The age of facility managers' paper boxes is yet far from over

The first time I saw the top left image was July 2012 during a keynote speech by Dr. Bill East as part of the ECPPM in Reykjavik. I had then just started my doctoral studies and roughly outlined my research area as lifecycle-support building information management. Through literary sources such as the BIM Handbook, I had already noticed the urge for extending the use of high-end information technologies to the operation phase; but I still had an avid hunger for more insights and indications for finalizing my research topic.

The image at the top left shows a room where FM documents are stored - in a hospital if I remember correctly. The image conveys an uncomfortable reality about the status quo in the facility management sector: the information required for operating buildings and planning and executing maintenance tasks often needs to be dug out of piles of blueprints, brochures, manuals and contractual documents stacked in some shabby obscure room. The gist of Dr. East's talk was to unravel how inefficient, error-pone, sluggish and counterproductive this prevailing practice of information management is and a suggested approach to turn the tide.

In my first paper, 'Is the age of facility manager's paper boxes over?', the problem was addressed in detail, an alternative solution (FM:BIM) was disclosed through literature, and the major categories of obstacles to be lifted to truly leverage BIM for a more efficient FM&O sector were designated.

Since then, I have been constantly monitoring the subject area to ascertain the relevance of my research goal and gauge the possible need for updating or modifying the overall set up. Through hours of talks and discussions with professionals of different positions in both fields of FM&O and construction IT, attending seminars and observing practitioners, I can confidently conclude that the problem still prevails - even in such an IT-friendly country as Sweden.

The picture in the middle shows the construction drawings and operation documents of the condominium where I live, freshly handed over from the construction company to the facility management firm! All documents are, of course, accompanied with their counterparts in digital format; but these are the paper versions that are legally binding and will be used for daily operation activities. Moreover, the digital hand-over documents are, in the best case, PDF files and no original model or drawing in either proprietary or neutral format has been included; apparently because no such requirement exists in contractual documents which, in turn, is a result of lack of national legislations on digital hand-over requirements.

The strategic document 'BIM i staten' which has been procured by five Swedish public organizations and provides guidelines for open-standard information management in the AECO industry and other initiatives from BIM Alliance Sweden gradually paves the ground for filling the legal gaps mentioned above.

I took the picture to the top right the other day upon entering the pool where I usually swim. One of the staff was carrying a number of maintenance folders to the storage room in the basement. Apparently, the handover documents in paper format were still in use as the primary source of information for running the facility! In fact, FM&O information is currently stored in a broad range of formats as depicted in the diagram below ranging from blueprints and paper folders to cloud-based object-oriented repositories. The majority of FM&O firms are, nonetheless, still using the rudimentary formats that are demonstrated towards the left end of the diagram below.

Spectrum of forms and formats of FM&O information (Parsanezhad, 2014)

Technologies such as 3D-scanning could help speeding up the process of creating BIMs for older buildings or upgrading old-format legacy documents to more semantically-rich building drawings, models and databases. My third paper is, in fact, a critical reflection on one of such efforts (though not using 3D-scanning) for creating BIMs for pre-BIM facilities. The co-author was Johannes Dimyadi who I was lucky to bump into during WBC2013 in Brisbane. We described and analyzed the case of developing BIMs of 191 campus buildings in Auckland over 4 years. The models had then been coupled with a centralized database in an SQL DBMS and a number of APIs through a portal solution and deployed for optimizing their FM&O activities. I presented the work at CIB-W070 in Copenhagen last year.

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Keeping to my recent blogging tradition, below comes some anecdotes of the events I have lately attended:

23rd September - During our last departmental lunch seminar, Professor Hans Lind presented his recent paper on merits of vertical integration in the real estate sector. The term 'vertical integration' originates from the literature in industrial organization and refers to integrating complementary services into the core business activities of firms. The other alternative is outsourcing or buying in such services when necessary. Through this research, a number of theoretical propositions had been tested within four real estate firms in Sweden. Construction, acquisition, selling and operating facilities were the core and complementary business fields of the selected cases.

According to the literature, some examples of the rationales for vertical integration are: preserving the quality of services and products, entering the retail market, enacting more control over input resources and protecting corporational information. As an example, facility owners who also operate their buildings possess more bargaining power when renting out their properties and are less prone to making incorrect decisions such as selling their assets at the wrong time or at a low price. All in all, vertical integration provides firms with additional options. One common feature is that vertical integration increases bargaining power in markets with limited competition.

22nd September - An exhibition of the works by the students of architecture in Master Studio 4 at KTH was held at the new School of Architecture building designed by Tham & Videgård architects. The title for the exhibition was 'Another Earth' connoting temporary architecture for our future society. For me, it was also a good opportunity to take a look inside the new building which vividly stands out in the campus with its curvy façade comprising pre-oxidized rust-red corten plates and huge glass panes.

