AWARDS! 2024 Video Challenge

Congratulations to the winners of the Video Challenge who displayed creativity, vitality and good communication skills to explain the significance of their research: "Why It Matters".

5th Anniversary Essays

It's B&C's 5th year of publication. Celebrate with us by reading these thought-provoking essays.

Self-Organised Knowledge Space as a Living Lab

How can a self-organised initiative in an informal settlement foster community engagement and confront social issues?

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.

Climate Mitigation & Carbon Budgets: Research Challenges

Why the built environment research community is vital for policy and strategy implementation

Thomas Lützkendorf (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) explains how the research community has helped to change the climate change policy landscape for the construction and real estate sectors, particularly for mitigating GHG emissions. Evidence can be used to influence policy pathways and carbon budgets, and to develop detailed carbon strategies and implementation. A key challenge is to create a stronger connection between the requirements for individual buildings and the national reduction pathways for the built environment.

Climate Change Risk and Decision-Making

Guest Editors: Simon Foxell and Ian Cooper

Deadline for abstracts: 09 June 2025 (noon GMT)

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How should built environment actors (individually and collectively) respond to the increasing risks resulting from the changes to the global and local climates? How can the sector improve its understanding of risk factors and potential responses? What obligations do decision-makers have to act and explain their actions relating to avoidance and mitigation of risk? What processes and shared understandings are needed for identifying, communicating and responding to climate risks? What are the appropriate approaches to thinking about and acting on built environment risk (across a spectrum from 'probability times consequences' to 'how far is safe enough' that locate risk in a larger cultural context?

Co-ordinate Built Environment Research for the Public Good

Why a coordinated programme of built environment research needs to be based on the public good

Gavin Killip and Kate Simpson (Nottingham Trent University) propose a coordinated research programme of field trials to create a focus for iterative learning about outcomes in the built environment, for the public good. They explain why a transdisciplinary programme is needed and seven key characteristics of the programme are proposed.

B&C's Readership Metric

Research papers in B&C are being widely read

Buildings & Cities is pleased to announce that in 2024 our peer reviewed articles were viewed and downloaded 523,612 times from the journal's website.

The great interest shown here is an indicator of the journal's role as an important resource and as a valued contributor to the field.

Reframing Sustainable Construction

Why a new approach to sustainable development is needed.

Alice Moncaster (University of the West of England) reflects on the lack of progress in sustainable development over several decades. This failure is argued to be linked to how sustainable development has been framed: the separation of technical issues from social justice and equity. Understanding, involving and empowering communities (and wider society) is the key to making progress and achieving sustainable development goals.

Artificial Intelligence and Decarbonisation

How building research can harness AI for mass decarbonisation

Ten years ago, it was rare to read building science papers referencing learning algorithms, sensor networks, cloud computing or digital twins. Now, data-driven techniques are at the core of building decarbonisation research, generating both new opportunities and new risks. Jenn McArthur (Toronto Metropolitan University) reflects on how the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming building decarbonisation research.

Cities-Scale Research to Address Climate Change

Understanding the interactions between urban form, outdoor and indoor spaces, and local climate requIres interdisciplinary interaction

Gerald Mills (University College Dublin) considers the big challenges for cities amid global climate change (GCC) and discusses the need for an inter-disciplinary approach among urban climate sciences to overcome obstacles. A distinction is made between global climate science, which focusses on Earth-scale outcomes, and urban climate science, which refers to processes and impacts at city-scales, including buildings, streets and neighbourhoods.

Climate Change, Overshoot and the Demise of Large Cities

Why large cities will need to contract or be abandoned altogether

William E. Rees (University of British Columbia) explains why urbanisation has been a significant contributor to ecological overshoot (when human consumption and waste generation exceeds the regenerative capacity of supporting ecosystems) and climate change.¹ Civil society needs to begin designing a truly viable future involving a 'Plan B' for orderly local degrowth of large cities.

The Sixth Industrial Revolution Should be Ecological

Why the next industrial revolution needs to be based on nature and not "technology"

Over the past 50 years the world has seen countless summits and agreements to reduce carbon emissions and prevent ecological overshoot. We have seen widespread adoption of the SDGs, a rapid shift to renewable energy, and numerous urban planning strategies to create biodiversity corridors, rewild rivers, and enable public and non-motorised transport options. However, appearances are deceiving. Chrisna du Plessis (University of Pretoria) considers the challenge of how to foster an ecological civilization in a world obsessed with technological innovation.

Energy Sufficiency in Buildings and Cities

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

Energy and climate policies have tended to focus on the promotion of energy efficiency and renewable energies, but there is no evidence that these measures alone will be able to meet climate and sustainable development goals. This special issue explores what the concept of sufficiency means for the built environment - both as a floor (minimum) and a ceiling (maximum) to ensure a "good life". Sufficiency is explored in many interconnected issues such as land use and density, space usage (size and adaptability), sharing of goods, services and spaces, and space conditioning (heating, cooling and ventilation) for health.

Health Inequalities and Indoor Environments

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

Health inequalities are a crucial aspect of public health and a pressing societal challenge. Access to healthy indoor spaces that are optimised to promote health should be seen as a fundamental right for all. This special issue is a starting point for the built-environment and public health communities to identify many existing inequities in order to improve methodological approaches, share vocabularies between disciplines, and create new knowledge necessary to create a safe and healthy indoor environments for all. Equitable design could translate into prioritising air quality improvements in the homes of people suffering from respiratory conditions, introducing inclusive design elements for disabled people, or providing energy retrofit subsidies to low-income, fuel-poor households.

Systems Thinking is Needed to Achieve Sustainable Cities

Why a just transition to sustainable cities depends on quality, affordable housing

As city populations grow, a critical current and future challenge for urban researchers is to provide compelling evidence of the medium- and long-term co-benefits of quality, low-carbon affordable housing and compact urban design. Philippa Howden-Chapman (University of Otago) and Ralph Chapman (Victoria University of Wellington) explain why systems-based, transition-oriented research on housing and associated systemic benefits is needed now more than ever.

Unmaking Cities Can Catalyse Sustainable Transformations

Why urban innovation is not enough to create sustainable cities

Andrew Karvonen (Lund University) explains why innovation has limitations for achieving systemic change. What is also needed is a process of unmaking (i.e. phasing out existing harmful technologies, processes and practices) whilst ensuring inequalities, vulnerabilities and economic hazards are avoided. Researchers have an important role to identify what needs dismantling, identify advantageous and negative impacts and work with stakeholders and local governments.

Is Gentrification a Crime?

The destruction of cultural heritage is a war crime. Should peacetime destruction or displacement be a crime too?

Civil society is understandably horrified by catastrophic loss of cultural, societal and historically important architecture and communities during wartime. But when this happens more piecemeal or by less visibly aggressive means in peacetime, we seem able to ignore it, even where it occurs at scale. Ian Cooper argues that greater protection needs to be provided to built environment and to the people who live there to avoid their displacement.

Overcoming Regime Resistance to the Circularity Transition

Observations from 15 years of built environment reuse research about how change occurs

Satu Huuhka (Tampere University) reflects on why the needed changes in practice are often slow and difficult in the building sector even when proved beneficial. Overcoming this inertia and accelerating widespread change requires a coordinated multi-level approach. The research agenda must not only be to produce new technology and practices but also to facilitate its uptake. This calls for understanding and addressing societal structures and collective behaviours: regulation and policy, market and industry structures and infrastructures, as well as education and culture.