Sustainable infrastructure: A review and a research agenda

Antônio Márcio Tavares Thomé*, Paula Santos Ceryno, Annibal Scavarda, Arne Remmen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

58 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper proposes a taxonomy of themes and a research agenda on sustainable infrastructure, with a focus on sustainable buildings (SB) and green infrastructure (GI). The citation databases of Web of Science formed the basis for a novel strategic thematic analysis of co-citation and co-occurrence of keywords with a longitudinal identification of themes during the last two decades (from 1995 to 2015) of an emerging and ever growing research area. SI is a multidisciplinary endeavour, including a diversified array of disciplines as general engineering, environmental ecology, construction, architecture, urban planning, and geography. This paper traces that the number of publications in SI is growing exponentially since 2003. Over 80% of total citations are concentrated in less than 10% of papers spread over a large number of journals. Most publications originate from the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The main research streams in SI are green infrastructure, sustainable buildings, and assessment methods. Emerging and prevailing research themes include methodological issues of cost-effectiveness, project management and assessment tools. Substantive issues complement the research agenda of emerging themes in the areas of integration of human, economic and corporate social responsibility values in environmental sustainability, urban landscape and sustainable drainage systems, interdisciplinary research in green material, integrated policy research in urbanization, agriculture and nature conservation, and extensions of Green Building (GB) and GI to cities of developing countries.

Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Environmental Management
Volume184
Issue numberPart 2
Pages (from-to)143-156
Number of pages14
ISSN0301-4797
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Dec 2016

Keywords

  • Green infrastructure
  • Research agenda
  • Sustainable building
  • Sustainable infrastructure
  • Systematic literature review
  • Taxonomy

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