Overview and reflections on key built environment research challenges raised in B&C's anniversary essays

Raymond J. Cole (University of British Columbia) reflects on the key challenges raised in the 34 commissioned essays for Buildings & Cities 5th anniversary. Not only are key research issues identified, but the consequences of changing contexts for conducting research and tailoring its influence on society are highlighted as key areas of action.

To celebrate its 5th anniversary in 2024, Buildings & Cities commissioned a series of commentaries to address the theme of “Challenges Ahead: Where Do We Need to Go?” A primary ambition of this initiative was to identify the challenges that those in the built environment research community could face over the next 5+ years. It generated 34 short essays, the majority by authors affiliated with European universities (22) half of which were in the UK, and the others in North America (5), New Zealand and Australia (4) and Africa (3). While the individual commentaries in part reflect challenges in the authors’ own specific research domains, the issues and concerns they raise are broader in scope and consequence.  Collectively they provide a glimpse of the diverse range of current building-related research, an indication of the issues considered important to researchers, and an understanding of a changing context that will directly and indirectly influence future research priorities. Rather than restricting themselves to identifying challenges they anticipate affecting research, many authors stressed what issues they hold important and what research can offer to address them. 

The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of some of the key issues raised in the commentaries that span building products, individual buildings to larger, urban-scale issues and, within these, explore technical, social and policy concerns. A problem here is therefore how to organise the numerous issues and ideas offered in the diverse essays and do justice to each of them in a short review. While many of the individual commentaries themselves cover several issues, collectively they fall into three broad areas:

1. Only two of the essays explicitly draw attention to undertaking and disseminating building-related research in the Global South - currently representing approximately 20% of the papers in top-ranked journals. While there is “significant overlap between the research themes in publications from developed and developing countries” (Laryea), there are marked differences in the way that the built environment is produced and maintained and in the challenges for researchers that it poses. In addition to pointing to the limitations of applying “traditional, Western-led” research approaches in developing countries, Sunikka-Blank highlights differences in who and how researchers partner with, and how local knowledge and stakeholders are integrated in building-related research. These echo larger issues regarding applying research outputs in very different cultural contexts, and how and to what extent it will be incorporated into decision-making by practitioners, politicians and others who shape the built environment (Kuittinen, Lützkendorf & Foliente).
2. The production of the built environment involves those who commission and pay for projects, those who design them, those who construct them, those who supply materials and those who create and administer policies, rules and standards. While some commentaries relate more specifically to construction (Sherratt), the majority directly or indirectly relate to design and planning.
3. While most commentaries relate to research within academic institutions, Keenan draws attention to education shortcomings in preparing graduates to address climate change and other complex environmental issues.

Of particular interest are distinctions between those issues, challenges and barriers that largely reside within the research culture of researchers and the academic institutions they work in, and the structural, organisational and operational aspects of the larger building industry that inhibit addressing wicked and intractable societal problems. This essay primarily focusses on the latter which researchers have little control and cannot easily change. 

Table 1: List of Buildings & Cities 5^th Anniversary Essays

Author	Title	URL
Altomonte, S.	A world in emergency and emergence	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/emergency-emergence.html
Andersen, M.	T-shaped interdisciplinarity: a model for applied research?	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/t-shaped-interdisciplinarity.html
Berghauser Pont, M.	The challenges of evidence-based design	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/evidence-based-design.html
Buyana, K.	Decolonising cities: the role of street naming	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/decolonising-cities-street-naming.html
Çidik, M.S.	Rethinking construction product regulations	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/rethinking-construction-product-regulations.html
Cole, R.J.	Research in a rapidly changing and increasingly uncertain world	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/research-changing-uncertain-world.html
Cooper, I.	Is gentrification a crime?	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/gentrification-crime.html
Darby, S.	The case for relational research	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/relational-research.html
du Plessis, C.	The sixth industrial revolution should be ecological	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/sixth-industrial-revolution.html
Emmanuel, R.	Future urban research: focus on the commons	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/future-urban-research-commons.html
Howden-Chapman, P. & Chapman, R.	Systems thinking is needed to achieve sustainable cities	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/systems-thinking-cities.html
Huuhka, S.	Overcoming regime resistance to the circularity transition	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/overcoming-regime-resistance.html
Iyer-Raga, U.	Creating circular built environments	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/circular-built-environments.html
Karvonen, A.	Unmaking cities can catalyse sustainable transformations	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/unmaking-cities-sustainable-transformations.html
Keenan, J.	Bridging the climate change research and education gap	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/climate-change-research-education-gap.html
Kelman, I.	Designing beyond climate change	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/designing-beyond-climate-change.html
Killip, G. & Simpson, K.	Co-ordinate built environment research for the public good	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/co-ordinate-built-environment-research.html
Kuittinen, M., Lützkendorf, T. & Foliente, G.	Net-zero requires improved collaboration between researchers and policymakers	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/researchers-climate-policy-gaps.html
Laryea, S.	Mainstreaming research agendas from Global South countries	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/mainstreaming-research-agendas.html
Leaman, A.	Integrating feedback into research and practice	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/integrating-feedback.html
Lützkendorf, T.	Climate mitigation and carbon budgets: research challenges	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/climate-mitigation-carbon-budgets.html
McArthur, J.	Artificial intelligence and decarbonisation	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/artificial-intelligence-decarbonisation.html
Meacham, B.	Why convergence research is needed	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/convergence-research.html
Mills, G.	Cities-scale research to address climate change	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/city-research-climate.html
Moncaster, A.	Reframing sustainable construction	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/reframing-sustainable-construction.html
Moore, T. & Oswald, D.	Why research must now prioritise inhabitants	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/research-prioritise-inhabitants.html
Pedersen-Zari, M.	Integrating nature into cities	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/integrating-nature-into-cities.html
Petrescu, D.	Harnessing design research to encourage alternative futures	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/harnessing-design-research.html
Rees, W.E.	Climate change, overshoot and the demise of large cities	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/climate-change-overshoot-cities.html
Roaf, S.	Overhaul the building regulations: the role of research	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/building-regulations-research.html
Schweiker, M.	The challenge of research prioritisation	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/research-prioritisation.html
Sherratt, F.	Construction management research: the challenge of consequences	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/construction-management-research-consequences.html
Sunikka-Blank, M.	Rethinking energy research in the Global South	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/energy-research-global-south.html
Taylor, J., Viitanen, A.K. & Espinosa, A.	Community-based monitoring of urban environmental data	https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/community-based-monitoring-urban-environmental.html

