Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

In recent decades, cities are becoming more involved than ever in the ‘world city’ status competition. The path of this competitiveness is often paved by some common terms such as flexibility, efficiency, sustainability, and strategic partnerships with private sectors and industries. In the urban policy and practice realm, the rhetoric of urban development has lumbered through several stages, from focusing on economic growth and sustainable development, to concentrating on smart city development and information and communication technologies (ICTs) for development. To achieve more sustainable and smarter-built environment, ICT companies have asserted several claims such as using Building Information Modeling (BIM) that has been lately colonized not only the lexicon of architecture and building construction practices but also the realm of policy-making. Studying the politics of BIM and its policy mobility in a global perspective reveals that governments are keen in welcoming the utopian promotional promises of BIM implementations. Despite the future-oriented rhetoric of BIM, mandating the use of BIM at some certain levels of project development has been already placed by several states. This paper discusses the current BIM discourse relevant to sustainability and smart city development, while providing a close scrutiny of the disciplines of urban planning and urban policy which are both missing in the current literature and debate on BIM.