Buildings and Cities in partnership with UCL, have launched a press release on their recent publication "Systemic inequalities in indoor air pollution exposure in London, UK" by Ferguson et al.
Exposure to air pollution is one of the greatest health risks in many countries, for example causing an estimated 28,000 – 36,000 premature deaths a year in the UK. Low-income households are exposed to higher levels of outdoor and indoor air pollution. What leads to these indoor exposure inequalities and what can be done to reduce them?
Read the full report on the Buildings and Cities website.
Posted on 10 May 2021
Guest Editors: Sofie Pelsmakers (Tampere U) and Elanor Warwick (Clarion Housing Association)
Deadline for abstract submission: 7 JUNE 2021
Full details downloadable here
Over the past 40+ years, the size of urban dwellings has diminished in many Western and Asian countries, resulting in negative impacts on residents’ needs and activities. At the same time, an increasing range of activities is expected to be performed at home. One set of possible solutions involves increasing the adaptability of spaces within the dwelling. Other solutions may reconsider the relation between domestic privacy and public cohabitation / shared facilities.
Aims
This special issue will explore multiple perspectives for both developed and developing countries:
Many different drivers (and approaches) exist including the following areas:
Papers in this special issue address topics including but not limited to:
Concepts and evidence
Policy and governance
Timeline
Deadline for abstract submission: 07 June 2021
Full papers due: 04 October 2021
Referees' comments: 24 January 2022
Final version due: 28 February 2022
Publication: April 2022
Note: papers are published as soon as they are accepted and therefore some papers will progress faster and appear in advance of the whole issue.
MORE INFORMATION
Submission details and further information:
https://www.buildingsandcities.org/calls-for-papers/housing-adaptability.html
Posted on 04 May 2021
Guest Editor: Stuart D. Green (University of Reading)
Deadline for abstract submission: 13 SEPTEMBER 2021
Full details downloadable here
What are the potential unintended consequences of modern methods of construction which are not currently considered?
This special issue investigates the externalities of modern methods of construction (MMC). It examines the dominant narrative used to promote MMC. Although an increased proportion of pre-manufactured value (PMV) may improve narrowly-defined site-based ‘productivity’, evidence is needed on the associated externalities and potential long-term adverse systemic consequences. What can be learned from previous attempts to modernise the construction process with industrialised methods?
Aim
The aim of this special issue is to examine the assumptions underpinning the prevailing ‘presumption in favour’ of MMC. Contributions will provide evidence about the externalities which lie beyond the narrowly-defined construct of productivity. Priority will be given to empirical papers aimed at exploring the systemic consequences of an ever-increasing proportion of PMV in construction. The special issue is open to a range of quantitative and qualitative research methods using primary and/or secondary data. Contextualised case studies are especially welcome.
Beyond productivity improvement
The definition of MMC remains problematic, but an emerging consensus is that MMC is best understood on the basis of pre-manufactured value (PMV) – i.e. the proportion of offsite construction as a percentage of the total measured works. But as yet there is little research which extends beyond the traditional drivers of time, cost, quality and productivity. Much of the research which does exist comprises opinion surveys on levels of adoption, and perceived barriers to implementation. What remains largely unexplored are the temporal externalities which extend beyond the construction phase. Little evidence exists on the implications of MMC for the material fabric of the built environment. There is also a recurring reluctance to learn the lessons of the past. This is of particular concern within the context of housing, although it applies equally to other sectors.
Scant research and data exist on the implications of MMC for the performance and longevity of buildings, and their ability to respond over time to shifting societal and occupant needs. The durability and adaptability of buildings are of central importance for resource consumption and for the achievement of a net-zero carbon economy. Particular concerns relate to environmental performance and occupant wellbeing After London’s Grenfell Tower fire, there are also significant concerns regarding the implications of MMC for fire safety.
