Digital transformation in projects disrupts how project-oriented organizations recognize and value skills and expertise of new data-savvy talents. Existing research on digitalization in projects has focused mainly on technologies that can help organizations and people achieve, without connecting the implications these technologies have on human and social capital in project environments. This research goes beyond this dominant technocratic view to examine talent management for project management professionals operating in an increasingly digitalized and data-rich world. Through a purposive sample of 24 semistructured interviews with diverse project management experts across industry, academia, and professional institutions, our findings extend talent management scholarship in two ways. First, unlike scholarship on talent management that hitherto has emphasized identification and recruitment of talents, our interviewees placed more attention on developing and retaining talents. Second, whereas talent management scholarship can identify pivotal roles that can secure competitive advantage, our research highlights the importance of data-savvy expertise to interact with nondigital project management expertise in order for such pivotal roles to succeed in project contexts. Strategies are proposed for new directions in talent management practices based on our proposed buy–lease–make model for talent management in project-oriented organizations.

The construction sector is increasingly recognized as a critical domain in the pursuit of a circular economy (CE) (Adams et al. 2017). In the Netherlands, the landfilling of construction and demolition waste (CDW) is already minimized, underlining the transition outcome to CE, but most of the CDW is currently only processed low level recycling or backfilling (Azcárate- Aguerre 2023). Among the various strategies to circularity, reuse of construction products has shown particular promise, where materials and components are recovered, refurbished if necessary, and reintroduced into new or ongoing building projects(Tsui 2023; Van Uden et al. 2025). Yet, despite its potential, this approach faces a series of practical challenges that impede mainstream adoption: fragmented stakeholder networks, inconsistent or incomplete data about available used materials, and a general lack of robust, integrative logistics mechanisms (Tjahjono 2010). […]

There has been growing interest in the adoption of advanced digital technologies in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector, as shown by the increasing number of review studies on the adoption of Digital Twin (DT) in the sector. While previous reviews on DT in the AEC sector have emphasised the technical opportunities and challenges, reviews that take a specific organisational and management focus on the use of DT are lacking. In this systematic review, we close this gap by analysing 102 papers from three main scientific databases (Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science), which emphasise organisational and management aspects of using DT in the AEC sector across the project and asset lifecycle phases. The findings indicate that, whereas there is still a stronger focus on finding optimisations for various performance concerns (e.g. project efficiency, health and safety and maintenance performance), there is increasing awareness and interest in using DT to encourage collaboration and (end-)user participation. Despite this recognition, our review also identified a number of critical knowledge gaps on the use and user perspectives of DT, which includes how powerful computational tools can be developed into user-friendly interfaces to reduce complexity and increase accessibility to all stakeholders in the decision-making process, and how participatory design frameworks can be combined with structured feedback systems and standardised data access protocols in order to stimulate communication, continuous improvement, and data-driven decision making.

The real estate industry is increasingly challenged to integrate sustainability into its operations, more specifically by the growing importance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) values. Simultaneously, the advancement of digital functions is reshaping industries worldwide, including the real estate industry, by transforming operational strategies and processes. This convergence places significant pressure on the industry to adopt ESG values while understanding their interconnection with digital functions.
As a result, this research explores the dynamic interplay between ESG values and digital functions, focusing on how their integration can enhance sustainable development in real estate. Employing a multi-stakeholder, chain-oriented approach, the study examines key ESG value constellations and their interconnection with digital functions. Real estate developers, as key actors in initiating, planning, and managing real estate development projects, are positioned as the primary focus group for this research for understanding and addressing this interconnection.
The main objective is to add onto academic literature and develop practicalities and insights that provide real estate developers with actionable insights to navigate the complexities of ESG values and digital functions effectively. By advancing understanding in this area, the study aims to contribute to the future of real estate development characterised by sustainability, transparency, and resilience, aligning with broader global goals for environmental and social responsibility.