Situating research within a complex industry

While researchers seek to understand and positively improve both the way that the built environment is produced and the lives of those who inhabit it, the pathways to do so are not easy. A prerequisite therefore would be an understanding of the ways that the construction industry functions and the sway of government policy. Although based on the UK context, Stuart Green’s (2024) Making Sense of Construction Improvement identifies several valuable characteristics that provide a context to review the commentaries:

1. Involving numerous stakeholders, diverse project types, and a lack of standardized processes and technologies. Integration is hampered by a widescale use of subcontracting, high levels of self-employed labour, and resulting multiple tiers of transactional interfaces.It is not a homogeneous single industry, but “several separate sub-industries each with its own distinguishing characteristics” (p.xiv).
2. Improvements in construction are significantly influenced by political shifts. Policy narratives and those who fund construction projects further influence what practitioners give attention to and prioritise (p.304).
3. While regulations exist to protect the wellbeing of citizens, decades of a doctrine of government deregulation and consistent lobbying by industry for a ‘flexible’ interpretation of standards, have eroded this primary role (p.290).
4. Technological optimism continues to dominate the construction policy agenda—a belief that problems can be solved by the adoption of advanced technology (p.304) and, as Rees notes, strategies that do not require behaviour shifts or sacrifice.

Four of the essays draw on the tragedy of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire to highlight long-standing failings in the construction industry and the embedded inertias that resist it from incorporating new ideas and research. First, the industry is presented as being "riddled with staggering levels of self-serving players, many of whom promote the vested interests of powerful forces to whom they are in thrall” (Roaf). Second, there is little effort to link the many related complex processes involved with the production of buildings (Darby). Third, there is an absence of feedback mechanisms to “ensure that buildings are designed, built and operated robustly and with low risk”of failure (Leaman). Fourth, in addition to a poor record of compliance with rules, standards and regulations, little protection is offered to building inhabitants to ensure they are provided safe and secure living accommodation (Moore & Oswald). Fifth, the construction industry suffers from shortages of skilled workers and necessary effective training programs. Finally, by having to get multiple players possessing different skillsets and work habits to work together in a coordinated manner, onsite construction practice “tends to be characterised by high inertia and slow innovation” (Darby). By contrast, material and building technology industries that feed the construction industry continuously develop new products. While these shortcomings are a critique of the UK construction industry and may not be evident in other countries with different political and industry structures, collectively they relate to five broader issues that are raised in other commentaries:

