Abstract
As the construction sector continues to be associated with highly energy-intensive practices leading to excessive carbon emissions, governments in many countries are promoting a shift towards greener building practices, like the use of wood in multistory construction (WMC). Meanwhile, local-government actors (e.g., municipalities) often act as important gatekeepers of urban development given their authority to oversee or approve zoning and land-use plans. Despite this fact, they are not much focused on in existing WMC research. This qualitative interview study serves to fill a gap by studying municipal civil servant perceptions regarding WMC, using Finland as a case study. Civil servants were asked to elicit their personal opinions on WMC, and what they perceived as favorable or unfavorable about using wood as a multistory construction material. Results show increasing support for WMC, and that this is due to key benefits made possible by the technical qualities of engineered wood products in emerging WMC projects. These products permit both the adoption of rapid construction practices that enhance citizens’ quality of living, and also the sourcing of local renewable building materials that support local industries. On the other hand, barriers to the use of wood were identified, such as inadequate information distribution, a limited number of WMC industry actors, and inefficient policy measures.
Highlights
As the construction sector continues to be associated with energy-intensive practices responsible for excessive carbon emissions, the consumption of largely nonrenewable materials, and environmental degradation, numerous governments are shifting towards greener building practices, e.g., References [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Several of these policy initiatives focus on the development of wooden multistory construction (WMC), that is, buildings of four or more stories whose primary loadbearing frame is made of wood or engineered wood products (EWP)
36 subcategories were elicited from the interview data (Table 4). It is a common practice in qualitative content analysis (QCA) to create an “Other” subcategory into the coding framework to capture information that might go undescribed by the coding framework
Summary
As the construction sector continues to be associated with energy-intensive practices responsible for excessive carbon emissions, the consumption of largely nonrenewable materials, and environmental degradation, numerous governments are shifting towards greener building practices, e.g., References [1,2,3,4,5,6]. In the United States (U.S.), legislative backing for the development of wood construction was seen through the introduction of the Timber Innovation Act of 2017 [11] Several of these policy initiatives focus on the development of wooden multistory construction (WMC), that is, buildings of four or more stories whose primary loadbearing frame is made of wood or engineered wood products (EWP)
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