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The purpose of this paper is to explore the feasibility of mud brick houses as an alternative to the more widely adopted emergency shelters used in war-torn Syria. It focuses on the mud houses’ sustainability, cost effectiveness, cultural preference, income generation and security.

This study uses a qualitative research approach to a single case study. Interviews were conducted with field experts from the Qatar Red Crescent Society and members of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) community living in mud brick houses.

The findings reveal that the utilisation of mud houses is a good alternative in relief efforts. The houses are sustainable and cost-effective, take into consideration cultural dynamics and provide economic empowerment to IDPs. However, the maintenance of mud brick houses turns out to be the largest flaw, and this problem requires further research.

The paper highlights the inefficiency of current emergency sheltering practices in Syria and reveals that tents are not a preferred mode of shelter. It further sheds light on a unique case study in which mud houses were used by an aid and development organisation, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses. This paper contributes to practical discussion and ideation on more appropriate housing for IDPs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore two financial inclusion measures adopted within the local welfare context of the city of Milan, Italy, examining their functioning and underpinning representations. The aim is also to understand how such representations take concrete shape in the practices of local actors, and their implications for the opportunities and constraints regarding individuals' effective inclusion. To this end, this paper takes a wide-ranging look at the interplay between the rise of financial inclusion and the individualisation and responsibilisation models informing welfare policies, within the broader context of financialisation processes overall.

This paper draws on the sociology of public action approach and provides a qualitative analysis of two case studies, a social microcredit service and a financial education programme, based on direct observation and semi-structured interviews conducted with key policy actors.

This paper sheds light on the rationale behind two financial inclusion services and illustrates how the instruments involved incorporate and tend to reproduce, individualising logics that reduce the problem of financial exclusion, and the social and economic vulnerability which underlies it, to a matter of personal responsibility, thus fuelling depoliticising tendencies in public action. It also discusses the contradictions underlying financial inclusion instruments, showing how local actors negotiate views and strategies on the problems to be addressed.

The paper makes an original contribution to the field of sociology and social policy by focusing on two under-researched instruments of financial inclusion and improving understanding of the finance-welfare state nexus and of the contradictions underpinning attempts at financial inclusion of the most vulnerable.

Built environments are highly vulnerable to climatic disasters such as extreme floods, droughts and storms. Inaccurate decisions in adopting emerging construction technologies can result in missed opportunities to improve the resilience of built environments. Therefore, understanding the effectiveness of emerging construction technologies in improving built environment resilience can help in making better strategic decisions at the national and organizational levels. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of Construction 4.0 technologies in improving built environment resilience.

A list of Construction 4.0 technologies was adopted from a national strategic plan. Then, the data were collected using the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution technique from selected built environment experts to determine the relative effectiveness of Construction 4.0 technologies in improving built environment resilience.

Six Construction 4.0 technologies are critical in improving built environment resilience (in rank order): building information modeling, autonomous construction, advanced building materials, big data and predictive analytics, internet of Things and prefabrication and modular construction. In addition, adopting Construction 4.0 technologies collectively is crucial, as moderate to strong connections exist among the technologies in improving built environment resilience.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first papers that evaluate the effectiveness of Construction 4.0 technologies in improving built environment resilience. Industry professionals, researchers and policymakers can use the study findings to make well-informed decisions on selecting Construction 4.0 technologies that improve built environment resilience to climatic disasters.

The effects of the spread of COVID-19 across the world are devastating, both from a health and an economic perspective. However, we also see encouraging examples of collaborative and innovative initiatives, in society and in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to focus on initiatives related to digital business model innovation. The authors explore how organizational characteristics provide a variety of opportunities for digital responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and discuss the potential consequences for the speed of digital transformation in organizations and society.

In this paper, the authors analyze how organizations attempt to mitigate the negative effects of fighting COVID-19 using digital business model responses. The authors draw on a qualitative study where they have collected data from the retail and service industries. They have analyzed the data in relation to theory to better understand this ongoing phenomenon.

The authors have identified four categories of organizations (crisispreneurs, accelerators, endurers and thrivers). Each category faces different challenges and shows a different intensity in their digital transformation. The authors propose that the rapid turn toward digital business models will have enduring effects, as organizations have gained transformational capabilities that will remain, and that the digital trajectory has, as a result, changed forever.

The findings in this paper point toward new challenges for leaders and policymakers in terms of how to support initiatives and meet the needs of different categories of organizations while simultaneously being conscious of the potential societal effects of this rapid digital shift. The authors hope that this paper can be of value for managing this shock and learning how to adapt for the future taking certain aspects of current business models as the departure point.

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.

This paper aims to examine the dynamics of house prices in metropolitan cities in an emerging economy. The purpose of this study is to characterise the house price dynamics and the spatial heterogeneity in the dynamics.

The author explores spatial heterogeneity in house price dynamics, using data for 35 Indian cities with a million-plus population. The research methodology uses panel econometrics allowing for spatial heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence and non-stationary data. The author tests for spatial differences and analyses the income elasticity of prices, the role of construction costs and lending to the real estate industry by commercial banks.

Long-term fundamentals drive the Indian housing markets, where wealth parameters are stronger than supply-side parameters such as construction costs or availability of financing for housing projects. The long-term elasticity of house prices to aggregate household deposits (wealth proxy) varies considerably across cities. However, the elasticity estimated at 0.39 is low. The highest coefficient is for Ludhiana (1.14), followed by Bhubaneswar (0.78). The short-term dynamics are robust and show spatial heterogeneity. Short-term momentum (lagged housing price changes) has a parameter value of 0.307. The momentum factor is the crucial dynamic in the short term. The second driver, the reversion rate to long-term equilibrium (estimated at −0.18), is higher than rates reported from developed markets.

