Energy-efficient renovation (EER) is a complex process essential for reducing emissions in the built environment. This research identifies homeowners as the main decision-makers, whereas intermediaries and social interactions between peers are highly influential in home renovations. It investigates information and communication barriers encountered during the initial phases of EERs. The study reviews AI tools developed within the EERs domain to assess their capabilities in overcoming these barriers and identifies areas needing improvement. This research examines stakeholders, barriers, and the AI tools in the literature for EERs. The discussion compares the functionalities of these tools against stakeholder needs and the challenges they face. Findings show that tools often overlook methodologies in human–computer interaction and the potential of textual and visual AI methods. Digital tool development also lacks insights from social science and user feedback, potentially limiting the practical impact of these innovations. This article contributes to the EERs literature by proposing an AI-supported framework and outlining potential research areas for future exploration, particularly improving tool effectiveness and stakeholder engagement to scale up the EER practice.

The journal’s Editorial Office and Editorial Board are jointly issuing a resolution and update of the Academic Editor linked to this article [1]. Following concerns raised about the conflicts of interests between the original Academic Editor and the authors, the Editorial Office has conducted a post-publication review of this article. This review process incorporated the appointment of a new, independent Editorial Board member, Brian M. Deal, who did not have any conflicts of interest. As part of the review, the peer-review process was also re-checked to ensure compliance with MDPI’s editorial process (https://www.mdpi.com/editorial_process (accessed on 1 April 2025)). As a result of this process, the re-review process has confirmed that the peer-review process was conducted appropriately and no significant issues were identified. One additional Editorial Board Member, Brian M. Deal, has been involved in the process of the post-publication review, and the original Academic Editor has been updated and has agreed with the final decision. With this update, the new Academic Editor is satisfied that the editorial process relating to this article has been completed as per MDPI’s Editorial Process policy. The Editorial Office would like to thank the authors for their collaboration during this process.

COVID-19 initially closed universities forcing rapid adoption of online teaching. This chapter reflects on pandemic recovery in the context of higher education and explores some of the longer-term impacts that the pandemic has had on academic practice. Recovery is a complex and highly differentiated process and is founded upon resilience that is configured from ordinary rather than extraordinary phenomena. These processes include established social relationships based on extant friendship networks combined with investments in digital skills and related infrastructures. The chapter explores pandemic legacies and higher education focussing on implications for practice as this relates to teaching, learning, research and administration.

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.

It is recommended to integrate specific management competencies in academic education to support the transition towards environmentally sustainable practices, particularly in the construction and real estate sector. This paper explores how architectural management education can integrate environmental sustainability within its current university programmes. In recent years TU Delft explored and experimented with various education initiatives to bring forward environmental sustainability knowledge and to connect with policy, societal and industry practices. This paper describes what we learned from both bottom-up and top-down initiatives implementing environmental sustainability in construction and real estate management education. Bottom-up educational initiatives show that knowledge about transition policies, stakeholder experiences, business models and management practices from a European perspective can help students across the globe to apply knowledge into their local context, reflecting on the overarching management principals across stakeholders, institutions, academic disciplines and cultures. Top-down initiatives show that the university has a vision on integrating sustainability in its curriculum, but that integrating environmental sustainability in construction and real estate management education is still challenging. Adapting the academic curriculum to integrate building and portfolio responses to environmental challenges might be a way forward and the experiences from numerous elective courses and educational initiatives can be a basis to identify the development of a future standard curriculum.

The transition towards a circular economy (CE) is seen as vital for developing sustainable places. CE is used as a new buzzword, as well as an inducement to innovate and change socio-economic practices, by a diverse set of actors to meet sustainability and other goals. Genuine transformation, we argue here, requires those practices to seriously alter discourses and metrics. We adopt a material critical-relational perspective, drawing on the assemblage notion of (counter)actualisation. Our contribution is both conceptual and empirical. Conceptually, we develop an assemblage-based framework featuring practices, discourses and metrics. Empirically, we apply this to national CE policy and local initiatives in the Netherlands. Our results point out both passions and challenges to come to a genuinely transformative discourse and use of metrics.

