The Occasion
The third event of the New Zealand Academy of Applied Research met at the GTower Hotel, Kuala Lumpur, on 15 July 2017. Four themed conferences ran together: Architecture, Landscape and Interior Design (ALI 2017); Urban Design and Cities Planning (UDCP 2017); Sustainability, Green Buildings, Environmental Engineering and Renewable Energy (SGER 2017); and Civil Engineering, Construction Management and Structural Design (CCS 2017). A dedicated keynote session included papers by Robert Powell, Karl Wagner and Nasrin Aghamohammadi.
The event marked the series’ first anniversary. In thirteen months NZAAR had held three international events in two Malaysian cities, settled on a stable structure of four themed conferences and a keynote session, and built a community of authors from architecture, planning, engineering and environmental science. The July 2017 programme was smaller than its predecessors, and that compactness proved to be its strength.
Securing a Place in the Scholarly Record
Professor Ghaffarian chaired the event and led its programme and keynote session. With the other co-founders, Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini and Farnaz Sheikh, Prof Ghaffarian was responsible for the peer review and publication standards that brought the series into the Web of Science. The July 2017 proceedings were indexed in the Conference Proceedings Citation Index of the Web of Science Core Collection, the first NZAAR volume to achieve that status.
Independent conference series face a particular challenge. Without the backing of a large learned society, they must earn credibility through the quality of their peer review, the standing of their keynotes and the indexing of their proceedings. Indexing is the point at which a meeting moves from a regional gathering to a recognised part of the scholarly record, discoverable by researchers worldwide and countable in the assessments by which universities and funders judge research. NZAAR reached it thirteen months after its founding event in Putrajaya. The volume itself was compact, 18 papers across 137 pages, against 43 at the founding event, which is consistent with a selective standard of review that an external index would accept. Choosing quality of record over size of programme is what distinguishes a conference built for reputation from one built for volume.
The Programme and Its Range
The papers covered an unusual breadth for a single day. They ranged from the design of King Abdullah City for Atomic and Nuclear Energy as a city for the post petroleum era to digital technologies for inclusive urban planning, the perceived scenic beauty of tropical recreational forests, pedestrian behaviour at mid block crossings in Malaysia, and a comparison of green building rating systems in terms of energy.
Several of these themes ran directly through Prof Ghaffarian’s own research at the time. The comparison of rating systems paralleled the work he was publishing with his doctoral candidate Dat Tien Doan, whose critical comparison of green building rating systems appeared in Building and Environment in 2017 and has since been cited 966 times. The keynote by Nasrin Aghamohammadi connected the event to the urban heat island research of Kuala Lumpur, in which Prof Ghaffarian was a co-author both of the review of mitigation strategies for Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong, cited 577 times, and of a 2018 critical review of the urban heat island phenomenon in Greater Kuala Lumpur written with Aghamohammadi and colleagues. The chair’s research network and the series’ programme reinforced each other, which is one reason the event could attract keynotes of this standing.
Read from today, other papers in the volume anticipate questions that now sit at the centre of Prof Ghaffarian’s work. Digital technologies for inclusive urban planning foreshadow the doctoral research on urban digital twins and wellbeing that Prof Ghaffarian has since co-supervised; pedestrian behaviour at crossings connects with the mobility and transport strand of the RG UBE Lab; and a city designed for the post petroleum era addresses the decarbonisation agenda that runs through the research on resilient mobility and infrastructure. The series was an early forum for themes that would later define the research priorities of the School of Future Environments.
A Chair Publishing at the Front of the Field
The credibility of an independent series depends in part on the standing of the people who lead it, and 2017 was one of the most consequential publishing years of Prof Ghaffarian’s career. The year saw the volume publication of the review of BIM uptake, since cited 1,266 times; the nD BIM integrated knowledge based building management system for inspecting energy efficiency after construction, cited 231 times; the critical comparison of green building rating systems in Building and Environment; the review of urban heat island mitigation in Cities; and a study of BIM implementation for New Zealand’s Green Star certification in Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management.
These papers appeared in leading journals of Elsevier and Emerald Publishing, and several have become standard references. That the chair of NZAAR was publishing at this level in the same months the series sought indexing is part of the explanation for its rapid recognition. Authors submitting to the July 2017 event were reviewed within a structure led by researchers who understood, from their own experience as authors, what international journals and indexing services expect. For the doctoral candidates and early career researchers who made up much of the series’ authorship, that was a substantial benefit: an indexed publication, reviewed to a recognisable standard, at the beginning of a career.
Standards That Travelled
The principles fixed in 2017, rigorous review, keynotes of international standing, indexed publication and a structure in which several disciplines meet, became the template for Prof Ghaffarian’s later conference leadership. SASBE 2024, which he co-chaired with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini in collaboration with CIB W116, published 165 peer reviewed papers in Springer Nature’s Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering and an associated special issue of ITcon. The GDI series has since worked with Emerald Publishing, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Elsevier.
The same standards shape Prof Ghaffarian’s editorial service as Associate Editor of three international journals and guest editor of eight journal special issues, roles in which the judgement first exercised as NZAAR’s chair, about what deserves publication and in what form, is exercised at the scale of the international literature. The July 2017 event is where that judgement first earned external validation.