About
About the series
Advancing Knowledge Beyond the Price of Entry....Impact Without Limits.
The SURE-Built Series is convened by the Sustainable Human Settlement and Construction Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg — an entity of the Department of Construction Management and Quantity Surveying within the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment.
Our mission is to serve as an interdisciplinary research and information source on housing and human settlement development in South Africa. We work to create and leverage research that improves the affordability, finance, sustainability, delivery, satisfaction and post-occupancy experience of human settlements.
The Centre is policy-relevant, theoretically informed, and centred on interdisciplinary understandings of housing, home and the wider human settlement spectrum.
Our journey
The SURE-Built story
From an ambitious idea to a global platform for accessible, high-quality built environment research.
2022
The vision takes shape
The concept for a free-to-attend, high-quality scholarly conference series in sustainable built environment research is developed at the Sustainable Human Settlement and Construction Research Centre (SHSCRC), University of Johannesburg.
4–5 September 2025
Inaugural SURE-Built Conference
Theme: "Facilitating Inclusivity in Multi-, Inter-, and Transdisciplinary Sustainable Built Environment Research in Emerging Economies." The first edition brought together scholars from 22 countries, with participants joining both in person in Johannesburg and remotely.
2025
Proceedings published in Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering
The 2025 proceedings were published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering series and indexed in Scopus, providing an important scholarly pathway for contributors, particularly early-career researchers.
3–4 September 2026
SURE-Built 2026 — 2nd Global Conference
Theme: "Built Environment Epistemologies: Crafting Sustainable Knowledge in the GenAI Era." Examining not only what the built environment knows, but how knowledge is created, validated, communicated, and applied in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.
2026
Expanding the intellectual scope
Seven dedicated tracks reflect the increasingly interconnected nature of contemporary built environment challenges:
What we stand for
Our guiding principles
The SURE-Built Series is built on a simple but important principle: high-quality academic knowledge should not be limited by the ability to pay for access to it or to participate in its creation and exchange.
Accessibility
Free participation removes financial barriers to conference attendance, ensuring that researchers participate based on the quality of their work, not their financial capacity.
Academic Excellence
A rigorous double-blind, two-stage peer-review system ensures that contributions demonstrate relevance, originality, methodological rigour, and meaningful contribution to knowledge.
Global Inclusion
Scholars from Africa and other emerging regions actively theorise, critique, develop, and shape the future of the built environment, rather than serving as passive recipients of global discourse.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Connecting disciplines that are often separated, researchers who may otherwise remain disconnected, and ideas that can contribute to more sustainable and equitable built environments.
Knowledge Accessibility
Proceedings published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering series and indexed in Scopus, ensuring that accepted contributions reach a global scholarly audience.
Scholarly Community
A sustained global knowledge network connecting researchers, practitioners, policymakers, educators, students, and industry stakeholders across disciplines and regions.