20th September - The Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket) had organized a public visit to their railroad bridge project as part of the new commuter train line in Stockholm. Citybanan is 6 kilometers long and stretches north-south, passing through the city center. The project will be completed by 2017. In construction of the Älvsjö bridge, modern techniques such as movable scaffolding system (MSC) have been implemented.

16th-17th September - Stockholm Business Arena was held at Stockholm Waterfront Congress Centre. The event includes tens of lectures and debate sessions on construction and regional and urban planning. Off to the side of the event, major actors in the field present their services at the venue. Due to other occupations at school, I only managed to be there half a day. Yet, I had intriguing discussions with representatives of architectural, construction, FM and real estate companies and attended a few sessions on smart cities, infrastructure and residential architecture.

	Right to left: Fredrik Brunes, Inga-Lill Söderberg and me

9th September , morning - As part of the breakfast seminar series organized by the Swedish Association of Architects, Michael Kazarnowiczs gave a speech on how social media could be deployed efficiently and professionally by architectural firms. 'Contents', 'algorithms' and 'people' were emphasized as the pillars of social media platforms where content is the fuel, algorithms are the catalysts and people are the engine. Different media employ different algorithms for customizing the contents. That of Facebook, for instance, customizes each individual user's interface according to her/his interests, previous posts, interest in the creator of the content, content type and recency of the post i.e. News Feed Visibility=IxPxCxTxR.

In Sweden, people at the age of 16 to 25 use the Internet the most. The highest number of Swedish Facebook users belong to the same age interval of 16-25; while the majority of Instagram users through the country are 12 to 15 years old.

9th September, evening - The seminar on virtual design and construction (VDC) was held at KTH. The organizer was the construction firm, Veidekke, and the main speaker of the event was professor Marin Fischer from Stanford University. He presented the basic principles of the Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) method as part of the Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) methodology. A number of case studies were presented where implementing ICE had resulted in significant reduction of work orders and RFIs (request for information) and budget and time efficiencies.

Advocates of the VDC methodology regard BIM as just one single component of their more comprehensive solution which is formulated and practiced at a higher strategic level than BIM. This battle of terms reminds me of how researchers and practitioners in the field of 'adaptation' consider those affiliated with the domain of 'resilience' lacking strategic insight. While BIM is more tangible for designers and engineers, VDC sounds more intriguing and relevant for project managers. Both concepts could be developed further to also embrace the needs of the actors in the operation phase; whereas the term VDC needs to be rephrased to VDCO (virtual design, construction and operation) for this purpose.

P.s. I just discovered that an adept Florida-based team has already started using the updated term, VDCO! I got to know Birgitta Foster firstly through a former student of her, Francisco Forns‐Samso, whom I met at ECPPM 2012 in Reykjavik. Since I found Francisco's thesis an interesting piece of work, I reached Birgitta via a Skype interview in 2012. I also got the opportunity to meet and talk to her during the international BIM conference by BIM Alliance Sweden in 2014. She is a very passionate, charming, energetic and accommodating person with great ideas!

3rd September - Petra Blaisse, the textile designer and landscape architect, presented some of the works designed in their office ranging from interior projects to park designs in Qatar, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Italy, Germany, etc. 'Two eventful years' had been organized by the Swedish Association of Architects and held at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Elaborate use of forms and materials characterizes their work being surrounded by either an individual fully-designed structure or a large-scale urban district.

20th-21st August - Our departmental research and education seminar was held in a conference venue located to the west of Stockholm. Coordination of educational programs at our department, gender equality and pedagogic concerns were the central themes for the event. The corporational vision of the Department of Real Estate and Construction Management at KTH comprises research for a sustainable society, excellent engineering education, and collaboration with industry and society. Research at our department is linked to both policy and practice and covers a wide range of subject areas, namely, urban development, property/facility management, production and logistics.

Miscellaneous thoughts and reports on built environment: from economic segregation to IoT, adaptation and resilience

The lunch seminar on 10th June at our department was devoted to a talk by Dr. Kerstin Annadotter titled as "From centralized housing policy to structural economic discrimination – Analyzing the effect of minimum income criteria and income type restrictions on the Swedish rental housing market". The point of departure was the minimum-salary requirements imposed by housing associations in Sweden.

Access to the rental housing stock in Stockholm and other major Swedish cities is primarily regulated through waiting queues. The waiting time for renting out a residential unit in central Stockholm can take up to a couple of decades. Yet, this is often not the only criteria. Eventually, owners have the ultimate authority to evaluate and approve applicants mainly based on their income. A rule of thumb is that housing expenditures of the prospective tenants should not exceed thirty percent of their incomes. This is though not always the case and the owners' subjective measures in verifying tenants could result in discrimination.

