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A central platform to exchange best practices and ideas guiding the infrastructure and urban development industry in its transformation, and helping it to address its key challenges.

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All Challenges

How business decision-makers can stimulate visionary thinking: Studying scenarios to navigate a volatile future

Scenarios have the power to anticipate potential systemic transformations, enable the necessary strategic dialogue between key stakeholders, to analyse change and as a consequence unlock novel and visionary approaches. According to the OECD “The goal in using scenarios is to reveal the dynamics of change and use these insights to reach sustainable solutions to the […]

How Latin America and the Caribbean can unlock its digital potential

The region can learn lessons from first movers to leapfrog to success Digitising the built environment could revolutionise service provision and how we build and deliver the underlying infrastructure and real estate assets.   Figure 1: Percentage urban and location of urban agglomerations with at least 500,000 inhabitants, 2014. Source: UN, World Urbanisation Prospects: The […]

New Report available | An Action Plan to Accelerate Building Information Modeling (BIM) Adoption

BIM is the centerpiece of the construction industry’s digital transformation, however BIM adoption is still too slow Download the full report here In the last decades the construction industry has failed to keep up with productivity gains made in other industries, hampering national economies’ wider growth, societies’ well-being and the solution of environmental issues. Emerging […]

New Report available | Shaping the Future of Construction: An Action Plan to solve the Industry’s Talent Gap

The construction industry needs to take actions to close its talent gap as one major hurdle for its digital transformation Recently, transformative technological developments, like 3D-printed houses, automated construction equipment and pre-fabricated skyscrapers, emerged. The digital transformation of the construction industry has the potential to uplift the decade-long stagnating productivity of the industry which is […]

Where people live the longest

How NEOM could set a new lifespan record for its future Citizens by designing a $500-billion-megacity community of rejuvenation and happiness. Following the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 to transition into a post-oil economy, his country has just announced a plan to build a megacity on the coast of the Red Sea, NEOM, […]

It costs trillions of dollars to settle commercial conflicts. It’s time for Alternative Dispute Resolution

More commercial disputes happen in energy, mining, infrastructure and urban development than in other industries. Projects in these sectors demand long timeframes and the co-ordination of large numbers of organisations, both of which cause friction. Consequently, conflict management and dispute resolution techniques have advanced fast. Why do disputes matter? Commercial disputes are like toxins. They cause […]

These homes of the future will bring nature indoors

Rethinking how we build shelter may be an important step in increasing sustainability. One such possibility involves creating permeable buildings that interact with the natural world. Traditional buildings are designed to provide protection against a savage world, with us safe on one side and our waste on the other. Architects have long relied on ‘hard’ […]