SASBE Comes to Aotearoa
SASBE 2024 was hosted at AUT City Campus from 7 to 9 November 2024 by the School of Future Environments, in collaboration with CIB W116, the international commission on Smart and Sustainable Built Environments. The series is closely associated with the Emerald Publishing journal of the same name, and its arrival in New Zealand brought one of the established international meetings of the field to AUT. The conference received about 300 abstracts and organised its programme in 15 presentation tracks across intelligent buildings, energy efficiency, resilience, digital construction and the social dimensions of sustainability, reflecting the commission’s view that smart and sustainable are two sides of one agenda rather than competing priorities.
Three Addresses, One Mandate
Professor Ghaffarian, as Conference Chair, gave the formal welcome on the evening of 7 November with his fellow chair, Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, opened the scientific programme the following morning, and delivered the closing session on 9 November, addressing delegates from the AUT lectern across the three days. Three addresses across three days is the work of a conference chair rather than a guest speaker. The welcome sets the tone for an international community arriving in Auckland; the opening frames the scientific programme and the standards by which it will be judged; the closing decides what the conference has achieved and what it should produce next.
The closing session made that judgement public. Best paper awards were announced with Professor Derek Clements Croome of the University of Reading, one of the founding figures of intelligent building research and a collaborator on several of Prof Ghaffarian’s most read reviews. Prof Ghaffarian also presented the Best Team award with Dr Farzad Pour Rahimian and Professor James Rotimi. Recognition of teams as well as individual papers was a considered choice: it rewarded the collaborative, cross institutional research that the smart and sustainable agenda requires, and it gave early career researchers and doctoral students a visible place in the conference’s final word.
Architect of the Scientific Programme
Behind the addresses lay a governance structure Prof Ghaffarian built for the conference. SASBE 2024 had five international scientific committee chairs, a senior advisory board spanning 20 countries and honorary chairs from Teesside University in the United Kingdom. Three technical workshops were run with CIB Task Group 125, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Prof Ghaffarian’s doctoral institution, and XOIA Studio of Canada. Twelve keynotes came from seven countries, from the University of Maryland, the Technical University of Denmark, Chung-Ang University, HKUST, the University of Reading, Toronto Metropolitan University and Victoria University of Wellington, alongside the NZIA, the NZGBC and the Smart Cities Council. The balance was intentional in effect: leading research universities from North America, Europe and Asia sat beside New Zealand’s professional and industry bodies, so that international evidence and national practice were heard on the same stage.
The publishing partnerships were equally deliberate: Springer Nature for the proceedings, Elsevier through Automation in Construction, Emerald through Smart and Sustainable Built Environment and Urbanization, Sustainability and Society, and CIB through ITcon. Each partner served a distinct stage in the life of the research: the proceedings as the complete and citable record of the conference, and the journals as destinations for extended papers selected after peer review. Partnerships of this range give authors confidence that work presented in Auckland will reach the international literature, and they formed the model Prof Ghaffarian later extended to GDI.
Credentials for the Chair
The SASBE agenda is close to the centre of Prof Ghaffarian’s own scholarship. The review of intelligent or smart cities and buildings, written with Derek Clements Croome among others, set out a critical exposition of exactly the relationship between the smart and the sustainable that CIB W116 exists to examine. The reviews of the sustainable energy performance of green buildings, cited 659 times, and of green building rating systems, cited 966 times, belong to the sustainability canon of the field. Prof Ghaffarian had already guest edited a 2022 special issue of Smart and Sustainable Built Environment on future construction, and has served as Associate Editor of Urbanization, Sustainability and Society since 2022.
Leadership experience mattered as much as scholarship. Prof Ghaffarian chaired SASBE 2024 as Head of Department of Built Environment Engineering, four months after his department hosted IGLC32 and four years after he chaired ANZAScA 2020. Chairing two established international conferences and leading the host department for a third within five years gave Prof Ghaffarian the operational judgement to deliver SASBE at scale, and together with IGLC32 and GDI 2025 the conference generated substantial external income for AUT.
A Legacy in Publication
The conference’s 165 peer reviewed papers were published by Springer Nature in Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, volume 591, as the Proceedings of SASBE 2024, edited by Prof Ghaffarian as lead editor with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, Farzad Pour Rahimian and M. B. Purushothaman. The volume opens with a conference chairs’ message, “Shaping tomorrow: Insights from SASBE2024 on advancing smart, sustainable, and inclusive built environments,” whose pairing of the smart, the sustainable and the inclusive restates in written form the agenda the chairs set from the lectern, placing social outcomes beside technical ones. Selected work went on to a 15 paper special issue of ITcon, volume 30, which Prof Ghaffarian jointly guest edited, and to a special issue of Smart and Sustainable Built Environment introduced by a guest editorial he jointly authored.
The proceedings also carried the work of the School’s own doctoral researchers into an international series, among them studies on identifying outdoor thermal risk areas to improve liveability and on digital competencies for project managers, with digital twins as an exemplar. That chain, from conference to proceedings to journal special issues, is how a three day meeting becomes a lasting scholarly record, and it is documented in the entries on the proceedings and the ITcon special issue. The conference also deepened AUT’s place in CIB’s international network. It was followed by the formation of the AUT CIB Student Chapter, launched in July 2026, and by Prof Ghaffarian’s proposal for a CIB Task Group on Digital Twin Governance, approved in principle by CIB, which identifies W116 among the related CIB commissions whose work it complements.