In practice, several rental housing queues have been formed based on a combination of waiting time and the applicants' incomes. Low-income households are therefore constantly denied access to more attractive districts of the city, which aggravates economic segregation. The question that follows is whether income level is an appropriate measure for pre-evaluating applicants. An alternative approach is setting waiting times as the only criteria and providing the owner with the right to expel tenants later in case they are not able to pay the rental.

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On 8th June, Stockholm Association of Architects (Stockholms Arkitektförening) held their spring review of the prominent recent architectural works. The president, Jonas Elding, opened the session. Each speaker or team of speakers shortly presented one or two of their projects.

Bolle Tham och Martin Videgård have established an international reputation for their brick buildings. In the case of the new School of Architecture at KTH which is surrounded by older buildings of dark red bricks, however, they have maintained the harmony through corten steel facade cladding instead.

In an earlier post in this blog, I had shortly written about Fittja People's Palace as presented within the "Architects for Architects" event organized by Graphisoft a while ago. Ola Broms Wessel from Spridd Architects and Madeleine Nobs from NCC presented the project. The main qualities of the project as uttered by the speakers were maximum participation of stakeholders in the design procedure through meetings, talks and workshops, great emphasis on social coordinates of the projects and maintaining high standards within reasonable costs.

Some of the presented projects were on the other side of the spectrum with their main focus on formal innovations and new ways of using materials.
Kalle Dinell and Morten Johansson from DinellJohansson presented their project for auxiliary facilities - including grandstands and cafes - for a football stadium in Lidingö. The designed structure has been erected on an overall hexagonal geometric grid which is manifested in both plan and facade.

Emma Jonsteg from Utopia Architects presented their solution for housing shortage in Stockholm. Their suggestion is to extend the favored concept of sharing spaces - which is nowadays quite popular in designing workplaces - to apartments. An example of dwelling design as such is KomBo. The project is located in Sundbyberg and accommodates large apartments with plenty of bedrooms with own sanitary facilities and shared kitchen and living halls instead of small apartments for singles. The aim is to promote more social and vibrant yet economic ways of living.

Johan Arrhov from Arrhov Frick, Carolina Wikström and Frida Öster from Asante, Louise Robinson from Blå arkitektur landskap, Johanna Nenander from KTH, Åsa Drougge and Göran Lindberg from Nivå landscape architects and Johanna Jarméus from Lovely landscape architects were the other speakers of the event.

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Takaharu Tezuka is a reputed Japanese architect who has worked at Richard Roger's office for a while and developed a number of prestigious designs. On 1st June, he presented a selection of his works varying largely in type and size, from private residences to primary schools. He constantly questions the status quo and challenges the given program and national and regional codes and regulations in search of new qualities and values in architecture. The event had been jointly organized by Stockholm Association of Architects and KTH School of Architecture and was held in F3 lecture hall at KTH main campus.

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On 6th May, I defended my licentiate thesis during a challenging, intriguing and inspiring discussion with the opponent, Dr. Stefan Olander, associate professor at University of Lund and national coordinator at the Swedish Universities of the Built Environment (SBU). The seminar session was followed by a brief celebration and mingle at our department. The thesis work consisted four peer-reviewed conference papers (below) preceded by an introductory section that motivated the papers and mapped them onto the overall landscape of my research:

• Paper 1 - Is the age of facility managers’ paper boxes over? (Joint work with Prof. Väino Tarandi, published in the “Proceedings of the 19th CIB World Building Congress, Brisbane 2013: Construction and Society") 
• Paper 2 - A holistic approach to acquisition of building information for a more efficient collaboration (Joint work with Prof. Väino Tarandi, published in the “Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Construction Economics and Organisation 2013") 
• Paper 3 - Effective facility management and operations via a BIM-based integrated information system (Joint work with Johannes Dimyadi, published in the “Proceedings of the CIB Facilities Management Conference") 
• Paper 4 - An overview of information logistics for FM&O business processes (Published in the “Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Product and Process Modelling - ECPPM 2014)”

The time for chilling out, creamy cakes and drinks for recovering from lengthy months of intellectual endeavors, hammering out the text and arranging all practicalities and formalities of the licentiate degree was though soon over. The second round of my research has just been initiated with preparatory studies, refining drafted plans and making necessary contacts for building up an extensive multiple-case study setup. The work will be continued over a period of app. two years in parallel with other administrative and teaching responsibilities such as running the master-level course, 'Project Development and Architectural Concepts'.

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On 28th April, BIM lounge 2015 was held at the headquarters of Tyréns consulting firm in Stockholm where speakers from Sweden and U.K. shared their insights and experiences about the synergic effects envisioned by merging BIM as a Service (BaaS) and Internet of Things (IoT). Unfortunately, I missed the final presentations on the ubiquitous facility management system, IBM Maximo and the demonstration on the integrated use of IoT and BIM.

