2024 PhD Video Challenge: Why It Matters

Calling all PhD candidates! You are invited to participate in the 2024 Video Challenge by creating a 2-minute video that tells the world about the significance of your research. The theme is “WHY IT MATTERS”. DEADLINE: 15.10.2024 noon GMT.

Online Workshop: “How to make a good video”

Registration is now closed for our online workshop entitled “How to make a good video” for interested entrants on 5 September 2024.

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

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.

Future Urban Research: Focus on the Commons

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.

Trusting Building Performance Simulation

Guest editor: Michael Donn (Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington)

Deadline for abstracts: 11 November 2024 (noon GMT)

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As codes and regulations become stricter, is simulation the right tool for compliance as well as sketching performance to assist design? Can building simulation address the competing demands and tensions that regulators, clients and designers place on it? If not, what alternatives could be appropriate?

This special issue seeks research reporting on quality assurance measures, case studies, user studies that address the development of trust in the performance calculations of designers. Papers are sought that describe the challenges, innovative methodologies, or strategies to enhance reliability and effectiveness. Overall, the papers should show evidence of improvement in guiding sustainable building practices. The “performance gap” typically references energy performance. However, this special issue is open to all design assessment parameters: Indoor Air Flows, Daylight, Energy, Overheating and Acoustics.

Research in a Rapidly Changing and Increasingly Uncertain World

Challenges ahead: how the conduct of research needs to change

How might the conduct of research need to change in the future? What are the lessons for built environment research from the Covid pandemic? Raymond J Cole (University of British Columbia) considers whether and why knowledge production outside the purview of disciplinary-based research is increasing needed. Addressing rapid change and the complex multi-faceted consequences of a warming climate will challenge existing research methodologies and is likely to require increased interdisciplinarity. New ways of working will also require overcoming organisational barriers and a deeper understanding of the needs of decisionmakers.

Net-Zero Retrofit of the Building Stock

Guest editors: Daniel Godoy-Shimizu and Philip Steadman (University College London)

Deadline for abstracts: 28 October 2024 (noon GMT)

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How might the building stock transition towards Net Zero? How big a change is achievable? At what cost? And what are the theoretical and practical factors that determine both the overall potential as well as the transition process?

Although these questions might lend themselves to a large-scale, aggregate perspective (considering issues like total capital cost, long-term targets for the deployment of low-zero carbon technologies, national and local energy efficiency policies, etc); any changes will be enacted on individual buildings. This special issue will explore these topics, from both a top-down (national, urban or local stock level) standpoint, but also a bottom-up (building level) point of view. Abstracts (in the first instance) are invited that explore these issues whether from a qualitative perspective (e.g. the potential impact of different retrofit policies as well and any barriers to successful uptake) or a quantitative perspective (e.g. the impact of different approaches to deploying retrofit measures at scale).

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?

Current imaginaries (ways to understand and envisage how adaptation should take place) and practices need to be revised to provide social justice and reflect local needs. This special issue focuses on how inappropriate / inadequate urban adaptation imaginaries and practices can be identified and disrupted to provide more inclusive, socially just approaches to urban adaptation. Actions for urban climate adaptation (in physical, social, political, legal dimensions) are needed to break with the status quo, reduce systemic vulnerabilities and increase coping capacities (resilience) to face climate change impacts at scale.