1. While research can identify the failings of the building industry and offer sound practical and policy advice, the perspectives it offers must fall on receptive ears if they are to be adopted and take effect. Here, those in positions of power invariably determine “how a problem is framed, and therefore what solutions are proposed” (Moncaster) and embracing the products of research or new ideas thereby largely depends on visionary leaders or the “right person in the right place” (Huuhka).
2. It is difficult for building regulations and standards to keep pace with rapid material and technological advances. This “heightens the challenge of balancing innovation, safety and performance” (Çiduk) that potentially leads to building performance and public safety “not being appropriately validated” and to making accountability harder to enforce (Meacham).
3. While decisions of designer, planners and policy directives are well-intentioned, without careful and critical evaluation of the pathways of innovative strategies and technologies can also have potential unintended consequences (Meacham; Killip & Simpson).
4. Despite the increasing recognition of the value of evidence-based design—where design decisions are informed by the best available rigorous scientific evidence to guide them—it is far from common practice. Its adoption would require a ‘fundamental change in how knowledge is disseminated, research is conducted, architects and urban planners are trained, and how professional practice is organised (Berghauser Pont). Moreover, while evidence-based design has raised the expectation that founding decisions on credible research will achieve the best possible outcomes, such a process is further challenged within a rapidly changing and heating world with unknown outcomes (Cole).
5. While building-related research has always been directly or indirectly shaped by societal priorities, it is also influenced by the value placed on research. Of importance here is maintaining the relevance of research at a time when the availability of funding is decreasing, when scepticism in scientific findings is increasing and, particularly in the US, when political agendas and conflicts are affecting freedom of research (Schweiker). Thus, while getting the research question right and how it is framed are clearly important, with less degrees of freedom for researchers, more effort is being expended in tailoring research activity to meet governmental priorities. This will almost certainly bear upon Schweiker’s concern that one of the biggest challenges for individual researchers, research groups and funding bodies is “how to prioritise research questions.”

The built environment as a complex socio-ecological system

The built environment functions as a complex dynamic socio-ecological-technical system. Indeed, Green (2024) noted that the most striking revelation about the Grenfell Tower fire was that no single party was to blame, but that it was the “system that had failed in its entirety” (p.290). However, the commentaries point to how the built environment is far from being considered as a system in its conception and production and identify how it displays many dysfunctionalities and fragilities:

1. The generation of knowledge that informs the design of the built environment, the industries that construct it, and the regulatory system that govern it, function “through a collection of unconnected, individual disciplinary silos, which focus on diverse and specific parts of the problem” (Meacham). This very much echoes the divisions and practices within them.
2. Feedback loops—both reinforcing and balancing—are fundamental to understanding how complex systems, acting as mechanisms that either amplify or dampen changes within the system by feeding outputs back as inputs. These reinforcing and balancing feedback loops drive system behavior, influencing stability and emergent properties. Leaman emphasises that “routine feedback” may offer a simple, fast and cost-effective way of “repairing the systemic breakdown that has manifest its worst features in a mendacious building industry.” However, given that it requires being funded and may reveal failings, he also acknowledges the embedded reticence towards formal routine feedback. Monitoring is necessary to know if something is succeeding or failing. Taylor, Viitanen & Espinosa draw attention to the use of low-cost sensors by the general public to measure their immediate local environment in real-time. Despite concerns regarding attaining representation across cities and the reliability and accuracy of the sensors, such monitoring provides a “better understanding of relationships between urban form, microclimates and environmental exposures and areas of increased risk.”
3. Interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, “convergence research” and other forms of research collaboration are widely acknowledged as being essential to address the scope and complexity of problems facing the built environment—many of which involve strongly interconnected and codependent social, ecological, and economic elements. Indeed, this shift in the way that research is conducted represents the most widely cited call across all commentaries. They point to the need for researchers to both hold a deep understanding of their specific field and to be able to connect with other disciplines to create a shared understanding of the consequences of decisions (Andersen).
4. Forging relationships with industrial and authoritative partners and involving them in research programs, strengthens pathways into practice and policy. Here, international collaborations have been relatively successful in bringing academics together to share experiences and produce collective outputs (Lützkendorf), and collaboration across existing organisations, networks and conferences can help facilitate dissemination (Killip & Simpson).

Transforming the built environment

Buildings & Cities was officially launched in July 2019 and began publishing in open access in 2020. Over the past five years, the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing impacts of a heating world were at the forefront of challenges for those inhabiting buildings. The COVID lockdowns prompted considerable indoor air quality research, triggered remote and hybrid work practices and, in many ways, led to a reconceptualising of the ways the built environment is used (Altomonte). While global supply chains continue to be impacted, COVID-related health has subsided as a public and policy concern, isolation and social distancing rules have been removed, and companies are attempting to introduce “back-to-office” policies. But while the pandemic is now seen in a rearview mirror, global heating and the rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence (McArthur) are now forming an increasingly dominant context for building-related research.

Unsurprisingly, commentaries cover research related to strategies and policies necessary to decarbonise the built environment and to adapt to the impacts of a heating world. Here, Mills highlights how urban climate sciences, and the study of indoor and outdoor spaces are currently largely conducted independently of each other and studied by different disciplines each deploying its own methods. In his sobering commentary, Rees stresses that the climate crisis is not the root problem but one of the many symptoms of “ecological overshoot”—where human enterprise is using resources and generating wastes that exceed the regenerative and assimilative capacities of the planet. Despite the considerable political attention on reducing fossil fuels and associated greenhouse gas emissions, he emphasises that climate change cannot be solved in isolation from addressing biodiversity loss, air/land/water pollution, impending resource scarcity and any other major symptoms of overshoot. In a similar vein, while also recognising the need to counter human-caused climate change, Kelman contended that it should not dominate design considerations at the expense of addressing social needs.