Ulrika Franke, CEO of Tyréns and president of BIM Alliance Sweden was the first speaker. She referred to the conservative nature of building industry and how this restrains efficiency and aggravates waste of resources. She then postulated that digitalizing is the central clue to improve automation in construction. This requires educating all actors across the AECO industry, new regulations and advanced business models, according to her.

Anders Fredholm, vice president of IBM Global Business Services clarified their initiative for encouraging a more efficient building information management. IBM promotes the notion of 'BIM as a service' (BaaS) implying that BIM is now an industry driver across the entire lifecycle of buildings from inception, through operation and maintenance and towards recycling and re-use of building materials. Fast and on-the-fly access to building information is increasingly becoming a business-enabler for construction firms. New contractual methods are gaining grounds for facilitating usecase-based payments. While actors in the automotive industry have now widely adopted Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) methods and Digital Mock-ups (DMUs) are prevalent in design of aircrafts and ships, the AECO industry is still lagging behind. Together with other public and private agents and within national programs such as RIBA Plan of Work in the UK, IBM aims to encourage actors to develop their skills and go digital.

The AECO industry is lagging behind others when it comes to automation (diagram is taken from my licentiate thesis) 

David Platt, industrial products lead at Digital Operations notified the surge in the number of organizations that see data as a resource. This is, in turn, triggered by the need for more lean performances as a business advantage over competent global competitors. Buildings are no more seen merely as buildings rather as dynamic material banks that should be used and re-used by building-owners efficiently. The key to a more functionally and environmentally efficient use and re-use of buildings and their embodied assets is constant measurement of building performance and tracing of building materials and assets. The seamless flow of information that is required for realizing this vision calls for soft-landing periods through handover of facilities and a shift of mentalities from silo thinking to collaborative thinking.

The moment technologies and working processes for a coordinated and steady flow and provision of building information are in place, predictive analyses for optimizing setups of assets and accurate KPI management in FM companies would be plausible.

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The final report of this post is about the intense and informative lecture by Jesse M. Keenan, adjunct professor at Columbia University and the director of the Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE). It was titled as "Recent Research in the Adaptation of the Built Environment" and held on 9th April at the Department of Urban Planning and Environment of KTH.

In an earlier post, I had reported on an earlier seminar focused on strategies for coastal resilience.  During that event, Hurricane Sandy was repeatedly referred to as one of the motivations and stimuli for aligning greater efforts for promoting resilience in urban and regional design and planning.

Hurricane Sandy was again mentioned by Keenan through his talk. Though, his remedy for hazards as such was a set of methodologies and concepts termed as 'adaptation' this time. According to the principals of adaptation as articulated by Keenan, natural hazards such as hurricanes, floods and tsunamis affect our built environment in such an extensive and devastating scale and in such diversified ways that confronting them urges for an overall shift in planning paradigms. While more focused solutions pronounced as the concept of 'resilience' mainly focus on maintaining the status quo though spatial provisions, adaptation is about handling massive transformations that could not be reversed. Adaptation is conceptualized at a more strategic level also incorporating top-level social and economic aspects of spatial decisions prior and during disasters. IT-features are essential for and central to adaption strategies.

A subtle point raised in Keenan's speech was the inherent conflict between adaptation and sustainability: sustainability in one system results in instability of other systems, while adaptation deals with the entire equilibrium as a whole. All in all, the concept of 'adaptation' suggests alluring prospects for confronting severe natural hazards of large magnitudes. Such holistic strategies for shaping and managing built environment should be constantly applied over long periods if the capacity for confronting destructive hazards is truly to be created ad maintained. A requisite for this is powerful and stable central decision-making institutions with legitimized top-down mandates. In the absence of such arrangements, more limited but focused and concrete solutions devised at the level of individual structures and urban level sound more plausible and beneficial.

Diversity in Swedish architectural firms

The topic for the first breakfast seminar organized by the Swedish Association of Architects (Sveriges Arkitekter) this morning was 'diversity in Swedish architectural firms'.

The meeting was opened by Karin Hammarskiöld clarifying that the theme of the meeting was too broad to be covered in a single session. The following discussions should, therefore, be considered as the corporational points of view of the participant firms, BAU (Peter Bäckström and Ewa Bialecka) and
Dinelljohansson (Kalle Dinell och Morten Johansson). BAU architectural office have almost constantly had around one forth of their employees from other nationalities since their starting days in 1991, and could thus be regarded as a fairly successful architectural firm in maintaining diversity.
Despite all difficulties with finding a job as an architect, stability of the Swedish economy has turned this country into one of the best working environments for architects around the world with regard to salaries and unemployment rates. Swedish architectural offices are constantly approached by foreign architects residing in or outside Sweden. The employers would often prefer to meet the applicants in person before making a final decision.

