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By adopting the “hard” and “soft” project management (PM) approaches from the PM-literature, this paper aims to problematize the expected role of client organizations in driving innovation in the transport infrastructure sector.

Addressing a large public client in Sweden, a case study design was initially applied to provide in-depth insights and perspectives of client project managers’ views and experiences of managing projects expected to drive innovation. In this paper, the concepts of “hard” and “soft” are used to discuss empirical findings on challenges associated with adopting a PM-approach for driving innovation in projects. The empirical material consists of interview data, complemented with observations and archival data.

Findings reveal challenges associated with combining hard and soft approaches, frequently demonstrating difficulties in balancing short-term project expectations with the promotion of innovation. In line with the literature, project managers note that there is a need for soft approaches to promote development and drive innovation. Yet, findings reflect a situation in which operational success criteria predominate, whereas soft approaches are not sufficiently used to create the grounds required for fostering innovation.

Insights are provided into how PM-approaches may impact construction innovation in the infrastructure sector, demonstrating a need for further research on the challenges and implications of applying and combining hard and soft PM-approaches.

This study traced the architectural, urban and social characteristics of the Bugok Railway Official Residences (BRORs) in South Korea. It also explored the modern elements of Western (or Japanized Western) or traditional Korean characteristics embodied in the BRORs in the modernization process of Korea in the early 20th century.

Through literature reviews, field trips and archive investigation, this study uncovered new critical facts concerning the origin of the BRORs’ construction plan and architectural characteristics.

The BRORs’ value can be described as follows. First, the BRORs are the first modern housing complex in the Uiwang region. Second, they are meaningful as a housing area built during the Japanese colonial period, and many houses were concentrated in the center of a large city. Third, each official residence shows that various phenomena (mass production, standardization, efficiency and so on) are concentrated in buildings from premodern to modern period. Finally, the image of a group residential complex about to be demolished due to redevelopment is recorded in detail.

In the 1940s, the Railway Bureau of the Japanese Government-General of Korea planned a new small-scale town where mainly railway workers would live. The BRORs in Sam-dong, Uiwang were the first-phase plan. Specifically, 200 households in 100 buildings (two households per building) were built in 1943 during the end of the Japanese colonial period. After the liberation in 1945, these residences were made available to the general public and only 27 households remained through modification and renovation. The remaining residences will be demolished in 2023.

This research examined the meaning of the BRORs, which had not previously been researched in-depth, from diverse perspectives; accordingly, the basic research required for sustainable archiving can be performed after demolition using the study data.

In the post-pandemic era urban ecosystem planning has become critically important. Given the emphasis on relevant issues concerning the complex interactions between human civilizations and natural systems within urban environments in the new normal, this article aims to enrich the field of knowledge management developing a cross-cultural analysis for clarifying the role of knowledge in planning and urban ecosystems.

This paper is conceptual in nature. Based on a theoretical foundation built by a critical literature review and data from the China Statistical Yearbook and China’s National Bureau of Statistics, this paper introduces some emerging real-impact topics regarding the connections between humanistic knowledge and urban planning. A comparative analysis between the capital city of Chang’an in the Tang dynasty of China and the capital city of Athens in Ancient Greek was used for explaining the influence of knowledge on successful urban planning.

The understanding the role of cross-cultural differences in knowledge management and practices for urban ecosystems offer the opportunities for rethinking consolidated approach to the interaction among social, economic, and environmental dimensions in urban settings.

This paper implies a new inter-disciplinary research field of great interest for the real impact KM community by illuminating how knowledge management is central in urban planning and across cultures.

Modern subway transportation systems need to satisfy increasing safety demands to rapidly evacuate passengers under hazardous emergency circumstances, such as fires, accidents or terrorist attacks, to reduce passenger injuries or life losses. The emergency evacuation capacity (EEC) of a subway station needs to be revised timely, in case passenger demand increases or the evacuation route changes in the future. However, traditional ways of estimating EEC, e.g. fire drills are time- and resource-consuming and are difficult to revise from time to time. The purpose of this study is to establish an intuitive modelling approach to increase the EEC of subway stations in a stepwised manner.

This study develops an approach to combine agent-based evacuation modelling and building information modelling (BIM) technology to estimate the total evacuation time of a subway station.

Evacuation time can be saved (33% in the studied case) from iterative improvements including stopping escalators running against the evacuation flow and modifying the geometry around escalator exits. Such iterative improvements rely on integrating agent-based modelling and BIM.

The agent-based model can provide a more realistic simulation of intelligent individual movements under emergency circumstances and provides precise feedback on locations of evacuation bottlenecks. This study also examined the effectiveness of two rounds of stepwise improvements in terms of operation or design to increase the EEC of the station.

It is over 20 years since the publication of the Wanless Report, “Securing our Future Health: Taking a Long-Term View”. The Wanless Report argued that the National Health Service (NHS) would survive in its current form only if the population became “fully engaged” with it.

In this discussion paper, the authors explored what “fully engaged” meant to Wanless, what it might mean now (allowing for the impact of the anti-vaxxer movement) and what policymakers could do to enhance public engagement.

Although the Wanless Report neatly fitted into other long-term thinking about the NHS, it was unique in that it built economic models to predict the costs and impact of different patterns of NHS performance. Wanless predicted that people’s poor levels of health would put considerable pressure on the NHS. This pressure could swamp efforts to meet healthcare targets and improve health outcomes, despite its sizeable investment of money. Wanless set out three possible scenarios for public engagement with the NHS: solid progress, slow uptake and fully engaged.

The authors pose questions for policymakers and practitioners. Would a reboot of the Wanless approach be worth the effort for policymakers? If yes, how would it differ from the original? The NHS faces the whole of society; could it be the vehicle for engaging the anti-vaxxer public with the truthfulness of medical science, and will it be this, that is, Wanless' enduring legacy?

The exploration of the Wanless Report is complicated (at least for the time being) by the rise of the anti-vaxxer movement’s resistance to health promotion and mistrust of part of the NHS.