This paper reviews the authors’ work on Integrated Planning (IP) as a construction site management tool. IP integrates the different planning skills used by site managers, construction workers and craftspersons into an interactive group which manages a production planning process from the earliest stages to the end of a building project. The studies reviewed in this paper, performed over the last three decades, tested, longitudinally evaluated and refined the IP model for use in modern sustainable building sites. The refined model, Integrated Planning for Sustainable Building Production (SBP), includes the factors: leadership, health and safety, quality management and environmental management.

As the building construction industry accounts for a large part of the ecological burden, sustainable construction processes are very important for achieving sustainable communities. Construction is often a linear process, where different actors act at different stages of the process. In this process there are critical borderlines where the information is to be transferred from one actor to another. Over the years, the construction industry has developed a well-functioning and standardized arrangement for how this happens. However, this has proven to be problematic when sustainability is to be introduced in construction projects. Sustainability goals can often be perceived as diffuse and difficult to interpret. Different actors with different values and knowledge level regarding sustainability also interpret the goals differently. A common way is to set environmental goals as checklists with criteria to be met. In this process, it is common for certain aspects to be sub-optimized while other important aspects fall outside the scope. It is therefore very important to simplify the sustainability parameters without sacrificing complexity. The goals must be clearly formulated initially and followed up continuously throughout the process. The purpose of this paper is to study and analyze good examples of sustainable construction processes with regard to clear goal formulation and continuous follow-up. The result end up in a proposal for a model for knowledge management of sustainable construction processes.

The built environment is an important component for a sustainable society. Choices made today will affect society during decades to come, both regarding performance of buildings and in affecting what is possible choices regarding mobility, energy, waste handling and human well being in general. There have been several projects in Sweden and around the world aiming at better sustainability performance of new built areas. A strong experience from earlier projects is that it is not that easy to actually achieve high ambitions set up at project initiation; the most common example in this direction that requirements on energy efficiency are not achieved when measuring in actual use of the final building.The project Storsjö Strand, a new township in Östersund in an earlier industrialized area, has aimed to work around identified earlier problems, using a strong interactivity and a triple helix process with the municipality, developers, and the university. The role of the university is to through an action research approach both be involved in the process to help guide it and to document and evaluate the process, with the research goal to contribute to and develop sustainable building processes for Sweden and elsewhere.The Storsjö Strand project is presently an ongoing project. This paper describes the approach taken and how it is a development of earlier approaches for sustainable building processes and also evaluates early experiences of the triple helix process.