The central theme of the discussion was the dilemma of the scarcity of skilled workpeople on the one side, and the difficulty of foreign architects for finding a job in Sweden on the other side. Architects who have been educated in other countries could potentially enrich Swedish architectural firms by contributing their knowledge from other cultural and technological backgrounds. This could be of special interest for Swedish architectural firms considering the fact that they often undertake projects that span over various stages through the entire life cycle of buildings i.e. from design, through construction and to operations. Moreover, globalization has forced corporations to seek more customers overseas and foreign employees can potentially serve as useful links for this purpose.

Speakers did not fully agree on how problematic lack of knowledge in the Swedish language would be for foreign architects. The representatives for Dinelljohansson believed that a modest knowledge of Swedish would be sufficient for employees to do their daily professional tasks as long as the relationships among co-workers are non-complicated and processes are straightforward. In their opinion, proficiency in nuances and expressions would only be required for manipulation purposes.

Peter Bäckström, however, contended that there are situations were the employees need to be capable of detecting manipulative deeds perpetrated by other actors in the market as well as manipulating others themselves when required. Such conditions are more common to smaller firms where almost all employees need to, in parallel to their internal tasks, be in contact with other firms and actors as well as customers. Surprisingly, none of the participants on the panel believed that smaller architectural firms in Sweden were, in principle, less multi-national.

The speakers insisted that the need for language proficiency is different in different working environments. Project managers working on-site, for example, are much more in need of improving their communication capabilities partly through mastering the intricacies of the language; while design positions within design teams could be less demanding in this regard as long as the internal language of the office is English. All in all, the participants postulated that the importance of language proficiency for foreign architects in Sweden is often overrated. Proficiency in working with design software such as Revit and ArchiCAD and expertise in technical aspects of design and construction (respectively known as digital and technical literacy) could, in many situations, be of a substantially higher value for the employers. Knowledge of the Swedish regulations is also demanded, but such type of knowledge is often not that difficult to acquire.

Miscellaneous notes on recent events

23rd March

During the time I was communication officer at Stockholm's International Research Association (SIRAP), I got in contact with Stockholm's Academic Forum (Staf). In that regard, I was recently invited to Staf's inauguration of their new office at KTH main campus (Valhallavägen 79). This was a timely opportunity for meeting and talking to academicians from other universities around Stockholm. Staf's chairman, Moira von Wright, reported on recent developments including the initiatives for branding Stockholm as a world-class academic destination. She also announced that such efforts would thereafter be continued by the newly-born Stockholm Academic Network.

18th Mach

The workshop on BIM 360 Glue and Field was hosted by Cad-q. Joachim Dekker referred to the population increase in Stockholm as the driving force for a more accelerated construction pace. The increasing competition among current actors in the construction market and their international rivals calls for an increased use of more automated design and construction tools which are, at the time, concretized as BIM applications. BIM envisions an AECO industry with lower material and energy consumption, improved productivity and accelerated delivery. In the same fashion as previous decades since the emergence of the technology, BIM adoption level is the highest among architects and declines subsequently when it comes to engineers, contractors and owners; whereas it is the latter group who is assumed to benefit the most from BIM-implementation.

Pierre Gullander proceeded with a hands-on demonstration of Autodesk's BIM 360 products. The main objective of BIM 360 is to connect the design office to the construction site. BIM 360 Glue is intended for information exchange between the design and production units; whereas BIM 360 Field aims to coordinate the information from different production sources and sites and channel them into the hand-over documents.

BIM 360 Glue can interact with Navisworks and enables functionalities such as clash control, creating mark-ups, searching and filtering specific parameters and doing measurements in three-dimensional views. Using standard views instead of common navigation tools has proved to be easier on mouse-free tools such as tablets.

BIM 360 Field presumably facilitates tracking documents in combination with a model viewer, creating work orders and reports on issues on-the-fly during on-site inspection, assigning actor-specific tasks to work orders, automated management of inspection checklists, and monitoring overall status of the project and its progress rate. A number of early-adopters have already started using BIM 360 Field in their projects. Bravida is an example.

Rasmus Thomsen presented a brief demo of the under-development product of Autodesk, BIM 360 Layout. The idea is using a Total station for capturing the as-built model of an existing or under-construction structure and using the output for checking against the original design model and performing quality assurance and quality control procedures. However, the demo was focused on the point cloud capturing stage and did not include the comparison and QA/QC part. 