Interorganisational collaboration has been a longstanding, central topic of interest to researchers and practitioners in construction management. Early studies have approached collaboration through factors- or indicators-oriented modes of theorising, with more recent studies zooming in on the practices of collaboration. Yet, how collaboration emerges and what effortful accomplishments need to be in place for collaboration to work remain under-explored. In this paper, we investigate how interorganisational collaboration emerges in the context of sustainability transitions, where transitions are characterised by long-term endeavours that go beyond a single project, and which are typically known for high levels of uncertainty and novelty. Through two living laboratories for regenerating the port cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in which we work as engaged scholars in these settings we analysed how, how actors navigate through the paradoxes of identity, challenge specificity, and temporal uncertainties are analysed as they come together to learn to collaborate.

Amidst the disruptive backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are navigating toward a new normal, leveraging digital technologies to reconfigure business processes and operational practices. This study delves into the transformative effects of digitalization on project management, with a focus on integrating data-savvy talent in a data-rich era. Employing a mixed methods approach, data were collected from June to November 2022, providing a comprehensive blend of various perspectives. Quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted successively in this study to explore the formation mechanism of digital competence of talents in project management and analyze the practical experience and expectations on the impact of data-savvy talents on project management. This study highlights the crucial role of organizations in actively shaping digital competencies to align with the changing demands of project management. It also emphasizes the increasing importance of data-savvy talents, whose intrinsic understanding of digital technologies and business models is essential in transforming the project management landscape. The outcomes of this study offer both theoretical insights into the nexus of digital competence, talent management, and project management, and practical guidelines for effectively integrating new talents into project management practices.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of the most dicussed topics of today and are being used to support solving complex problems. AI has given opportunities for efficiency, control, safety while raising issues around trust, optimism and responsibility. One of the prominent features of AI resides in the digitalization of the built environment. Optimizing the built environment to improve quality of life, adapt to climate change and respond to crises requires strategies to redesign, reproduce and manage the traditional ways the built environment has been shaped. In this chapter, we present demonstate how we can use AI for post-pandemic recovery. To do that, we first start with addressing digital transformation and the role of AI. We then discuss how we can accelerate this transformation in cities. We will reflect on the covid-19 crises and the impact of the crises in the built environment. We argue that the use of AI raises new possibilities, questions and problems around how we can better organize the built environment and more inclusive participation while supporting existing logics of the built environment.

The recent research focus on circular construction supply chains challenges the integration of supply chain processes. There is a need to build simulation tools for construction, facility management, deconstruction and reuse of building components. This paper introduces a model-based tool to enhance supply chain process integration developed with Business Process Mapping and Notation (BPMN). The model captures the remanufacturing supply chain for façade products that are demounted and reapplied in a different construction project. The paper highlights the tool’s potential for predictive analysis and decision support based on supply chain performances. The demonstration shows an innovative approach to CE-driven supply chains.

Automatic design tools are being developed to assist designers handle tedious work at scale. However, knowledge gaps still exist in harnessing deep learning models to learn from human experience for more efficient design generation while keeping the data understandable and interoperable. Moreover, human-in-the-loop approach is largely neglected, which are essential for more user-centered design. This research utilizes graph data to parametrically represent housing designs and graph-representative deep generative models for design generation, which provides an interactive design approach for the users at every step. This method would facilitate the human-centered design process by returning feasible and parametric housing design alternatives.

Despite the importance of motivation in driving the formation of collaborative risk management, the existing literature lacks recognition of stakeholders’ motivations to participate in the collaborative risk management of mega infrastructure projects. By combining interview data with the theoretical framework based on previous literature, this study constructs a motivation framework for stakeholders to participate in collaborative risk management of mega infrastructure projects, comprising four groups of motivations formed by glue identity logic (organizational or individual level) and interest logic (intrinsic drive or extrinsic stimulus). Motivational differences between project owners and contractors are discussed based on the case study of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, indicating that these differences are closely related to the identity of stakeholders and project progress. This study contributes a systematic perspective to recognize the motivations behind participation in collaborative risk management of mega infrastructure projects, aligns managerial intentions with actual motivations, and uncovers new insights into collaborative risk management. It enriches the collaborative risk management theory in mega infrastructure projects and provides guidance and inspiration for practitioners in decision-making and collaborative risk management in such projects.

