Special Issues

Energy Sufficiency in Buildings and Cities

How can conditions be created for decent living standards for all without exceeding planetary limits?

Health Inequalities and Indoor Environments

How do indoor environments affect health inequalities, inequities and injustice?

Urban Adaptation: Disrupting Imaginaries & Practices

How can we create a more pluralistic, inclusive approach to urban climate adaptation? How can ill-suited approaches be disrupted?

Social Value of the Built Environment

How is social value created, defined and measured in both placemaking (urban design, architecture and real estate) and construction (procurement and labour) processes?

Understanding Demolition

Understanding Demolition

This special issue examines why demolition occurs, its consequences and how a more sustainable approach can be created.

Data Politics in the Built Environment

This special issue advances understandings of the practices, politics and power implications of data-driven buildings and cities

Urban Expansion

Urban Expansion

This special issue examines how cities in the Global South can predict & manage their expansion in effective, sustainable ways.

Transformational Climate Actions by Cities

This special issue advances understandings of the nature, extent and effectiveness of cities' implementation efforts to realise low-carbon, climate resilient cities.

Energy, Emerging Technologies and Gender in Homes

Gender 'blindness' impacts negatively on engagement with smart home technologies. If the energy transition is to be realised, then gender must be addressed.

Modern Methods of Construction: Beyond Productivity Improvement

This special issue investigates the broader implications and consequences of MMC over the life of the building - for both civil society and the construction industry.

Housing Adaptability

Housing Adaptability

This special issue advances the understanding and implementation of housing adaptability and flexibility across a range of issues: spatial, social, environmental, economic, time and multi-use and multiuser adaptability.

Alternatives to Air Conditioning

In an increasingly hotter world, what policies, designs, technologies & behaviours can provide thermal adequacy for coolth?

Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health

Urban areas are highly complex systems. Solutions to urban problems are often co-dependent and inter-connected. How can a systems approach to cities improve sustainability and health outcomes?

Retrofitting at Scale: Accelerating Capabilities for Domestic Building Stocks

What are the capabilities and capacities for delivering retrofit at scale?

Urban Densification

Urban Densification

How can urban densification be defined, monitored and controlled to create positive outcomes and avoid unintended consequences / negative impacts?

Education and Training: Mainstreaming Zero Carbon

How can education and training develop the capacities, capabilities and competences to rapidly decarbonise both new construction and the existing building stock?

Carbon Metrics: Assessing & Controlling GHG Emissions Across Scales

What constitutes appropriate and scalable carbon metrics in the built environment? How can a basket of different metrics inform policy and practice?

Climate Justice: The Role of the Built Environment

Questions of justice are embedded in every aspect of climate change. Ongoing and future anthropogenic climate change will exacerbate inequities worldwide.

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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