Andrew Bowles reported on the current state of implementation of BIM 360 Field in the UK. He referred to a project where using the application resulted in saving 9 hours of work per week compared with traditional methods. According to him, the implementation of the software also resulted in substantial reduction in claims from sub-contractors and other actors. This was realized by the ease of access to the required information in a consolidated and coordinated digital database. Site diaries, detailed reports and audit trail information are some examples of such types of information.

He also briefly presented projects where cloud-based information management facilitated direct transfer of building information from construction databases to the FM&O applications such as IBM Maximo. Such a cloud-based and file-import-and-export-free method is considered as the Autodesk's new paradigm for cross-disciplinary and cross-company information transfer. The vision is already realized for information transfer among Glue and Field applications. Yet, optimal work flows for benefiting such configurations and totally dismissing traditional building information registry and transfer methods need to be defined and widely implemented. 

Apparently, Autodesk is trying to add new functionalities to its software portfolio with the aim of providing a cradle-to-cradle package to design and construction firms. 

11th March

A breakfast seminar about Solibri Model-Checker for project managers was hosted by Graphisoft at their office in Solna (Sweden). Peter Dufvenberg, BIM-strategist at projektledarhuset, presented a number of cases of implementation of SMC in Stockholm. SMC is deployed for visualization, clash-control prior to and during periodical BIM coordination meetings and eventually minimizing the use of drawings. The models should, however, be visually checked before running SMC tools. In case of substantial losses of required information or inaccuracies, the model should be returned to the provider to be completed.

SMC has a specific plug-in for optimizing IFC files that are unnecessarily large. SMC also has now plug-ins for Swedish building codes such as different definitions of area calculation according to the Swedish standard, SS 21054-2009, i.e. BOA, BYA, BRA, BTA, etc. As common to all lectures on building information management, the potentials for benefiting BIM in the operations phase and relevant initiatives for this purpose such as the fi2xml format were also discussed.

4th March
In yet another lunch seminar at our department, Professor Hans Lind presented a critical view on the article 'A monstrous Hybrid’ which hypothesizes a shift from a regulated to a liberated Swedish housing market with the aim of relieving the housing shortages of the poor households. 

According to Prof. Lind, there has never happened such a phenomenon as a pure shift from a regulated to a liberated housing market. An evidence for this argument is that the rental prices in some suburbs of Stockholm such as Hanninge were market-driven already in 1970s. Apparently, forced rental reduction did by no means increase the poor household's access to the housing market in those suburbs.

In 1990, the government ceased to subsidize the interest rates for housing loans. Since then, the construction sector in Sweden has received no subsidy from the government at all; while no alternative governmental housing policy has been introduced either. This does not imply that current housing market is totally liberated; but that the real estate market policies have been left to municipalities rather than the market or the state. In such a situation, the decision-making power is distributed among local alliances - sometimes - with environmentalist agendas and the not-in-my-backyard groups and individuals. The result is often a stronger influence for those who try to reduce the costs of the municipalities.

A more concrete consequence of this trend is that the market has less influence on the pace, quality and quantity of construction; new actors can not survive in the market and established actors' strategic policies become the most influential force. The regional agents, who are expected to supervise municipalities, are quite often nominated and influenced by the municipalities themselves and are therefore neutralized. The excess of the supply of housing which adds to the bargaining power of the poor, is not realized under such circumstances.

27th February

It was May 2013 during the 19th CIB World Building Congress in Brisbane when, for the first time, I noticed that the increasingly popular concept of sustainability had been overshadowed by the notion of 'resilience' presumably in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and its devastating consequences for the U.S. cities.

The Coastal Resilience Seminar was organized jointly by KTH Center for a Sustainable Built Environment and City of Stockholm. Gunnar Söderholm, the head of Environment and Health Administration in the City of Stockholm, opened the session with addressing some interesting facts about Stockholm: the city was designated as the first green capital in Europe in 2010; Stockholm is growing at an accelerating pace; according to Vision 2030, by 2020, Stockholm will accommodate 250'000 new residents, will possess 140'000 new dwellings and will become a notably denser city. A sustainable urban growth will therefore gain even more importance.

Map of flooding risk in central Stockholm

The carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of the city per capita in 2015 has been estimated as 3,0 tonnes. This demonstrates a forty percent reduction since 1990. According to the vision document, Stockholm will be a fossil-fuel free city by 2040. While the requirements of ecological sustainability are not far from being met, global warming keeps to be a constant threat to the city in the meanwhile. Like many other metropolitan areas around the world, Stockholm too is now exposed to the risk of flooding. While the Hammarby Waterfront and the Royal Seaport projects were primarily marketed as sustainable urban planning initiatives, the reconstruction of Slussen has a strong focus on handling the consequences of the sea level rise. The municipality is nowadays concerned the most with the question of how to make a dense - and presumably sustainable - city also resilient.