Notwithstanding the above, any significant increase in the proportion of PMV is also likely to have systemic consequences for the economic structure of the sector. Particular concerns relate to employment practices and the potentially adverse implications for skills within local communities. The increasing emphasis on PMV further exposes the construction sector to competition from global manufacturing firms, with significant implications for the barriers to entry and the national balance of payments. Additional questions relate to lack of transparency in global supply chains, with direct implications for the risk of labour exploitation. Outsourcing sub-assembly processes to geographically remote locations can reduce standards of environmental protection.
Topics include:
Timeline
Deadline for abstract submission: 13 September 2021
Full papers due: 01 February 2022
Referees' comments: 29 March 2022
Final version due: 27 May 2022
Publication: July 2022
Note: papers are published as soon as they are accepted and therefore some papers will progress faster and appear in advance of the whole issue.
MORE INFORMATION
Submission details and further information:
https://www.buildingsandcities.org/calls-for-papers/cfp-mmc.html
Posted on 03 May 2021
Guest Editors:
Brian Ford (Nottingham U), Dean Mumovic (UCL), Rajan Rawal (CEPT University)
Deadline for abstract submission: 12 APRIL 2021
Full details downloadable here
This special issue explores alternative approaches to providing thermal comfort and ventilation in different climatic zones across the world at the scales of building, neighbourhood and city. It considers the implications of these alternatives across a range of issues: health, wellbeing, air quality and heat stress; technical / design solutions; social expectations and practices; climate change; policy and regulation; supply chain and procurement; education and training. It includes a range of disciplines: geography, sociology, anthropology, behavioural sciences, architecture, engineering, public health, economics, energy and environmental assessment.
In urbanised areas, there is an opportunity to break the current dependency on air conditioning. The design of cities, neighbourhoods and buildings can ensure ventilation and thermal comfort by climate friendly means. Retrofit opportunities for the existing building stock can make existing buildings comfortable without increasing energy demand. The design of new buildings and their environs can reduce or eliminate the need for air conditioning.
Equally important are the responses of the many different actors that promote or inhibit adoption - policy makers, clients, construction professions and the supply chain (development and procurement). Key questions include:
Topics include:
Timeline
Deadline for abstract submission: 12 April 2021
Full papers due: 01 September 2021
Referees' comments: 01 December 2021
Final version due: 01 February 2022
Publication: April 2022
Note: papers are published as soon as they are accepted and therefore some papers will progress faster and appear in advance of the whole issue.
MORE INFORMATION
Submission details and further information:
https://www.buildingsandcities.org/calls-for-papers/alternatives-air-conditioning.html
Posted on 11 Feb 2021
We are pleased to announce that B&C has been formally approved for inclusion in The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The journal has been awarded DOAJ's 'SEAL OF APPROVAL' that is given to only 10% of eligible publications.
DOAJ is a long-standing mark of journal quality. Inclusion is only open to journals with high quality editorial process and transparency, complexity of peer review, easy and freely available articles in open access publishing mode.
All peer-reviewed content in Buildings & Cities will be indexed in the DOAJ. This means B&C is Plan S compliant.
Buildings & Cities was awarded the DOAJ Seal of Approval for demonstrating best practice in open access publishing.
Posted on 07 Sep 2020
Guest Editors: Jonathon Taylor (Tampere U) and Philippa Howden-Chapman (U of Otago)
Deadline for abstract submission: 30 July 2020
Cities are complex systems with interactions between various factors e.g.: urban density, ‘green’ infrastructure and open space, housing, transport, waste management, water and sanitation, air quality, health systems, and city governance. With an increasing majority of the global population now inhabiting urban areas, it is essential that cities reduce their environmental footprints and increase their resilience to environmental change whilst protecting and promoting planetary health.
This special issue seeks to explore how cities can address the multiple challenges of health and sustainability. This involves the development and implementation of evidence-informed solutions in a variety of different contexts (mature cities, rapidly expanding urban areas, shrinking cities, and informal settlements; Global North and Global South); political systems (high centralised, decentralised, autocratic, democratic) and scales (city, neighbourhood, street, building). Papers are sought on a variety of topics that model, track or evaluate the effectiveness and outcomes of different policies or practices, as well as the interaction between various systems.
