Social media serves as a key mechanism for sexual minority young adults to connect with peers and to learn about COVID-19. We utilized focus groups to explore how sexual minority gender expansive college women (N= 28) engage with social media, including alcohol-related content on social networking sites. Two focus groups were held in-person during the month before the campus closed on March 10, 2020 due to a shelter-in-place mandate. Focus groups were then moved online, and also assessed how engagement with social media, including alcohol-related content, changed in response to COVID-19 at one month and two months into shelter-in-place. Using social media to connect with sexual and gender minority (SGM) content and community was a prominent theme across the three cohorts of data collection. Social drinking via social networking sites became increasingly prominent during shelter-in-place as a way to combat isolation, boredom, and the general stress of coping with COVID-19.

Around the globe, cities seek to improve their resilience to face the stresses and shocks that are expected from global climate change and other threats. In implementing urban resilience policies, they are guided by different urban resilience conceptualisations. What is meant by the concept differs between scholars, governments, as well as international organisations that seek to study, advise on and implement urban resilience policies and governance interventions. This article presents a review of the urban resilience literature since the 1970s. It seeks to map and interrogate dominant urban resilience conceptualisations, and decipher whether and how different understandings of the concept can result in essentially different policies and governance interventions and outcomes. In contrasting the 'what' of urban resilience (various conceptualisations) with the 'why' of urban resilience policy (bouncing back, falling forwards, persistence) it investigates approaches to overcome some of the key critiques to urban resilience policy and research.

Purpose – Most barriers and enablers of sustainable projects are related to procurement. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for evaluating green procurement practices throughout the lifecycle of road construction projects and demonstrates its application through an Australian case study. Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on linking the phases of road construction with incentive mechanisms for proactively motivating behavioural change. A holistic view on utilised and potential incentives is attempted with a literature review and a state-of-practice review. The latter is based on interviews and 90 policy and procurement documents across five Australian states. Findings – An evaluation framework with seven procurement stages is suggested to describe current state green procurement incentives throughout the delivery lifecycle of road construction projects. The Australian case study was found to provide useful data to identify gaps and strong points of the different states regarding their level of integration of sustainability and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) reduction elements in their procurement practices. This understanding was used to draw recommendations on future advancement of green procurement. Originality/value – Government entities across the globe can impact considerably the achievement of sustainability and GHG targets, by using their procurement practices and requirements to create incentives for contractors and suppliers to engage in more GHG conscious practices. The present study provides a systematic account of how green procurement practices can be underpinned using the Australian road construction industry as a case study, and distinguish between strong and weak links in the green procurement chain to draw recommendations for future initiatives.

This research is focused on realizing productivity benefits for the delivery of transport infrastructure in the Australian construction industry through the use of building information modeling (BIM), virtual design and construction (VDC) and integrated project delivery (IPD). Specific objectives include: (I) building an understanding of the institutional environment, business systems and support mechanisms (e.g., training and skilling) which impact on the uptake of BIM/VDC; (II) gathering data to undertake a cross-country analysis of these environments; and (III) providing strategic and practical outcomes to guide the uptake of such processes in Australia. Activities which will inform this research include a review of academic literature and industry documentation, semi-formal interviews in Australia and Sweden, and a cross-country comparative analysis to determine factors affecting uptake and associated productivity improvements. These activities will seek to highlight the gaps between current-practice and best-practice which are impacting on widespread adoption of BIM/VDC and IPD. Early findings will be discussed with intended outcomes of this research being used to: inform a national public procurement strategy; provide guidelines for new contractual frameworks; and contribute to closing skill gaps.

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