Health and Safety in the Built Environment: Toward a Systems Thinking and Human-Centred Approach

Dear Colleagues,

The construction industry, long recognised for its dynamism and complexity, paradoxically remains one of the most hazardous occupational sectors worldwide; injury rates and fatalities persist despite decades of regulatory advances, technical innovations, and organisational reforms. This Special Issue examines the fundamental inadequacies of traditional, compliance-driven health and safety (H&S) paradigms and proposes an integrative framework rooted in systems thinking and human-centred design.

At its core, the Special Issue seeks to move beyond the prevailing safety model of mere error prevention; instead, it redefines construction health and safety as an emergent property of socio-technical systems shaped by the interactions between human cognition, organisational structures, technological artefacts, and dynamic site conditions. The central thesis is that accidents are not simply the result of individual failures, but the predictable byproduct of systemic configurations that, although often appearing rational in isolation, can produce catastrophic outcomes under real-world complexity.

This Special Issue is intended for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers across construction management, cognitive psychology, human factors, organisational behaviour, and systems engineering. By drawing on contemporary theories of resilience engineering, safety climate, risk perception, and socio-technical design, this Special Issue invites readers to reconsider basic assumptions about how safety is conceptualised, studied, and practised.

The Special Issue is organised around the following major themes:

1. Digitalization and Emerging Technologies: In what ways are digital tools such as BIM, wearable sensors, and AI reshaping safety practices, opportunities, and vulnerabilities?
2. Psychosocial Risks and Mental Health: How do mental health factors—such as stress, fatigue, and burnout—interact with traditional physical hazards on construction sites?
3. Cognitive and Behavioural Foundations of Safety: How do construction workers and managers perceive and respond to risk? What are the cognitive biases and decision heuristics that shape safety-related behaviours?
4. Culture, Climate, and Organisational Dynamics: How are safety cultures and climates constructed, maintained, and eroded across projects and hierarchies?
5. Human Factors and Ergonomics: How might design processes more fully account for human capabilities, limitations, and variability?
6. Resilience and Systems Approaches: What lessons can construction safety draw from models such as resilience engineering and the systems-theoretic accident model and process (STAMP)?
7. Learning and Adaptation: How can industries shift from blame-oriented investigations to proactive organisational learning?
8. Contractual and Organisational Structures: What often hidden systemic levers encourage or suppress safe work practices?
9. Worker Participation and Empowerment: How can frontline workers be engaged not as passive rule-followers but as co-designers of resilient and safe systems?

These topics are not pursued in isolation but are connected through a guiding concern: how to design construction systems that are not only safer in principle but resilient in practice.

The Special Issue addresses a critical gap: the tendency of academic research and industry practice to treat health and safety either as a compliance checklist or as the sum of individual behaviours, whilst overlooking the systemic and emergent nature of safety outcomes. In doing so, it seeks to foster a research agenda and a practical ethos that are both scientifically robust and deeply relevant to the realities of construction work.

By encouraging methodological diversity—taking in ethnographic studies, cognitive task analysis, system dynamics modelling, and participatory design—and theoretical plurality, this collection aims to seed a new generation of inquiry into construction health and safety, one that is at once rigorous, interdisciplinary, and profoundly human-centred.

Ultimately, this Special Issue sets out to solve a persistent problem: why construction health and safety remains so difficult to improve sustainably, despite abundant knowledge of risks. It argues that lasting progress demands not more rules, but a deeper understanding of the systems in which humans and technologies interact, as well as a radical rethinking of how we define, study, and cultivate safety itself.

Dr. Hector Martin
Dr. Raj Shah
Dr. Wilfred Matipa
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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