The nature of shocks and crisis is highly diverse; crises and shocks tend to conglomerate rather than occur as single events. People and places are affected differently and have distinct abilities and resources to respond, cope and recover. Key here are path-dependent socio-economic living conditions along with pre-existent intersectional burdens that are constitutive of the everyday abilities of people and places to recover, to some extent, from shocks. There is not one type of recovery, but several parallel recovery processes. Such recoveries are deeply fragmented and reflect the harsh realities of inequitable societies which are simultaneously risk and recovery societies. Places, people, and policy are unprepared for new crises that would have similar (or worse) impacts than the COVID-19 pandemic. New theoretical development is required to characterise the new paradigm of recovery society which is based on understanding how society responds in practice to the direct, indirect, induced, and latent impacts of shocks and hazards.

Increasing resilience to flooding is a complex process that requires horizontal and vertical coordination between institutions in policy making and implementation. This paper explores the effect of institutional coordination on managing flood risk in two cities plagued by flooding. Our results show that efforts on building urban flood resilience can be undermined by lack of proper coordination between urban development, water management and land use planning. We find that this complexity is magnified by the emergence of the concept of resilience as an urban development goal that is increasingly pursued by various authorities, but that is inherently contested in practice.

Any one shock is never isolated from other shocks and any one recovery process will be complicated by further related and unrelated shocks and their related recovery processes. This chapter highlights the interactions that occur between shocks that are experienced in parallel or simultaneously and those that occur linearly and take the form of shock chains. These shock processes suggest that there needs to be further social science research on the complexity of shock and related recovery processes, to contribute to academic debate, but also to inform practice, policy development, and implementation. There needs to be a new social science research agenda on characterizing the features of the recovery society. A key issue is that there are many alternative recovery pathways and that each emerges through a set of iterative relationships between people, place, organisations, institutions, and governance processes. These alternatives reflect path dependency and previous decisions and related investments but are complicated by place-based intersectionality that compounds the ways in which parallel shocks and shock chains, and related recovery processes, interact with one another forming highly contextualised shock-related impacts and which then mediate the impacts of recovery processes in practice.

In recent decades, various programs have been developed as part of Chile’s housing policies to respond to the housing deficit. Most policies have so far focused on addressing the quantitative, qualitative, and urban deficits, neglecting the social dimension of housing. At the same time, the concept of collaborative housing has been referred to as a possible alternative to respond to these social challenges by fostering social cohesion, collaboration, and mutual aid. This article explores how collaborative housing can tackle the social deficit of housing. Here, we conceptualise this deficit as ‘the lack of non-physical or intangible social characteristics given among residents of a project, such as trust, social cohesion, and a sense of community, necessary for housing to be considered adequate.’ We examined the relation between these two concepts by developing a theoretical and empirical study. The first consisted of a theoretical framework and a review of literature on collaborative housing’s response to the social deficit of housing. Second, we interviewed stakeholders from two study cases. We found that residents in both collaborative housing cases perceive an improvement in their social interactions, sociability, trust, and sense of community in their current homes compared to previous homes. Therefore, we conclude that collaborative housing presents opportunities to tackle the social deficit of housing.

Voor dit onderzoek is data verzameld door middel van sleuteldocumenten, interviews en enquêtes. Alle stakeholders zijn individueel geïnterviewd in november 2022 middels een semigestructureerd interview. Hierbij zijn sleuteldocumenten gebruikt om de positie van een bepaalde stakeholdersgroep inzake warmtenetten te kennen, zoals positionpapers van brancheverenigingen of beleidsdocumenten. Uit de interviews met de stakeholders zijn onzekerheden geïdentificeerd. Een samenvatting van de geïdentificeerde onzekerheden is ter verificatie aangeboden aan de geïnterviewde stakeholders. Vanuit alle geïdentificeerde onzekerheden heeft het onderzoeksteam een inschatting gemaakt welke onzekerheden van toepassing konden zijn voor een bepaalde stakeholdersgroep. Hierbij zijn de volgende stakeholdergroepen gedefinieerd: gemeente, warmtebedrijven, warmteproducent en projectontwikkelaars. Vervolgens hebben stakeholders per enquête geverifieerd of de stakeholdersgroep bloot wordt gesteld aan de voorgelegde onzekerheden. Daarbij wordt er van uitgegaan dat als, bijvoorbeeld, één projectontwikkelaar aangaf dat zij aan een onzekerheid wordt blootgesteld, die onzekerheid van toepassing is op de gehele groep van projectontwikkelaars. De primaire doelgroep voor dit whitepaper zijn gemeenten, maar ook voor andere stakeholders die betrokken zijn bij de ontwikkeling van een warmtenet zijn er zinvolle lessen te trekken.