In an age where research productivity has become a valued measure, it is encouraging to read a book that calls for researchers to slow down and embrace ethnography in order to dwell in the throes of everyday life. As the editors rightly point out, ethnographic research enables us to search deeper, ask unexplored or under-explored questions and reveal the 'hidden gems' that allow us to better understand what really goes on in the practices of constructing the built environment. Over 20 years ago, as I was embarking on my own journey as a PhD student, I was indeed drawn to the power of ethnographic research. An early inspiration came from reading LeMasters' (1975) tavern approach and his attempt to grasp the culture of building workers, their attitudes to family and work life and their perspectives and suspicions of the 'other' (e.g. the managerial classes, women, ethnic minorities). LeMasters spent five years immersed in the life of a tavern where building workers socialised and, apart from writing up his observations, he also learnt to play pool and eventually became part of the winning team in the tavern's champion's league.

Learning has been put forward as a critical aspect to achieve sustainable transformation of societal systems. However, there is a lack of a systematic review of empirical evidence on how learning is related to sustainability transitions. To bridge this gap, we systematically reviewed 113 empirical papers that addressed the role of learning in transitions. Our results show that the complexity of the relationship between learning and transitions is not deeply analysed and that there is a need to distinguish more precisely between learning processes and learning outcomes. Further, there is a need to shift the focus towards analysing regime-level learning to increase our understanding of how learning contributes to system transformation. Finally, networks, trust, disagreement, and power are key aspects related to learning that will require further examination, especially in terms of how they play out dynamically in learning for sustainability transitions.

The transition from projects to operations requires a spanning from more temporary, goal-oriented, and evolving organizational forms to more permanent, routine, and ongoing organizational forms. A question of practical and theoretical significance is how to organize the transition to operations in large inter-organizational projects. To answer this question, we conducted a longitudinal case study of Beijing Daxing International Airport, which is the largest transportation hub in China to date, and provides rich evidence for successfully managing the transition to operations. By analyzing the organizational design strategy, structures, processes, and management of people in the transition, we provide a synthetic framework for designing the transition to operations in large inter-organizational projects. The framework provides a set of considerations to design organizational boundaries that build connections, emphasize coordination, and achieve continuity between projects and operations. This study contributes to the nexus of operations management and project management and the organizational design of large inter-organizational projects.

Research on the circular built environment has to date focussed mainly on technical aspects of circularity in the built environment, emphasising the development of methods, tools, and frameworks to facilitate technical solutions that can narrow, slow, close, and regenerate materials cycles. Despite progress made in understanding the technical possibilities of circularity in the built environment, and although there has been longstanding acknowledgement that new forms of inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration are needed to accelerate and scale up solutions for the circular built environment, studies have also consistently highlighted the lack of collaboration as a significant barrier. In this position paper, we argue that existing research tends to focus on collaboration at the level of the building project, and this neglect calls for developing longer-term collaboration for circularity as a multi-level transition that considers the interactions between multiple parties involved in extended and multiple product lifecycles traversing multiple scales beyond the building project.

To close the loop for the circular economy (CE) transition in the construction industry, forward logistics (FL) and reverse logistics (RL), as enabling operations for CE, are important topics to be addressed. However, current research mainly focuses on either FL or RL, with a lack of synthesis that presents an overview of the bi-directional logistics system integrating FL and RL and related mechanisms to close the loop. This review, therefore, explores the current cases of FL and RL in the construction arena through a systematic literature review (SLR) process. A review framework to synthesize and compare both FL and RL operations in various phases of the construction project life cycle (CPLC) has been established for this purpose. The phases include - in FL: design, manufacturing, construction, and operations; and in RL: deconstruction, product reuse, waste distribution, and material reprocessing. The review concludes that while similar methods and CE strategies are used in FL and RL, RL operations require more integration between supply chain actors to close the loop for CE in construction. The findings also indicate that more lateral integration between FL and RL phases beyond the life cycle and industrial boundaries is necessary for CE-driven construction projects, instead of only direct vertical integration with up- and down-stream partners. This review proposes a new conceptual framework of circular logistics integration (CLI) that consists of channel creation, network integration, and inventory management to guide and inspire future research in tackling the systematic barriers that hinder materials and resource flow from RL to FL in construction life cycles.