Cities have grown in both size and complexity over the past two-hundred years or so and remain almost entirely reliant on fossil fuels. While Rees advocates an “orderly local degrowth” of cities to smaller-scale, more self-reliant human settlements, other commentaries are framed on the premise that the dysfunctional and unsustainable nature of the built-environment can be countered by overhauling the manifold processes that produce it and the policies and regulatory structures that govern it. Emmanuel, for example, identifies the importance of changing the “regulation of public and private property to give citizens institutional control over resources,” and working “with/through local government to enable and protect the urban commons.”  Four further issues relate to the transformation of the urban fabric:

1. Many “unsustainable features are deeply embedded in the physical and cognitive fabric” of cities and “multiple vested interests” block or slow any proposed changes (Karvonen). Moreover, Karvonen importantly argues that innovative interventions need to be accompanied by the purposive removal of old systems, structures, and practices “without exacerbating existing social inequalities, economic precarities, and environmental vulnerabilities.”
2. Cooper discusses how urban planning policies can cause significant change to a city’s character and cultural heritage embedded within their built environment—characteristics that are “crucial not just to our sense of place but to our self-identities and physical and mental well-being too.” The removal or replacement of long-standing buildings, public spaces and infrastructures that constitute recognisable and loved urban places—even if the replacement has improved environmental credentials—may therefore carry a deep sense of loss. Moreover, since the names assigned to buildings, sites and streets reinforce peoples’ attachment to them, any renaming during urban transformation thereby requires consideration of its consequences (Buyana).
3. Irrespective of physical changes, climate change is beginning to transform experience in the urban environment. While large gatherings in public spaces were restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic, sustained excessively high temperatures during the summer months are already making them inhospitable and, as global heating intensifies, likely uninhabitable.

Darby asserts that the built environment, by definition, addresses “people's needs and behaviour by the act of building itself” and that “if not for that, why build at all?” Moreover, many of the other commentaries position the provision of the health, well-being, safety and security of humans as they live, work and play in the built environment as the primary responsibility of those who produce, maintain and govern it. While seemingly not being a contentious stance, these:

1. Demonstrate the dominance of a human-centric worldview currently framing building-related research, practice and governance.
2. Avoid the sad fact that the production of the built environment is driven by the pursuit of profit and other vested interests rather than by meeting need. A primary motivation is often to build as quickly and cheaply as possible rather than to deliver quality buildings that are safe for its inhabitants.

Several commentaries refer to us being at a “crossroads” (du Plessis) and living in “transitional times” (Petrescu)—the former raising questions of what path society chooses and the latter how to “plan and accelerate a just transition to a more sustainable way of life” (Howden-Chapman & Chapman). While there is widely held faith that technological advances will continue to shape the future hopefully for the better, du Plessis explicitly advocates a necessary shift towards an industrial model based on how nature works, and Pedersen Zari emphasises that “nature-based” solutions could help cities evolve into living systems. Such a transition requires embracing a more holistic worldview and ecological paradigm (Petrescu), a lens through which the ambitions of building-related research would look very different. Moreover, it would presumably make the building industry more receptive to systems-based strategies such as a circular economy (Huuhka; Iyer-Raniga).

While the commentaries carry valuable messages for diverse audiences beyond the research community, the issues and challenges they raise will provide new researchers with an informed understanding of the context in which their future work will operate and prompt seasoned researchers to reflect on their own role and approaches they deploy. Importantly they suggest and illustrate that research need not only acknowledge complexities associated with production and maintenance of the built environment and the growing impacts of a heating world, but to situate the work within this unfolding context and understand what both researchers and practitioners can and cannot hope to do achieve effectively.

It is hard to imagine that the functional difficulties posed by fragmentation within the construction industry and its regulatory bodies are not experienced in day-to-day operations. Nor, it would seem, without the reforms suggested in the commentaries, the dysfunctional nature of the construction industry will lead to future Grenfell Tower-like catastrophes as pressures mount to deliver services in an increasing unstable geo-political and heating world. Difficulties and challenges arise equally, if not more, at the interfaces between the various constituent groups as those within them, and between them and those who affected by their decisions and actions. As such, improved bi-directional communication and greater collaboration represent two of the actions necessary to help shift entrenched perspectives, engender systems-thinking, and lessen potential unintended consequences. 

Reference

Green, S.D. (2024). Making Sense of Construction Improvement, Taylor & Francis.