Students and academics at the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology (EBIT) who are involved in teaching and research that relate to the various stages of a construction project are developing a transdisciplinary mindset. 

Members of the Departments of Architecture and Civil Engineering have embarked on an innovative approach to built environment education, an approach that achieved international recognition for its impact, scalability and sustainability when these departments received the Quanser Global Sustainability Award for 2023. It was the only shortlisted project from Africa.

The award addresses global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and waste and pollution. It supports the development of a circular economy, which requires effective systems and solution frameworks. It also encourages the engineering community to transform its practices in an effort to improve every element of global technological and economic systems. In the process, it challenges engineers and architects to consider how they can design buildings that support the principles of sustainability.

The project that was submitted for the award focused on improving circular value chains in construction through transdisciplinary education, homing in on leveraging building information modelling for the reuse of building material.

According to Dr Johann van der Merwe, a senior lecturer in the Department of Civil Engineering, the global construction industry contributes significantly to the emission of greenhouse gases and depletion of resources. 

“This is exacerbated by substantial wastage during both construction and demolition processes,” he says.

 Adopting a circular value chain for building materials presents a compelling opportunity to address these challenges, while reducing embodied carbon, dependency on raw materials and wasteful practices. Since so much building waste ends up in the country’s landfill sites, this has both a financial and an environmental impact.

In the domain of construction and sustainability, many initiatives place significant emphasis on addressing the fate of products and materials once they reach the end of their useful lifespan. The UP team’s effort primarily focuses on drastically reducing the physical waste generated when a building reaches the end of its life cycle. However, in the construction sector, the process of deconstruction can be exceptionally challenging, particularly when the building was not originally designed with these aspects in mind. 

Unfortunately, general design practices often overlook the essential considerations of deconstruction and demolition as key drivers of the circular design process. Consequently, achieving circularity at the end of a traditional building’s life presents formidable challenges. 

“While the traditional approach to teaching circularity is useful in addressing immediate concerns of waste in the construction industry, it falls short of fostering a fundamental paradigm shift among practitioners, explains Dr Calayde Davey, a senior lecturer in the Department of Architecture. 

This shift is necessary not only to address the symptoms of wastage, but also to delve into the root causes, all within a broader, long-term ecological perspective. 

Dr Davey believes that the concept of waste must be redefined altogether. Instead of viewing waste as “valueless”, she advocates for a transformation in perspective where waste is recognised as a fundamental and valuable part of our urban-ecological world. In nature, waste is an alien concept. Within an ecological mindset, waste simply does not exist at all. 

“To bring about systemic change in our industry, we must begin by cultivating an ecological mindset in our practical education for the built environment,” Dr Davey says. “Embracing this approach is the only path towards genuine progress in advancing the circular economy within our buildings, infrastructure and city landscapes. To do so, we need to learn how to work together as professionals, and we need to practise in school.”

As a structural engineer, Dr Van der Merwe has experienced the need in industry to collaborate more closely with architects at a much earlier stage in a construction project. 

“Collaboration among architects, engineers, landowners, consultants and users is crucial from the start of a project’s life cycle,” he explains. 

As a supervisor of structural engineering research projects at postgraduate level, he notes the contribution that the Department of Architecture’s digital twinning initiative could make in supporting research into circular construction and the reuse of building material. 

Dr Davey, who is also the research lead for the Hatfield Digital Twin City Initiative, explains that digital twinning provides a collaborative, data-driven learning environment that allows for a multitude of research and experimentation opportunities. 

“Using digital twinning as a vehicle for collaboration among diverse disciplines is particularly useful, especially when teaching co-design at a strategic level.”

Traditionally, built environment education takes place within disciplinary siloes. This results in fragmented and very diverse perspectives on complex topics such as circularity. As such, Dr Van der Merwe and Dr Davey realised that a new, systemic and collaborative approach needed to be adopted, one that transcends individual disciplines and cultivates cooperative problem-solving behaviour. 

“Empowering practitioners with scalable circularity skills such as transdisciplinary teamwork and unlocking shared realities is vital to effectively address challenges related to circularity,” Dr Davey says. 

The success of the transdisciplinary training model that was co-created by these two academics lies in the fact that existing resources were leveraged to overhaul traditional built environment education. 

Existing modules in architecture, civil engineering and construction economics were used to instil a circularity and transdisciplinary mindset in students and researchers without disrupting the core pedagogy. Furthermore, the initiative focused on the students’ professional development. It entailed transcending disciplinary boundaries so that students could fully comprehend the significance of collaboration and learning by doing. 

“This innovative setting accentuates students’ recognition of the immediate and long-term value of collaboration,” Dr Davey says. “It fosters novel insights, shared impacts and diverse perspectives through collective learning.” 

As students from different disciplines exchange methods, skills and diverse viewpoints, a dynamic learning environment emerges that mirrors the intricacies of real-world projects.

While formally focused on architecture and civil engineering students, the initiative attracted interest from students from other departments as well. 

“As the original group struggled to quantify their models for varying detail levels, quantity surveying [QS] students from the Department of Construction Economics voluntarily joined to help them,” Dr Van der Merwe says.

The QS students prepared presentations on QS methodologies that had a significant impact on the team’s understanding and outcomes of the core concepts of circularity. 

“This sensitised the entire student cohort to the QS discourse, an experience that the original students would not have encountered in a traditional education setting,” Dr Davey explains. 

Furthermore, while the structural engineering students delved into their individual research on structural life cycle assessment (LCA), the QS students swiftly offered their disciplinary perspective on LCA. 

This significantly enriched the comprehension and intricacy of LCA for all involved, intensifying the team’s enquiry, and kindling heightened enthusiasm for broader circularity concerns.

In the process, the transdisciplinary classroom organically transitioned into a flipped classroom, in which students mutually instructed each other in core disciplinary skills using shared building information modelling models. Dr Davey explains that cross-skilling within a shared digital ecosystem not only reshapes perspectives on the subject matter, but fosters collaboration, critical thinking and creative, complex problem-solving skills. 

The impact of this approach is that it is scalable beyond the classroom. When they enter industry, graduate architects and structural engineers will be aware of the benefit of collaborating with professionals from other disciplines at an earlier stage in the construction process. From an academic point of view, the scalability of the approach is evident in its application across different themes, as complex problems can be better solved by working together. 

As a pilot initiative, this project served as an experiment, paving the way for further transdisciplinary collaboration at UP. Dr Davey explains that the expansion of this initiative could continue as informal collaborations or evolve into structured transdisciplinary teams within the EBIT Faculty, all the while safeguarding the development of core disciplinary competencies. 

The ultimate vision of the academics involved is the creation of transdisciplinary classrooms that can serve as catalysts for significant, far-reaching transformation within the built environment. 

“Finding innovative solutions that lead to real-world change is at the heart of the University of Pretoria’s Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology (EBIT).  We are home to a generation of leaders and innovators who are dedicated to making a difference through innovative and cutting-edge research and collaborative community engagement. We are extremely proud of Drs Davey and van der Merwe who are globally recognised for their trailblazing research and teaching and learning techniques,” commented Prof Wynand JvdM Steyn, Dean of the Faculty of EBIT.

The research team acknowledges the contribution of HP Architects and UP Facilities Management for allowing the students to experiment on a real-life project.

Download the attached document to read more about the research