Commentaries
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Challenges ahead: framing urban research as a commons activity and as a research agenda
The focus of urban research has shifted in recent years.While the traditional focus was on aspects of urban provision (e.g. mass transit, housing, other infrastructure), the recent emphasis has shifted to the 'end goals' of urbanisation - e.g. sustainability, resilience, well-being, etc. In all these, a constant underlying theme has been the emphasis on creating and managing places. Rohinton Emmanuel (Glasgow Caledonian University) explains why future research needs to focus on the urban commons.
Latest Peer-Reviewed Journal Content
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Scaling up retrofit: regional challenges and opportunities for MMC
H Dörr, P Späth & I Goñi
Design as communicative activity: implications for sustainability assessment software
T Säwén, A Sasic Kalagasidis & A Hollberg
Indoor temperature and office work performance in a temperate climate
T Kramer & S Schiavon
Moving homes and energy poverty: residents’ concerns, capabilities and responses
M Jalas, J Rinkinen, S Numminen & E Valkealahti
Reference study for biogenic carbon storage in the residential building stock
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Building space heating and cooling in NDCs 4.0
T P Lützkendorf
Building component reuse as sociomaterial interaction: lessons from precast concrete
J Uusikartano, L Alkki & V Capitani
Validating national reuse indicators from regional demolition data: a Swedish example
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Climate change risk and decision-making [editorial]
S Foxell & I Cooper
Technologies of reconstruction [editorial]
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Retrofit realism: affordable low-carbon policies for existing homes
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Latest Commentaries
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.
Who is Responsible for Climate Change?
Ian Cooper (Eclipse Research) explores the questions of responsibility raised in the recent Buildings & Cities special issue ‘Climate Change Risk and Decision-Making’. Focusing here on carbon emissions and mitigation, global responses will require grounding in what can work locally. New responsibilities arise for the wide range of built environment decision-makers: clients, professionals and their institutions, central and local governments, product suppliers, financiers, insurers, etc. A framework is needed to manage the complexity of responsibilities especially for variety of actors, the time frames and spatial scales.