20th Built Environment Conference
BUILDING ON OUR PAST, CREATING OUR FUTURE
15 – 16 JULY 2026
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA
The Association of Schools of Southern Africa (ASOCSA) celebrates its 20th Built Environment Conference on the 15 &16th July, 2026, in Pretoria, South Africa.
In celebration of this milestone ASOCSA has selected as the theme for this conference, Building on our Past, Creating our Future. This theme provides the opportunity through a retrospective, progressive, transformative and visionary lens to examine through empirical research the historic, persistent and critical challenges and debates that face the construction industry locally, regionally and globally. The intent is that by reflectively looking back we may seek responses to the following questions:
- What does a resilient, future-ready construction industry look like in the face of deep technological, climate and regulatory uncertainty?
- How can all stakeholders embed adaptability, sustainability, innovation and foresight into design, planning and engineering of the built environment?
- What tools, data, and frameworks can help the construction industry to respond dynamically to climate, societal, and technological change?
Past conventional planning and engineering approaches are ill-suited in a dynamic and rapidly evolving landscape to respond to the challenges presented by, for example, extreme weather events, resource and skills shortages, health and safety crises, energy transitions, and workforce development. Emergent themes include consideration of adaptive and responsive design, resilience thinking, scenario planning, nature-based solutions, smart construction, robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Consequently, construction can no longer only be about durability, but must also take cognizance of flexibility, redundancy and responsiveness – all the while recognizing that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ response or solution.
In 2003, David Perkins at Harvard University in the opening lines of his article, Making Thinking Visible, stated the following:
Consider how often what we learn reflects what others are doing around us. We watch, we imitate, we adapt what we see to our own styles and interests, we build from there. Now imagine learning to dance when the dancers around you are all invisible. Imagine learning a sport when the players who already know the game can’t be seen. Bizarre as this may sound, something close to it happens all the time in one very important area of learning: learning to think.
Therefore, Building on our Past, Creating our Future, challenges us to learn to think – and re-think about the construction industry as a living system amid uncertainty.
The construction industry must continue to deliver in terms of the following:
- Adaptability to market dynamics
- Increased profitability and efficiency
- Environmental sustainability and compliance
- Customization and competitive advantage
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