Blockchain and building information management (BIM) for sustainable building development within the context of smart cities

‘Smart cities’ are a new type of city where stakeholders are jointly responsible for urban management. City Information Management (CIM) is an output tool for smart city planning and management, which assists in achieving the sustainable development of urban infrastructure, and promotes smart cities to achieve the goals of stable global economic development, sustainable environmental development, and improvement of people’s quality of life. Existing research has so far established that blockchain and BIM have great potential to enhance construction project performance. However, there is little research on how blockchain and BIM can support sustainable building design and construction. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the potential impact of the integration of blockchain and BIM in a smart city environment on making buildings more sustainable within the context of CIM/Smart Cities. The paper explores the relationships between blockchain, BIM and sustainable building across the life cycle stage of a construction project. This paper queries the Web of Science (WoS) database with keywords to obtain relevant publication, and then uses the VOSviewer to visually analyze the relationships between blockchain, BIM, and sustainable building within the context of smart cities and CIM, which is conducted in bibliometric analysis followed by micro scheme analysis. The results demonstrate the value of this method in gauging the importance of these three topics, highlighting their interrelationships and identifying trends, giving researchers an objective research direction. Those aspects reported in the paper constitute an original contribution.