Evidence is sought from different contexts from which we expect distinctions, complementarities and comparisons to be drawn for informing equitable development pathways for improving sustainability and public health in cities. In particular, we are interested in research that accelerates the implementation of large-scale ‘transformational’ changes that improve health and sustainability in low-, middle- and high-income settings, and across different socioeconomic and demographic groups.
Papers in this special issue address key urban topics including but not limited to:
Timeline
Deadline for abstract submission: 30 July 2020
Full papers due: 30 January 2021
Referees’ comments: 09 April 2021
Final version due: 01 June 2021
Publication: August 2021
Download the full Call for Papers here.
Posted on 27 Apr 2020
Guest Editors: Faye Wade (U of Edinburgh) and Henk Visscher (TU Delft)
Deadline for abstract submission: 13 July 2020
What are the capabilities and capacities for delivering retrofit at scale?
This special issue explores the accelerated delivery of domestic energy retrofitting at different scales – national, municipal, neighbourhood and individual sites. It will interrogate governance, economic / business, organisational, social and technical aspects and their interactions: existing planning capabilities; available building stock data and what more is needed; rural and urban retrofit strategies; the roles, capabilities and capacities of existing and new actors / enterprises in delivering retrofit (e.g. local authorities, urban planners, construction professionals, contractors and subcontractors); how can renovation elements be produced in an industrialised way to increase capacity and reduce costs; the economic, social, political, legislative, regulatory aspects of delivery models; what owners or inhabitants require; forms of user engagement; what future proofing is appropriate; what requirements and guarantees will ensure performance in use. There will be insights across different scales and geographical contexts as well as top-down vs bottom-up models. Distinctions & complementarities will be drawn for policies and delivery strategies for different scales, stakeholders, inhabitants and disciplines.
Papers in this special issue will address key questions and offer solutions in these areas:
Timeline
Deadline for abstract submission: 13 July 2020
Full papers due: 11 January 2021
Referees’ comments: 22 March 2021
Final version due: 10 May 2021
Publication: July 2021
Download the full Call for Papers here.
Posted on 26 Apr 2020
Guest editor: Jacques Teller
University of Liège, Belgium
E-mail: Jacques.Teller@uliege.be
The expansion of built-up urban areas progressively often leads to a loss of agricultural land and green spaces. It tends to increase distance travelled by car and contributes to habitat fragmentation.Accordingly, a number of cities and regions have adopted planning policies dedicated to fostering urban densification, through in-fill development and urban consolidation, in order to prevent a further expansion/sprawl of urban areas and the concomitant artificialization of open/green spaces. Other cities have an ad hoc or laissez faire approach to planning, respond to specific proposed projects on an individual basis or lack enforcement.
This special issue investigates the specific challenges, impacts and fragilities that urban densification creates in many cities and the different scales where these can be found.
The process of densification can typically be observed through two variables, i.e. through the increase of population and jobs or through the increase of built floor area within a defined area. There is a need for a better understanding of the complex relations between densification and expansion processes across different spatio- temporal scales. Densification may indeed be measured across a very wide spectrum of temporal units,from the hourly concentration of pedestrians in given public spaces to the long-term consolidation of low-density areas.
For either Global North cities or Global South cities, topics for the special issue may include (but are not limited to):
Download the full call for papers here.
Timeline
Deadline for abstract submission: 02 March 2020
Full papers due: 01 September 2020
Referees' comments: 15 December 2020
Revised papers due: 01 February 2021
Publication: April 2021
Posted on 14 Nov 2019
Guest Editor: Thomas Lützkendorf
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.
Email: thomas.luetzkendorf@kit.edu
The built environment’s types and ranges of contributions to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and thus to climate change are well known. There is acceptance of the need to drastically reduce GHG emissions and that the built environment must have a significant role. The focus of this special issue is to go substantially beyond the calculation of embodied and lifetime energy / CO2, to explore the appropriate units of assessment and their scalability for each country’s or region’s built environment in relation to the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the more recent commitment to limiting global warming to 1.5 C or less.
