The Construction Business and Project Management (CBPM) Conference ran from 23 to 25 June 2026 at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, under the theme Towards Resilient Futures: Sustainable Construction and Innovation in the Built Environment.
Martin Röck gave the keynote, “Towards Regenerative Spatial Systems: Advancing Environmental Life Cycle Modelling for Supporting Low/No Carbon and Climate Resilient Building Stock Development” - on how whole life cycle-based sustainability assessment, building information modelling and open science principles can guide the built environment, and what that experience from Europe does and does not transfer.
What came out of the room
The most useful part was the disagreement. Hearing directly from researchers and practitioners working on infrastructure gaps and climate adaptation across different regions of Africa was a reminder that there is no one-size-fits-all pathway to sustainable construction. Resilience and decarbonisation have to be addressed together, and both are shaped by context - which is an argument for context-specific analysis and context-sensitive approaches, not for exporting a European method and expecting it to land.
That is also the case for the data work: global, harmonised building data is only worth having if it can carry local realities rather than flatten them.
The conference was organised by the University of Cape Town, Durban University of Technology, the University of Greenwich and Tshwane University of Technology. A recap video from the conference is on YouTube.