Green islands

The next speaker was Guy Nordenson, Professor of architecture and structural engineering at Princton University. He presented a number of design alternatives for coastal resilience and climate adoption. Examples were taken from New York, Palisade Bay and Yangtze River Delta Project.

According to him, merely controlling the coastal lines using heavy engineering fortifications such as the ones erected in Saint Petersburg and Dutch cities is no more considered as a viable solution for flooding. A more plausible solution is confronting waves and hurricanes at three different zones: on the edge, inland and on the water. Constructing soft edges and allowing the water come in and managing it
inland has now gained a wider acceptance. In this approach, public spaces, landscape features, elevated roads, canals, green areas, raised houses, amphibious suburbs and areas of refuge located in high places are integrated components of an overall strategic plan for flood management. Different arrangements of elements as such are combined to serve different scenarios for hurricanes and the see level rise and the consequences are studied with the aim of identifying the best holistic design alternatives.

New Slussen: the Water Plaza

Monica Granberg, the executive director at the City of Stockholm, was the next speaker who talked about the project of reconstruction of Slussen. Since inauguration of the first lock, the Queen Kristina's lock, in 1642, Slussen has been reconstructed app. every 100 years: the Christopher Polhelm's lock was built in 1755 which was replaced by the Nils Ericson's lock in 1850. The latter was in place until 1935 when the current lock, Slussen, was constructed. Existing facilities and infrastructure at Slussen are in a very bad technical condition now. Improving the structural and spatial qualities of the area is, however, not the only objective of the project.

There are many facilities, cultural sites and agricultural farms located around lake Mälaren. Flooding could therefore cause drastic consequences for more than two million people such as pollution of drinking water and economical losses. The new Slussen is designed to cope with the worst case scenario of the see level rise - which is estimated as one meter by 2100. The locks between the lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea in the new design will increase the drainage capacity of lake Mälaren up to five times the current facilities and reduce the risk of flooding.

As the final speech of the seminar, Zahra Kalantari, the functional manager at ÅF presented some general facts about Stockholm's by-pass project, the East Link project for high-speed rail lines and the 'Blue Green Solution' initiative. The seminar was rounded up by a panel discussion moderated by Gunnar Söderholm.

Time for methodology

Gliding towards the end of the third year of my Ph.D. studies, it is perhaps not the most suitable time for rethinking my methodological stance. However, contemplating my work so far while writing the introductory part of my licentiate thesis over past months brought methodology to the front of my agenda.

The seventh version of the introductory part of my licentiate thesis - which is called 'kappa' here in Sweden and aims to map the enclosed articles onto the overall schema of the research program - was sent to the reviewer this morning for a second round of checking and commenting. Questions which arose along the way, however, stimulated me to grasp the opportunity for participating in the course 'Case study methodolog'. The course is organized by Martin Rudberg, professor in construction logistic at Linköping university. Today, the second session of the course was held at the Norrköping campus. As a preparation for this session, the participants - Torbjörn Glad, Andreas Ekeskär and me - had thoroughly read and analyzed a couple of chapters of the book "Case study research" by Robert Yin - a well-known figure in research methodology and the president of Cosmos Corporation.

The session was an educative forum for reflecting over such fundamental concepts as research strategies, generalization through case study research, components of a research design, criteria for choosing among research strategies, data collection methods and different research design arrangements e.g. single-case/multiple-case and holistic/embedded research design...

The subject area of research methodology is ripe with ambiguities and diverging or even conflicting schools of thought. There is no widespread agreement even about the underlying terminologies such as research strategies and research approach and how different concepts in this field should be labeled. Yet, rigor, systematic work, meticulous documentation and measures for continual examination of validity and reliability of the research design could be stipulated as undisputed verses of the ambitious researchers' mantra.

2014 - Miscellaneous

Due to the workload for the course I was engaged in and some other parallel activities during recent months, there was no time left for more posts on this blog. When I went through my archive this evening, I learned that a handful of drafts from the events in 2014 had not got the chance to be developed into organized texts. Some of the contents have though lost their currency now. Besides, it would not be feasible to work out all those items at this moment. Yet, those events of the 2014 that were supposed to be discussed here are shortlisted in this openning post of the year 2015 in a reverse chronological order:

Poster session at SB14,
photo by Professor Keith Hampson

10/12/2014

During the last lunch seminar of the year at our department, Professor Hans Lind clarified the idea behind an upcoming research work of him and some other coleagues. The central arguement introduced by him was that shifting from public to private procurement in construction projects would alleviate the issues with moral hazards. Generally speaking, diminishing moral hazards could be interpreted as eliminating the incentives for not getting the things done in the way that they are supposed to be done by different parts of a contract.

