Off-site construction (OSC) has been regarded as an effective means of improving construction quality and efficiency. The adoption of OSC has been slower in developing countries such as China than in developed countries, and research on the barriers inhibiting the sector’s growth is inadequate. This paper aims to investigate the major factors inhibiting the adoption of OSC with reference to the Chinese construction market. Thirty factors influencing the use of OSC were identified through a literature review, questionnaire survey, and face-to-face interview with professionals in the construction industry. A questionnaire was sent out to developers in China, and 83 completed questionnaires were retrieved. Ranking analysis was used to identify 18 critical factors. The top three barriers are “absence of government regulations and incentives,” “high initial cost,” and “dependence on traditional construction methods.” Factor analysis enables grouping of the 18 critical factors into five categories, name...

The globally-interconnected construction market forces contractors to embrace innovations for surviving and thriving among competitors. Business model innovation (BMI) plays a decisive role in a company’s success because it quickly converts emerging technology into commercial values and produces four times more revenue growth than product and/or service innovations. Chinese construction companies encounter the BMI challenge when facing the technological shift of modular prefabrication from conventional construction methods; however, little literature provides quantifiable information for them to better understand BMI. Therefore, this study aims to identify the relationships between BMI and its drivers for the Chinese construction industry in the context of such a technological shift. The researchers conducted an industry-wide survey and analyzed the data using the structural equation modeling (SEM). Findings confirm four significant relationships: (1) favorable business environment has a positive ...

Off-site Construction (OSC) is an alternative to conventional construction. However, China lags behind developed countries in terms of its OSC development. The chief goal of this study is to demonstrate the critical driving forces and solutions that promote OSC development. A total of 21 hypotheses are established to present the interrelations among eight driving forces. Based on 176 valid responses from developers in mainland China, a structural equation model is built to explore the key solutions and the critical driving forces. Most driving forces, such as Pursuit of Sustainable Competitiveness (PSC), Governmental Policies and Regulations (GPR), Technological Innovation (TI), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and Construction Market Demand (CMD), can affect a Corporation’s Willingness and Behavior (CWB) in adopting OSC through two mediating factors, namely, Economic Benefits (EB) and social and environmental benefits. The findings highlight five main driving solutions to promote OSC, namely, “PSC → EB → CWB,” “PSC → TI → EB → CWB,” “GPR → TI → EB → CWB,” “GPR → CSR → CWB,” and “GPR → CMD → CWB.” Governments and project clients are also identified as important players in the development of OSC in China. These results provide a valuable reference for the government to understand the underlying interrelationships among the driving forces and key solutions to the development of OSC in China.

Examining the public’s attention and comments on smart city topics in social media can help enable a full understanding of the development characteristics of smart cities, and provide a realistic reference for improving the level of public participation and citizens’ sense of acquisition in smart city construction. Based on Sina Weibo, a well-known social media platform in China, over 230,000 public comments related to smart cities were extracted to analyze. Using LDA (Latent Dirichlet Assignment) and CNN-BiLSTM (Convolutional Neural Network and Bi-directional long and short memory) models, a topic mining and sentiment analysis model for user comments was constructed to study the current state of public perception of smart city concepts. The results demonstrate that public discussions on smart cities were macro-oriented, focusing on strategic layout and technical applications. As public awareness of smart cities deepens, topics about application scenarios and social services are gradually emphasized. The public’s positive sentiment toward smart cities dominates and varies in sentiment intensity across years; the positive sentiment intensity of individual users on smart city ideas is significantly lower than that of official certified Weibo users, such as government departments and corporate organizations, which reveals the identity and temporal characteristics of public participation in cyberspace.

The current study argues that the capitalisation effect of urban public facilities on housing will be considerable when the accessibility or availability of facilities has a serious stake in the location or property rights of houses. The supply level and supply quantity of urban public facilities determine whether there is a significant difference in the accessibility or availability of facilities amongst neighbourhoods, and subsequently determines whether the capitalisation effect of facilities on surrounding houses is considerable, which ultimately affects the spatial inequality in housing prices (i.e. spatial dispersion of housing prices). However, previous studies have rarely considered the fact that the supply and demand of urban public facilities vary with the type of facilities. Thus, according to the law of diminishing marginal utility, the current study proposes a theoretical framework for the impact of the allocation of urban public facilities at different supply levels on the spatial inequity in housing prices and verifies this through a case study. Results indicate that the difference in urban public facility allocation caused by the unequal supply quantity or unbalanced spatial distribution has a notable impact on the spatial inequality in housing prices. There are three states of allocation of urban public facilities available according to different supply levels, namely, disequilibrium, quantitative equilibrium and spatial equilibrium: (I) Scarce and high-quality public resources that may always be in the disequilibrium state create a substantial capitalisation effect on nearby housing, and their presence will aggravate spatial inequality in housing prices; (II) Public facilities that can only reach the quantitative equilibrium state have a considerable capitalisation effect on nearby housing, and their supply densities have a positive impact on the spatial inequality in housing prices; (III) Public facilities in the spatial equilibrium state have a negligible capitalisation effect on nearby housing, and their supply densities have a negative impact on the spatial inequality in housing prices. Therefore, it is reasonable to argue that urban public facilities at different supply levels have a diversified impact on the housing market. This study can contribute to having a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the diversified impact of urban public facilities on the housing market.

Environmental burdens arise in the whole life cycle of construction. Waste and pollution are produced in the upstream and downstream of a construction project along the supply chains. The interdependency between on-site construction and off-site logistics also leads to an expansion effect of waste when a disturbance occurs. A related supply chain activated by construction activities should be taken into account to improve the sustainability in construction from a material and waste management perspective. However, it is unknown how the supply chain integration could contribute to the sustainable use of materials in construction. Therefore, an empirical investigation is conducted. A research model with eight latent-constructs is designed through a comprehensive literature review, and 70 completed survey questionnaires are received. Using PLS-SEM (partial least squares-structural equation modeling), sample data is analyzed and seven research hypotheses are examined. Results support the assumption that the construction supply chain integration had a positive correlation with the sustainable use of construction materials. Discussion and relevant suggestions are given for the future research.