A SWOT analysis for promoting off-site construction under the backdrop of China’s new urbanisation Rui Jiang a , Chao Mao a, c, * , Lei Hou b , Chengke Wu a , Jiajuan Tan a a Faculty of Construction Management and Real Estate, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400045, China b School of Engineering, Griffith University, Southport 4222, Australia c International Research Center for Sustainable Built Environment, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400045, China article info Article history: Received 13 November 2016 Received in revised form 27 March 2017 Accepted 16 June 2017 Available online xxx Keywords: Off-site construction Semi-structured interviews SWOT analysis Implementation strategies China’s new urbanisation abstract Off-site construction refers to a new building approach which moves the building process away from the physical site but into a controlled factory environment. There are numerous and significant benefits derived from the increased global adoption of off-site construction. In China, however, it is identified that a number of transferable driving factors have not been present, for example, strategic roadmaps, appropriate policies and sufficient workable guidelines. To investigate into the China’s off-site con- struction status quo under the backdrop of China’s new urbanisation, this study conducts an exhaustive review of the literature towards a total of 107 papers and 85 governmental documents published during the past three years, along with semi-structured interviews to a number of experienced stakeholders. According to the information acquired from the literature review and the interviews, this paper sets forth a scientific process of carrying out a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis, from which the advantages and barriers of implementing off-site construction in China are analysed. Last but not least, the body of knowledge that the state-of-the-art research works have seldom addressed are complemented, namely, top-to-bottom implementation roadmaps and strategies that could significantly contextualise the China’s National New Urbanisation Plan 2014e2020 and help the Chinese construction sector to improve its competency. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In-situ construction has been the common practice across the global construction sector. This justification, however, does not conceal the challenges that in-situ construction has been long presented, for instance, efficiency, safety, quality, environmental sustainability and so on (Arif and Egbu, 2010; Cook and Murray, 2003; Gu et al., 2012; Jaillon and Poon, 2008; Mu, 2015; Shen et al., 2010). With the development of innovative construction techniques, offsite construction (OSC) has started to reveal its sig- nificance in addressing these challenges (Jaillon, 2009). It refers to a totally different building method which includes prefabricating modules of a building in a manufacturing or production site, transporting modules to the site and completing on-site assembly. In addition, successful OSC practices from several developed countries also indicate that OSC can significantly create fast-track and higher-quality structures, and reduce both the embodied en- ergy content and the amount of carbon emissions (Jaillon and Poon, 2008). Nowadays, Japan is one of the world’s most active practi- tioners of manufactured construction with many companies pro- ducing over 70,000 manufactured homes a year; in the UK, over 30% of the new homes built today are prefabricated; in Ireland and Scotland, the prefabrication rate is projected to reach 70% in a few years (Arif et al., 2012a; Blismas and Wakefield, 2009; Jansson, 2010; Jha et al.,1996; Li et al., 2016; Steinhardt et al., 2013). Positive intervention of government has always been the driving force for the advancement of OSC. To illustrate, Arif and Egbu (2010) purported that government behaviours such as policy making, should be favourable to the manufactured construction initiative, because government behaviours are generally the wind vane of * Corresponding author. International Research Center for Sustainable Built Environment, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400045, China. E-mail addresses: jiangrui@cqu.edu.cn (R. Jiang), maochao1201@126.com (C. Mao), lei.hou@griffith.edu.au (L. Hou), chengke.wu@curtin.edu.au (C. Wu), tanjiajuan@126.com (J. Tan). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.06.147 0959-6526/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Cleaner Production xxx (2017) 1e10 Please cite this article in press as: Jiang, R., et al., A SWOT analysis for promoting off-site construction under the backdrop of China’s new urbanisation, Journal of Cleaner Production (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.06.147