The delivery of urban basic infrastructure services is often guided by the modern infrastructure ideal, which aims for technical innovation, economic efficiency and uniformity through long-term, centralized management approaches. In rapidly growing urban centres of the global South, however, heterogeneous infrastructure configurations have long involved multiple systems in varying degrees of coexistence. This paper explores how community-based enterprises – organizations that aim not to turn a profit but rather to generate human well-being – contribute to, complement or conflict with wider municipal solid waste management strategies. It does so through two case studies, focused on Luchacos, a local enterprise turning waste into briquettes in an informal settlement of Kampala, Uganda; and the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a cooperative of waste pickers in Ahmedabad, India. Drawing on empirical data and policy analysis, the research finds that, given the necessary state support, community-based enterprises can contribute to a range of sustainability and development objectives.

With rapid high-speed railway (HSR) developments in China, HSR-based transit-oriented development (TOD) has proliferated across the country. Although local governments claim that HSR station areas are planned according to TOD principles, some scholars argue that these station areas actually contribute to unsustainable development. This study investigates two main questions: (1) what success factors should be included in a TOD plan for HSR station areas? (2) to what extent are these factors considered in the plans of Chinese HSR station areas? To answer these questions, we use content analysis to compare spatial plans for 15 HSR station areas across China, triangulating the findings via in-depth interviews and field investigations. This study reveals that most of the factors in the plans for HSR station areas deviate from TOD principles, especially in small- and medium-sized cities. We find that Chinese local governments mainly use TODs as a tool to promote suburban expansion around HSR stations.

This paper focuses on the information and communication challenges in the Dutch energy transition in the built environment, with a specific focus on energy-efficient retrofits (EER) in homeowners’ associations (HOAs). The research surveyed the literature on barriers and drivers related to information and communication in EERs. It systematically investigated the information sources and communication channels provided by governmental and non-governmental institutions on financial subsidies, step-by-step guidelines, home evaluation tools, and participation guidelines. Lastly, the research categorised and evaluated the interfaces designed to deliver the information to the Dutch homeowners’ associations. The research also explored the barriers and drivers related to trust issues in EERs as the correlation between trust and information and communication emerged as one of the most prominent factors affecting EERs' acceptance. The paper analysed the online information sources based on readability, credibility, and interactivity, focusing on accessibility and the ability to generate tailor-made suggestions. The analysis revealed that the online information sources are disorganised and dispersed. The online platforms rarely provide information on prior case studies and more on financial subsidies, guidelines, and EER benefits. Lastly, we discussed the main barriers and potential solutions for these challenges.

Basic infrastructure services – water and sanitation, waste collection and management, transport, energy, and housing – form the foundation upon which cities are built. Sustainable and equitable provision of services is key to combating climate change, eradicating poverty and meeting targets set out in international sustainability agendas. However, even as the language of the sustainability transitions literature is being appropriated by governments, social movements and practitioners, the concepts of sustainability and sustainability transitions remain ill-defined and often narrowly applied. We conduct a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the sustainability transitions literature on urban basic infrastructure services to tap into prevailing representations and conceptions. Findings show that the delivery of sustainable urban services is discursively framed as a predominantly institutional and economic challenge, favouring a top-down techno-managerial approach to transitions that applies technical fixes to environmental problems at the expense of social dimensions of sustainability. While some studies, such as those with a focus on the Global South and/or water and sanitation services, engage to a greater degree with issues such as justice and equality, they still tend towards technical and economic solutions. An integrated approach encompassing all dimensions of sustainability and a broader understanding of infrastructure services not as separate, single-purpose technologies but as part of interconnected systems with multiple social, economic and environmental objectives is needed if we are to transition to a more sustainable urban future.