1/12/2014 - 3/12/2014
I participated in a gratifying writing retreat by Professor Christine Räisänen and Dr. Paul W. Chan held at Chalmers University. Common structures of the abstract and the main text, the funnel principle for presenting the research work and the CARS model were some of the topics that were covered by the lecturers.

28/10/2014 - 30/10/2014
During the World Sustainable Building conference (SB14) held in Barcelona, I presented a poster in the afternoon session of the second day.

23/10/2014
Stockholm Business Region Development & Stockholm IT Region organized an intriguing breakfast seminar about Internet of Things (IoT) at cinema Rigoletto in Stockholm. In the final part of the event, a number of startups in the field introduced their products.


20/10/2014
The seminar, 'Insights and prospects' (Utblick & inblick) organized by BIM Alliance Sweden - was held at Clarion conference facilities at Arlanda Airport. In the begining, Dr. Olle Samuelson briefly covered the priorities in BIM-implementation such as introducing best practices, standardizing (setting and promoting standards), engaging all stakeholders, issues with collaboration, BIM education and BIM research. Dr. Rogier Jongeling's brief words about the seminar was then followed by an insightful talk by Dale Sinclair - Director of Technical Practice (in the UK). He, among others, explained the ongoing activities for updating the RIBA Outline Plan of Work and replacing the approximately 30000 existing CAD manuals with a standard national BIM document. As an example of the challenges with engaging stakeholders, he referred to the fact that 80% of the architects in the UK had not seen the Bow-Richard diagram of BIM-maturity levels by the time...

Bow-Richard diagram of BIM-maturity levels 

The kick-off meeting for the detailed design phase of
the project 'Undervisningshuset'

20/10/2014
I had to leave the seminar to join the kick-off meeting for the detailed design phase of the project 'Undervisningshuset' to be built at the main campus of KTH. The meeting was held at Akademiskahus building where the project manager and participating consulting firms discussed the practicalities of the upcoming design phase.

Dr. Antje Junghans (professor in facilities management
at NTNU) and me at ECPPM (source)

17/9/2014 - 19/09/2014
The 10th European Conference on Product & Process Modelling (ECPPM) in Vienna was opened by the host and organizer of the event, Professor Ardeshir Mahdavi followed by Professor Ziga Turk. Keynote speakers expressed  their concerns about the need for a closer collaboration between academia and industry for realizing a greater impact by the research community on the society. My contribution to the event was an oral presentation of my latest article 'An overview of information logistics for FM&O business processes'.

KTH delegation at the welcome reception at Kuppelsaal, right to left: Professor Väino Tarandi, Susanna Vass, Tina Karrbom Gustavsson and Hannes Lindblad

Project Services Forum by Cad-q

11/9/2014
Cad-q introduced their alternative for a lifecycle-support building information management configuration during the Project Services Forum. The seminar was initiated with an account of information management strategies at the sizable construction project of New Karolinska Solna hospital. The following lecturers contemplated on how to coordinate the use of diverse applications for authoring and communicating building infromation e.g. BIMeye, Naviate, Chaos Desktop, Interaxo, Simplebim and Lumion.

8/9/2014

School visit by Professor Peter Gudmundson

The president of KTH, Professor Peter Gudmundson made a school visit and talked to the staff. Routines for evaluating the quality of education and research at KTH, environmental certification of KTH campus buildings,
KTH's ranking (among the top ten best European universities and the top 120 universities around the world at the time of the lecture), publishing policies and strategies at KTH, internationalization and E-learning were among the topics raised by him.

12/6/2014
Graphisoft Sweden held the event 'Highlight' at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Konstakademin) in Stockholm. Joakim Werning from National Museum explained how he utilized the capicities of the BIM application, ArchiCAD, for scenography of art exhibitions. Creating a virtual collection of the works of arts prior to shiping, examining different arrangements virtually, examining different alternatives for stands, platforms and information texts, lighting design, locating surveilance cameras, extracting quantity take-offs for procurement of materials such as chipboard and gypsum panels and paint were some of the functionalities facilitated by using ArchiCAD, according to Joakim. The talk was followed by a visit to the exhibition.

Design of an art exhibition in ArchiCAD environment

Professor Martin Fischer kindly accepted my request for a selfie
together just before his speech ensuing the conference

20/03/2014
The buildingSMART international conference was held by BIM Alliance Sweden and hosted at KTH. The event was preceded by a number of technical sessions starting on March 16th. Market-based initiatives for operationalizing bsDD, the new concept of FMie (developed in Norway), application of BCF for transferring portions of IFC files, developments of COBie US and UK, implications of different classification systems such as Omniclass and Uniclass, engaging part manufacturers in developing product data templates and fi2-compatible applications such as Solibri were among the topics discussed during the week.