Surveying the future landscape of the Australian built environment

One of the aims of the 'Leveraging R&D for the Australian built environment' project is to develop a strategic roadmap for the future of the Australian built environment industry by assessing the likely future landscapes that R&D investment will both respond to and anticipate. In the process of developing the roadmap, the research is taking the Construction 2020 report as a starting point and extending the analyses conducted there to include wider macro-social 'sectors and factors' that may have a significant impact on this critical Australian industry. The sectors and factors are like a map of alternative building blocks in the wider macro-social landscape. Scenarios can be developed from combining these sectors and factors in many different ways to allow for the consideration of a very wide variety of plausible futures landscapes. The map then becomes a way of scanning for and measuring future developments. The built environment is a crucial element in several global grand challenges and the real estate and construction industry play an essential role in balancing natural cycles and societies' consumption of resources. On the following pages are: (1) A summary diagram of the landscape of the macro-social environment in which the Australian industry is engaged showing a selection of important sectors and their corresponding factors; (2) Descriptions of each of the sectors and corresponding factors; (3) Important assumptions; and (4) References.