Established in 1981, the AUGC (The University – Association of Civil Engineering) aims in developing and promoting the academic teaching (Undergraduate, Graduate and PhD) and researches in the civil engineering field in the universities and high schools of the French Education.
The ‘RUGC’ is the national forum in civil engineering organised annually by the AUGC for information dissemination and exchange, discussions and debates on research, learning and practice related to the construction field.
The 34th meeting of universities in civil engineering has been organised by AUGC and the department ArGEnCo (Architecture, Geology, Environment and Construction) of the University of Liège was held in Liège (Belgium) from 25 to 27 May 2016 under the general theme: Building the city of the future.
This is the second time that the RUGC is organised outside France after the days in Tlemcen (Algeria) in May 2012.
The conference attracted 200 people from several French speaking countries (France, Belgium, Algeria, …) representing a wide range of academics, scientists, researchers, students, designers, policy makers and other industrialists from a wide variety of backgrounds, including fields of engineering, materials, sustainable, architecture and ecological technologies, biomaterials, materials sciences, environmental engineering and government agencies, en-users, etc.
Ten of the best contribution were selected and are presented in this special issue which benefits regular peer reviewing.
The RUGC’16 proceedings titled ‘Building the city of the future’ include the lectures and papers presented at the conference. It consists of 165 full texts of papers, including three keynotes related to some hot topics in the construction field:
‘An engineer at the service of the city’ by Vincent SERVAIS, GREISCH.
‘Circular economy with positive impact (C2C) applied to urban areas’ by Steven BECKERS, Architecte ESASLB.
‘The necessary integration of transport infrastructure’ by Dr. Thierry GOGER, Secretary General of FEHRL – Europe’s National Road Research Centres.
A one-day pre-course on 24 May 2016 was organised. The courses are related to Geophysical methods applied to civil engineering done by Prof. Frédéric Nguyen and Behaviour of structures subjected to fire done by Thomas Gernay
The 165 papers including 40 posters were presented in five parallel sessions which covered a wide spectrum of the topics related to materials and structures, wood, steel, bio-based materials, soil mechanics and geotenichs, building information modelling (BIM), methods, transfers, life-cycle assessment of materials and others.
In parallel with the conference, the 34th edition of the René Houpert Award has been organized through five parallel sessions. Twenty-four young junior researcher have been presented their PhD works and five candidates have been nominated for the final presentation. The 2016 René Houpert Award has been won by PhD. Joanna Eid for its original contribution: ‘Élaboration d'un éco-géo-matériau de construction à base de terre crue’.
On behalf of the scientific committee of AUGC, we would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to the local organizing committee and in particular to Prof. Luc Courard; to all our contributors and participants for their carefully prepared, stimulating and thought provoking manuscripts; to the co-organizers of the one-day pre-course for their dedicated task; to the members of the Technical and Scientific Committee for their time and effort of reviewing the papers and their valuable assistance, without which the conference and this special issue could not be formed.