Download the full call for papers here.
Timeline
Deadline for abstract submission: 26 September 2019
Full papers due: 06 January 2020
Referees' comments: 09 March 2020
Final version due: 30 March 2020
Publication: June 2020
Posted on 31 May 2019
Posted on 30 Apr 2019
Ongoing and future anthropogenic climate change, and our responses to it, could potentially magnify inequities worldwide and much of this will occur within the built environment. For instance, it is expected that low-income communities, individuals that suffer from chronic diseases or social isolation, and other vulnerable populations will be disproportionately affected by climate impacts due to their limited ability to adapt to a warming climate. Communities, and the people in them, are also likely to face differential implications of climate actions – such as building adaptation or mitigation infrastructure – due to their locations, livelihoods, or socio-economic resources. Some communities may need to abandon their homes and settlements if they become uninhabitable, while others may experience changes due to shifting ideas of desirable neighbourhoods, new rules for building codes or insurance policies, increased stress / hardship, or unintended consequences of other climate actions. How will different people and communities experience these shifts? How could efforts be designed to avoid deepening or actively reduce pre-existing inequalities in wellbeing? What policies and strategies are needed for the evaluating specific interventions at different scales (building, neighbourhood, city, building stock) and how these interact collectively?
The global community is committed to achieving climate equity as a core requirement. Insufficient capacity for climate change adaptation and unequal distribution of resources will negatively affect the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals promoting the wellbeing of people in developing countries and low-income communities within wealthy countries. Challenging multi-level inequities both internationally and nationally is, therefore, at the heart of climate change mitigation, adaptation and human development goals. Moreover, as mitigation action (e.g. "green" building & energy retrofits) is both needed to limit climate impacts and could itself have implications for equity at all scales, mitigation actions must also be examined through an equity lens.
Whilst there has been an increasing recognition of the role the building sector will play in the transition towards a low carbon economy, less attention has been paid to the relationship between buildings and urban design in the context of climate justice. It is widely recognised that the definition, measurement and distribution of climate related burdens are of fundamental importance for distributive justice in climate policy and adaptation practice. Moreover, efforts to design and change the built environment necessarily raise questions about procedural justice. As the built environment is at the heart of the lives of people and communities and is central to climate adaptation and mitigation, a deeper understanding of the justice implications of efforts to change or maintain the built environment in the context of climate change is essential.
Despite the obvious intersection between the built environment and issues of climate justice, these issues are often addressed separately. For example, despite the increasing concerns about air pollution and overheating in summer, such issues are rarely framed as energy or energy poverty issues. In addition, the majority of studies aiming to quantify the impact of climate change on energy use, comfort, health and wellbeing do so at the building stock level without incorporating social aspects that may magnify risks for health and wellbeing. Similarly, justice implications of decision-making about the built environment in the context of climate change could occur at all stages of the life cycle. For example, this includes the labour conditions for working under extreme or stressful conditions during the construction / renovation process.
Meanwhile, the recent rise of the political economy of ‘wellness’ and the wellbeing agenda among building designers and urban planners in affluent countries raises new questions about how health and wellbeing are linked with entitlements of wealth, social status and privilege. However, this raises further questions about how these (and other) concerns apply to people in less affluent areas within developed countries and the global south. The continued growth of informal settlements raises multiple questions about adaptation and mitigation options and their justice ramifications for vulnerable or poor communities.
This Special Issue will specifically explore the role our built environment plays in the climate change and inequity nexus. It seeks to examine the full implications of the built environment on social inequities and human development in the context of climate change: how might climate change or climate policies exacerbate these problems, what the scale of this is likely to be, and what policies, strategy solutions, resources and capabilities may be required to manage these concerns within and between countries.
Timeline
Deadline for abstract submission: 15 July 2019
Full papers due: 01 November 2019
Referees' comments: 15 February 2020
Final version due: 01 May 2020
Publication: July 2020
For further details visit: www.buildingsandcites.org
Posted on 29 Apr 2019