5th Anniversary Essays
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.
Challenges ahead: why robust research and education can help drive the necessary changes in regulating construction products to meet society's demands
Challenges ahead: collecting, managing, integrating and sharing comprehensible findings on actual performance from cradle to grave
Challenges ahead: how the recent past is shaping the research agenda
Challenges ahead: research has a role to protect the public interest and inhabitants
Challenges ahead: Making the UN's Building Breakthrough a reality
Challenges ahead: how the conduct of research needs to change
Challenges ahead: why relational research is vital for society and reduces dysfunction and disaster
Challenges ahead: the curriculum in many US built environment courses needs to change
Message to COP29: more effective collaboration is essential
Challenges ahead: addressing the complex issues of building performance, public safety, climate change and socio-ecological value
Looking forward: citizen science is changing the research landscape
Challenges ahead: understanding and protecting the end-users of the built environment
Challenges ahead: why research must focus on potential problematic consequences and provide proactive built-in fail-safes
Challenges ahead: sustainable design is much more than addressing climate change
Challenges ahead: framing urban research as a commons activity and as a research agenda
Challenges ahead: how the conduct of research needs to change
Latest Commentaries
5th Anniversary 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.
The Challenges of Evidence-Based Design
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.