lall & G Sethi

Promoting practices of sufficiency: reprogramming resource-intensive material arrangements
T H Christensen, L K Aagaard, A K Juvik, C Samson & K Gram-Hanssen

Structural barriers to sufficiency: the contribution of research on elites
M Koch, K Emilsson, J Lee & H Johansson

Disrupting the imaginaries of urban action to deliver just adaptation [editorial]
V Castán-Broto, M Olazabal & G Ziervogel

Nature for resilience reconfigured: global- to-local translation of frames in Africa
K Rochell, H Bulkeley & H Runhaar

How hegemonic discourses of sustainability influence urban climate action
V Castán Broto, L Westman & P Huang

Fabric first: is it still the right approach?
N Eyre, T Fawcett, M Topouzi, G Killip, T Oreszczyn, K Jenkinson & J Rosenow

Social value of the built environment [editorial]
F Samuel & K Watson

Understanding demolition [editorial]
S Huuhka

Data politics in the built environment [editorial]
A Karvonen & T Hargreaves


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Latest Commentaries

The current situation is implausible: there are pledges for 2030 but no roadmaps for their fulfilment over time. Image: Giovanna Cassavia (TU Graz).

To achieve net zero GHG emissions by mid-century (the Breakthrough Agenda) it is vital to establish explicit sector-specific roadmaps and targets. With an eye to the forthcoming COP30 in Brazil and based on work in the IEA EBC Annex 89, Thomas Lützkendorf, Greg Foliente and Alexander Passer argue why specific goals and measures for building, construction and real estate are needed in the forthcoming round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC 3.0).

A session from a participatory drawing workshop at the Rumi Library, led by Sadia Sharmin in 2019

While Living Labs are often framed as structured, institutionalised spaces for innovation, Sadia Sharmin (Habitat Forum Berlin) reinterprets the concept through the lens of grassroots urban practices. She argues that self-organised knowledge spaces can function as Living Labs by fostering situated learning, collective agency, and community resilience. The example of a Living Lab in Bangladesh provides a model pathway to civic participation and spatial justice.

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