This research applies to markets that require some home equity contributions from buyers of housing services.

Stakeholders can characterise stable housing markets based on long-term fundamental value and short-run house price dynamics. Because stable housing markets benefit all stakeholders, weak or non-existent mean reversion dynamics may prompt the intervention of policymakers. The role of urban planners, and local and regional governance, is essential to remove the bottlenecks from the demand side or supply side factors that can lead to runaway prices.

Existing literature is concerned about the risk of a housing bubble due to relaxed credit norms. To prevent housing market bubbles, some regulators require higher contributions from home buyers in the form of equity. The dynamics of house prices in markets with higher owner equity requirements vary from high-leverage markets. The influence of wealth effects is examined using novel data sets. This research, documents in an emerging market context, the observations cited in low-leverage developed markets such as Germany and Japan.

This study aims to examine the impact of some real variables such as real effective exchange rates, real mortgage rates, real money supply, real construction cost index and housing sales on the real housing prices.

This study uses a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model in the monthly period of 2010:1–2021:10.

The real effective exchange rate has a positive and symmetric effect. The decreasing effect of negative changes in real money supply on real housing prices is higher than the increasing effect of positive changes. Only positive changes in the real construction cost index have an increasing and statistically significant effect on real house prices, while only negative changes in housing sales have a small negative sign and a small increasing effect on housing prices. The fact that the positive and negative changes in real mortgage rates are negative and positive, respectively, indicates that both have a reducing effect on real housing prices.

This study suggests the first NARDL model that investigates the asymmetric effects on real housing prices instead of nominal housing prices for Turkey. In addition, the study is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to examine the effects of the five real variables on real housing prices.

The purpose of this paper is to understand if and how industrialized house building (IHB) could support productivity developments for housebuilding on project and industry levels. The take is that fragmentation of construction is one explanation for the lack of productivity growth, and that IHB could be an integrating method of overcoming horizontal and vertical fragmentation.

Singe-factor productivity measures are calculated based on data reported by IHB companies and compared to official produced and published research data. The survey covers the years 2013–2020 for IHB companies building multi-storey houses in timber. Generalization is sought through descriptive statistics by contrasting the data samples to the used means to control vertical and horizontal fragmentation formulated as three theoretical propositions.

According to the results, IHB in timber is on average more productive than conventional housebuilding at the company level, project level, in absolute and in growth terms over the eight-year period. On the company level, the labour productivity was on average 10% higher for IHB compared to general construction and positioned between general construction and general manufacturing. On the project level, IHB displayed an average cost productivity growth of 19% for an employed prefabrication degree of about 45%.

Empirical evidence is presented quantifying so far perceived advantages of IHB. By providing analysis of actual cost and project data derived from IHB companies, the article quantifies previous research that IHB is not only about prefabrication. The observed positive productivity growth in relation to the employed prefabrication degree indicates that off-site production is not a sufficient mean for reaching high productivity and productivity growth. Instead, the capabilities to integrate the operative logic of conventional housebuilding together with logic of IHB platform development and use is a probable explanation of the observed positive productivity growth.

The authors conducted 22 in-depth longitudinal interviews with 11 Hungarian migrant workers in the Dutch logistics sector, before and during the COVID-19 crisis, using thematic analysis and visual life diagrams to interpret them.

This study aims to contribute to conservation of resources theory, by exploring how global crises influence the perceived employability of migrant workers in low-wage, precarious work.

The authors find that resources are key in how migrants experience the valence of global crises in their careers and perceive their employability. When unforeseen consequences of the COVID-19 crisis coincided with migrants' resource gain spirals, this instigated a positively valenced career shock, leading to positive perceptions of employability. Coincidence with loss spirals led to negative perceptions.

The authors contribute to careers literature by showing that resources do not only help migrants cope with the impact of career shocks but also directly influence the valence of global crises in their perceived employability and careers.

Interestingly, when the COVID-19 crisis did not co-occur with migrants' resource gain and loss spirals, migrants experienced resource stress (psychological strain induced by the threat or actual loss of resources) and no significant change in their perceptions of employability.

The common language behind vernacular architecture only seems to be maintained in societies that preserve a traditional way of life. Changes in these societies can threaten their cultural heritage, while research may be a tool for its conservation and enhancement. In this paper, the habitat of a Mossi community is therefore studied as a first stage in analysing the possibilities of its maintenance.

After a previous study, data collection from a stay in Baasneere (Burkina Faso) and the analysis of 32 traditional residential units were completed. The research showed some common features which, when compared against the bibliography reviewed, could be defined as characteristic of the traditional architecture of this culture.

The home for a family unit consisted in an enclosure formed by the grouping of adobe constructions around a courtyard. As the family grew so did the compound, in a relationship directly linking the scales of architecture and the levels of kinship. The main daily activities took place in the courtyards while the individual interior spaces were understood as private shelters. Other typologies such as granaries, kitchens, warehouses and sheds were also analysed.

Some features of Mossi architecture already described in the existing bibliography were verified in the Baasneere case studies, showing that this tradition is still preserved. With a multidisciplinary approach, the house was examined not so much from the perspective of construction, but of its cultural configuration.