The digital transformation in project management is causing disruption on how the organizations recognize and value the skills and expertise of the new data-savvy talents in organization’s decision-making processes for improved project delivery. Existing research on digital transformation in projects has mainly focused on what technologies can help organizations and people achieve, without connecting to the disruptions that technologies bring to projects human and social capital. To address this deficiency and harness the data-rich era, there is a need to go beyond the prevailing technical line of thought and think about people’s issues in project settings. Therefore, this research aims to examine talent management initiatives for project management professionals on how they can exploit the inherent advantages of the data-rich era and digital transformation to build an inclusive workplace. The study poses two research objectives, first to understand how project management professionals experience the trends of the data-rich era in the project environment and data-savvy talent (also in light of the changing demographics in the sector) and second to identify the opportunities and obstacles for managing project management talent to deliver projects in the data-rich era. To answer these questions, this paper uses semi-structured interviews from a purposive sample of 24 interviewees with diverse project management experience. The interviewees were recruited from three main categories of stakeholders from industry, academia, and professional institutions. The research through qualitative data analysis and abductive thinking first identifies an overemphasis on developing data-savvy talent in the expense of attracting or retaining it. Second, the study documents the existence of six clusters of opportunities and obstacles in delivering of projects through data savvy project management talent. Accordingly, the identified themes/clusters of connectivity, communication, information management, project delivery, disruption, and project work and wellbeing provide new directions for talent management practices such as attracting, developing and retaining data-savvy talent in the data-rich era.

Project management practices are being profoundly changed due to a combination of demographics and technological advancements. This study exploresthe question of how the data-rich era is transforming the talent pipeline in projectwork. We followed a mixed methodology between June and November 2022 to benefit from diverse data and perspectives.We undertook an international survey with 124 responses and semi-structured interviews from a purposive sample of 24 interviewees to investigate the trends, areas of impact and key points of attention. The studyshows that organizational talent support and clear digital competence requirements will significantly affect the development of personal digital competence. Especially developing and training talents play a more important role than attracting new talents and retaining existing talents. Additionally, individual digital competence and a clear definition of digital applications in projectswill enormously enhance the performance of individuals in project environments.

Nowadays, emerging technologies continuously shift our understanding of human evolution as well as influence the understanding of the built and urban environment. It is evident that architectural and urban pedagogies are equally impacted by the so-called digital turns. On the one hand, digital technologies introduce a great variety of technical methods, such as mapping, filming, geographic information systems (GIS), parametric modelling or VR/AR technology, facilitating the extraction of certain aspects of urban life through qualitative and quantitative analyses or simulations. On the other hand, the rapid growth of such technologies has also raised questions on whether it could enhance the very understanding of urban conditions in evoking a critical thinking of the dynamic, transient and intensive encounters of urban life. To respond to that, one can perhaps turn to philosopher Gilbert Simondon and his concept of technicity: simply put, technicity deals with how humans relate and transform their environment through technology and how these relations transform all of them in their own – humans, technology, and environment. Utilising the concept of technicity, this paper intends to speculate on the intensive dynamics of urban life. It will do so by firstly embracing assemblage thinking and understanding the urban as an emergent and plastic condition. Secondly, in teasing out the tangible dimensions of technicity, the paper aims to discuss the affective, reticular, and co-transformative relations between people, spaces, and memory as produced and ramified by technology. It then brings the above discussions together to articulate potential urban pedagogies that are enabled by transdisciplinarity and a problem-based understanding of knowledge. Finally, the paper places an open-ended question: how digital literacy could produce a form of urban literacy, and how lack of knowledge on the entanglements between architecture and digital technologies leads eventually to an impediment in understanding how urban life is influenced by both.