Creating Built Environments

Built environments are complex, emergent, systemic, and require contextual analysis. They should be understood before reconsidering how professionals and researchers of the built environment are educated and trained to reduce the gap between knowledge, practice and real-world circumstances. There is an urgent need to rethink the role of policy makers, researchers, practitioners and laypeople in the construction, renovation and reuse of the built environment in order to deal with numerous environmental/ecological, economic/financial and social/ethical challenges of providing a habitat for current and future generations in a world of continual change. These challenges are too complex to be dealt with only by one discipline or profession. Combinations of different types of knowledge, knowing in praxis and tacit knowledge are needed. This book presents and illustrates recent innovative contributions with case studies focusing on five strategic domains and the interrelations between them. These transdisciplinary contributions apply concepts, methods and tools that facilitate convergence and concerted action between participants collaborating in policy definition and project implementation. The methods and tools include experiments in living-labs, prototypes on site and virtual simulations, as well as participatory approaches including citizen science, the development of alternative scenarios, and visioning plausible futures.

Built environments are complex, emergent, systemic, and require contextual analysis. They should be understood before reconsidering how professionals and researchers of the built environment are educated and trained to reduce the gap between knowledge, practice and real-world circumstances. There is an urgent need to rethink the role of policy makers, researchers, practitioners and laypeople in the construction, renovation and reuse of the built environment in order to deal with numerous environmental/ecological, economic/financial and social/ethical challenges of providing a habitat for current and future generations in a world of continual change. These challenges are too complex to be dealt with only by one discipline or profession. Combinations of different types of knowledge, knowing in praxis and tacit knowledge are needed. This book presents and illustrates recent innovative contributions with case studies focusing on five strategic domains and the interrelations between them. These transdisciplinary contributions apply concepts, methods and tools that facilitate convergence and concerted action between participants collaborating in policy definition and project implementation. The methods and tools include experiments in living-labs, prototypes on site and virtual simulations, as well as participatory approaches including citizen science, the development of alternative scenarios, and visioning plausible futures.

We spend most of our lives in buildings and almost every building is unique. The purpose of this book is to explain what buildings are and to provide an integrated overview of how they are built and sustained. The book does not presume any specialist knowledge of buildings, seeking instead to explain why the different groups involved in designing, constructing, managing and occupying them follow certain procedures. It is particularly concerned with the generation and circulation of information between these groups. In taking this view, the book considers the recommendations of Sir Michael Latham's 1994 report Constructing the Team which called for better cohesion and communication between specialists in the construction industry.

This book takes a sweeping view of the ways we build things, beginning at the scale of products and interiors, to that of regions and global systems. In doing so, it answers questions on how we effect and are affected by our environment and explores how components of what we make—from products, buildings, and cities—are interrelated, and why designers and planners must consider these connections.

In an increasingly globalised built environment industry, achieving higher levels of integration across organisational and software boundaries can lead to improved economic, social and environmental outcomes. This book is the direct result of a collaborative global network of industry and academic researchers spread across nine countries as part of CIB’s (International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction) Task Group 90 (TG90) Information Integration in Construction (IICON). The book provides a broad view of some of the opportunities and challenges brought by integrating information across organisational and system boundaries in the built environment industry. Chapters cover a large range of topics and are separated into three sections: resources, processes and added value. They provide a much-needed international perspective on a current global evolution in the industry and present leading original research and valuable lessons for researchers, industry practitioners, government clients and policy makers across the industry. Key features include: a broad range of topics that are not covered elsewhere in the literature; contributions from a diverse group of industry research leaders from across the globe; exemplar case studies providing real-world examples of where information integration has been a key factor for success or lack thereof has been at the root cause of failure; an analysis of future priority areas for research and development investment as well as their strategic implications for public and private decision-makers; the book will deliver innovation in best practice methodology for information sharing across disciplines and between the design, construction and asset management sectors.

Planning Australia¿s Healthy Built Environments shines a quintessentially Australian light on the links between land use planning and human health. A burgeoning body of empirical research demonstrates the ways urban structure and governance influences human health¿and Australia is playing a pivotal role in developing understandings of the relationships between health and the built environment. This book takes a retrospective look at many of the challenges faced in pushing the healthy built environment agenda forward. It provides a clear and theoretically sound framework to inform this work into the future. With an emphasis on context and the pursuit of equity, Jennifer L. Kent and Susan Thompson supply specific ways to better incorporate idiosyncrasies of place and culture into urban planning interventions for health promotion. By chronicling the ways health and the built environment scholarship and practice can work together, Planning Australia¿s Healthy Built Environments enters into new theoretical and practical debates in this critically important area of research. This book will resonate with both health and built environment scholars and practitioners working to create sustainable and health-supportive urban environments.

This book reveals how subjective and objective data gathered by innovative methods of measurement give us the ability to quantify stress, health, performance, and wellbeing outcomes in different built environments. Design interventions informed by these measures, along with innovative integrated building materials, can shape the character of built environments for better health, productivity, and performance. These measures can help employers and managers calculate the return on investment (ROI) of various design interventions. Areas of inquiry in health and the built environment are discussed in three parts: Part 1 – Fundamentals: Human, Environment, and Material Measures for Health and Wellbeing; Part 2 – Methods: Measurement Techniques, Tools, and Methods for Health and Wellbeing; and Part 3 – Applications: Case Studies and Future Directions. The rapid pace of technical innovation and entrepreneurship by interdisciplinary research teams in health and the built environment has created a need for more publications such as this book, which discuss latest tools and methods of measuring the effects of the built environment on human physiology and psychology. Emerging tools and techniques are introduced for this field of built environment design, including virtual reality immersive environments and fisheye lens photograph simulations for human wellbeing impact measures integral to the design process. The potentials and limitations of bio‐responsive material systems and integrated sensing devices with wearable technologies linked to the Internet of Things are discussed in relation to human wellbeing performance improvements. The book provides both the foundational knowledge and fundamentals for characterizing human health and wellbeing in the built environment as well as emerging trends and design research methods for innovations in this field. It will be of interest to researchers, educators, and students of architecture, interior design, and integrative medicine, as well as professionals working in health and the built environment.

Buildings and infrastructure represent principal assets of any national economy as well as prime sources of environmental degradation. Making them more sustainable represents a key challenge for the construction, planning and design industries and governments at all levels; and the rapid urbanisation of the 21st century has turned this into a global challenge. This book embodies the results of a major research programme by members of the Australia Co-operative Research Centre for Construction Innovation and its global partners, presented for an international audience of construction researchers, senior professionals and advanced students. It covers four themes, applied to regeneration as well as to new build, and within the overall theme of Innovation: Sustainable Materials and Manufactures, focusing on building material products, their manufacture and assembly – and the reduction of their ecological ‘fingerprints’, the extension of their service lives, and their re-use and recyclability. It also explores the prospects for applying the principles of the assembly line. Virtual Design, Construction and Management, viewed as increasing sustainable development through automation, enhanced collaboration (such as virtual design teams), real time BL performance assessment during design, simulation of the construction process, life-cycle management of project information (zero information loss) risk minimisation, and increased potential for innovation and value adding. Integrating Design, Construction and Facility Management over the Project Life Cycle, by converging ICT, design science engineering and sustainability science. Integration across spatial scales, enabling building–infrastructure synergies (such as water and energy efficiency). Convergences between IT and design and operational processes are also viewed as a key platform increased sustainability.