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Introduction
Urban cities face complex challenges driven by rapid population growth, economic development, and environmental pressures. With the population expected to grow to 70% by 2025, housing and infrastructure are increasingly strained [1]. Many countries grapple with poor infrastructure conditions, overcrowding of facilities, and limited capacity, capabilities and financial resources [2]. Sustainable urban facilities management is critical to respond to these challenges and ensure that cities cater for future needs [3]. Urban FM aims to improve FM’s influence on the urban environment, ensuring the implementation of sustainable development goals (SDGs) through a service-oriented perspective, with an attendant impact on livability, social values, community inclusiveness, and wellbeing, over and above the operation and management of urban infrastructures. However, there is limited research on urban FM. Extant studies have focused on investment in resilient infrastructure [1], sustainable building maintenance operations [4], digital transformation and capacity building in municipalities [5], climate change impacts [1,4] and lifecycle approaches [6]. Therefore, this special issue focuses on driving sustainability in facilities management, with particular attention on the social aspect of facilities management, users’ needs, skills development for participatory or community facilities management, and FM impacts on the citizenry (end users).
This special issue focuses on SDGs 3 (wellbeing), 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure) and 11 (sustainable cities and communities). Because facilities management is multidisciplinary, the special issue also touches on SDGs 6 (sustainable management of water and sanitation), 7 (clean and affordable energy), 12 (responsible consumption and production), 13 (climate action) and 15 (life on land, biodiversity).
List of topic areas
- Customer and community-centric facilities management
- Resilience, recovery, rehabilitation and resource efficiency
- Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) principles
- Innovation, green and circular economy
- Planning for the future (skills need, education and training)
- Financing
- Standards and policies
- Policy learning and institutions
Guest Editors
Chioma Okoro,
University of Johannesburg, South Africa,
[email protected]
Alex Opoku,
University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates,
[email protected]
Submissions Information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available by clicking the button below.
Submit your paper here!
Author guidelines must be strictly followed.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Key Deadlines
Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 5 February 2025
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31 October 2025
References
World Bank. (2024). Urban development. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/ overview
Thusi, X. & Mlambo, V. H. (2023). The effects of Africa’s infrastructure crisis and its root causes. International Journal of Environmental, Sustainability and Social Science, 4(4): 1055 – 1067.
Prabowo, B. N., Salaj, A. T. & Lohne, J. (2021). Urban heritage facility management: A scoping review. Applied Sciences, 11(20): 9443
Hauashdh, A., Nagapan, S., Jailani, J. & Gamil, Y. (2024). An integrated framework for sustainable and efficient building maintenance operations aligning with climate change, SDGs, and emerging technology. Results in Engineering, 3: 101822
Lafioune, N., Poirier, E. A. & St-Jacques, M. (2023). Managing urban infrastructure assets in the digital era: challenges of municipal digital transformation. Digital Transformation and Society, 3(1): 3-22.
Rathnasiri, N.E., De Silva, N. & Wijesundara, J. (2024). Urban space maintainability factors based on life cycle approach. Facilities, 42(3/4): 405-418.
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