With the urgency to adapt cities to social and ecological pressures, co-design has become essential to legitimise transformations by involving citizens and other stakeholders in their design processes. Public spaces remain at the heart of this transformation due to their accessibility for citizens and capacity to accommodate urban functions. However, urban landscape design is a complex task for people who are not used to it. Visual collaborative methods (VCMs) are often used to facilitate expression and ideation early in design, offering an arts-based language in which actors can communicate. We developed a co-design process framework to analyse how VCMs contribute to collaboration in urban processes throughout the three commonly distinguished design phases: conceptual, embodiment, and detail. We participated in a co-design process in the Atacama Desert in Chile, adopting an Action Research through Design (ARtD) in planning, undertaking and reflecting in practice. We found that VCMs are useful to facilitate collaboration throughout the process in design cycles. The variety of VCMs used were able to foster co-design in a rather non-participatory context and influenced the design outcomes. The framework recognized co-design trajectories such as the early fuzziness and the ascendent co-design trajectory throughout the process. The co-design process framework aims for conceptual clarification and may be helpful in planning and undertaking such processes in practice. We conclude that urban co-design should be planned and analysed as a long-term process of interwoven collaborative trajectories.

The development of high-speed railway (HSR) new towns in China represents a new phase of suburbanization and has had a significant impact on urban expansion, but not all of its mechanisms and drivers have been studied. This article aims to understand the booming development of HSR new towns in China through the theoretical lens of state entrepreneurialism. It dissects the entrepreneurial behaviors of the local state in a medium-sized city, which harnesses the HSR project strategically to develop a new town. Our findings reveal that local governments play out state entrepreneurialism in developing HSR new towns. They compete with other cities for HSR projects. They are motivated by land revenue generation, career advancement for officials, and maintaining state power. Furthermore, this article contributes to the understanding of interactions among multi-level governments. Local states in China can also exert influence on the policymaking and resource allocation of the national government.

With the increasing social and ecological pressures on urban settlements, re-thinking how we produce them becomes a growing concern. Due to the diversity of actors across sectors and backgrounds involved in such design processes, collaboration is of utmost importance. Co-design can thus play a crucial role in integrating aims and knowledge as an evolving institutional process toward feasible, suitable and legitimate projects. While many studies on co-design focus on one-time activities, little attention is paid to conceptualising how such processes occur, involving several actors in dynamic participatory ways. We propose a Co-Design Framework and suggest that collaboration is achieved at many levels within different design steps in the process. Analysing three Chilean public space co-design processes through the lens of our framework, we highlight the intrinsic diversity of such an approach. This study posits that three co-design arenas interact (strategic, transdisciplinary, and socio-cultural) according to their main aims to enable, inform, and legitimise the projects accordingly. Our framework contributes to conceptualising and analyzing co-design and may also be useful to plan and develop such processes in academia and practice.

The rapid high-speed railway development in China has faced many institutional challenges for the integrated development of transport and land use in station areas. This paper aims to gain insight into the institutional rules that structure the actors’ interactions and how they influence the integrated development in station areas. The Institutional Analysis and Development framework has been applied to a specific action situation, named Lanzhou West HSR station area in China. The findings from interviews, document analysis, and field visits reveal that Chinese institutional rules obstruct interactions between actors, thereby hampering the integrated development of functions in HSR station areas.

Urban living labs (ULLs) are progressive forms of interventions that aim to fulfil the sustainability ambitions of cities and communities. They provide opportunities to translate new ideas into practice. The increasing interest among researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in understanding sustainability transitions (ST) has brought new forms of experimentation through which cities and communities can be governed. Recently, there has been increasing attention towards the concept of circular economy (CE). This term promises the creation of distinct city systems in which material flows can be managed efficiently. In this article, we explore how ULLs can become pathways of sustainability transition towards innovative city systems from a circular economy perspective. By adopting a series of systematic analyses, i.e., multiple correspondence analysis and content analysis, we demonstrate the main pathways of circular economy-oriented innovative city systems that have been used in the literature. As a result of this work, we identify the main pathways, namely knowledge production, policy making, co-creation, geographical embeddedness, urban transitions, networks of cooperation among institutions, culture change, and collaborative engagement.