With the scarcity of land supply, complex high-rise buildings of more than 50 storeys Information management in the construction industry is inefficient when compared with other industrial activities. Unlike other productive activities, the construction industry is yet to develop standard formats for the representation of its products, which would allow its participants to communicate efficiently and, in some cases, automatically. Several different information models-(BIM) that represent building products partially or as a whole have been developed over the last decades. Their adoption by the community of users has been, however, scarce. It is believed that the dissemination and adoption of these models throughout the construction industry is hindered by a cooperation problem: the cumulative benefits derived from widespread BIM adoption are clearly larger than those that can be achieved through individual adoption, while the initial direct and indirect costs are considerable. The incentives for single users to change work their processes are therefore modest. In this context, automated code checking performed upon designs that follow standard representation formats is regarded not as an end in itself, but rather as a demonstration of the immediate benefits that can be obtained by the users who voluntarily adopt this kind of information technology. In this paper, an information model and an application developed at FEUP are briefly presented. These tools perform automated code-checking of domestic water systems for compliance with the main national regulations. Automated code-checking should not only provide advantages due to simplified work processes, but it should also motivate users to adopt building information models, especially in the early stages of the construction process. Copyright© 2010 IAHS.
Do negative perceptions toward manufactured homes come from misconceptions about this structure type, or do they come from the fact that these homes appear less attractive than otherwise similar site-built homes? Over all, the type of houses had a strong and positive impact on the relative pride that the respondents would feel owning manufactured houses as opposed to site-built houses.
The successful development of infrastructure is vitally important for economic growth in developed and developing countries alike. Consequently, ensuring that infrastructure projects are successfully undertaken and completed should be a top economic priority for the governments of all countries. However, infrastructure development cannot succeed without adequate financing, and it is clear that infrastructure development in developing economies, especially large-scale projects such as power plants, roadways, dams, bridges, airports, and telecommunications networks, requires substantial amounts of technology and capital. Finance matters for infrastructure development not only for the usual reason of allocative efficiency, but also because of certain distinctive economic characteristics of infrastructure-high capital intensity, elements of natural monopoly, and location-specific investments-all of which affect private sector incentives to commit long-term capital. Currently, there exist two main approaches to financing infrastructure. The first approach is one that I will call the State-Build-Own-Operate (SBOO) approach. The second approach is widely known as the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) approach. In Turkey like many countries, the first approach has been preferred generally, and most of infrastructure projects, have built, owned, and operated by the government, have been funded by public budget or foreign debt, especially in 1980s. Then, the governments in Turkey started to use new financing methods, such as establishing a special fund and issuing securities. After recognition of funding gap has resulted in a nearly universal acceptance that the private sector can and should play a larger role in the financing of infrastructure in partnership with the public sector, the new models such as BOT (Build Operate Transfer), which have been created have begun to be more popular in Turkey. However, it has been faced with some problems, while using the new methods. In this paper, the developments in infrastructure financing in Turkey will be examined after 1980 and some of the shortcomings existing approaches to infrastructure financing will be discussed. Finally, the problems and the benefits of infrastructure financing by using PPP or BOT models and issuing project securities through the global markets will be evaluated.
In contemporary post-apartheid South Africa a number of housing policy amendments and recommendations have been made since the drafting of the White Paper on Housing in 1994. The most recent policy amendment is the Comprehensive Housing Plan for the Development of Integrated Sustainable Human Settlements commonly known as the Breaking New Ground (BNG) housing plan of 2004. The aims of this paper are to present an overview and critical discourse analysis on research and influences that led to the Breaking New Ground housing plan and to determine how these influences are reflected in academic peer reviewed housing-policy research. Our results reveal that internal government agendas, international discourses on housing and consultancy research have had a greater influence on national policy making than academic research. We therefore argue that there is a divergence between contemporary housing policy discourses in South Africa and academic knowledge production on housing policy. Copyright© 2010 IAHS.
This paper clarifies the implementation of the core house concept in Indonesian housing developments from its inception until recently, and for its future implementation. The concept has been applied since the 1970s with several titles, but they share the same meaning of a house with minimum livable space which can be adjusted afterward incrementally by its occupants. It will still be an alternative for providing affordable shelter for lower income people in housing projects around the cities of less developed areas. As a self-provided incremental building process, the concept also needs to be promulgated to lower income communities since most of the housing demands are fulfilled by the community themselves.
In the last years, building regulation and technical standard concerning energy efficient design and indoor comfort conditions addressed their attention most of all to the thermal characteristics of the envelope and to the energy systems. Other aspects of the design process are often underestimated and delegated to the experience and knowledge of single designers as, for example, the building shape (internal and external), the dimension and the materials of the building elements. In this context, at the Laboratory of Building Design of the University of Trento a research has been carried on whose object is to give useful indication for the design of energy efficient buildings taking into account some specific parameters between which the position of the thermal mass of both the envelope and the inner horizontal partitions (floors), the windows percentage on the south façade, the influence of inner heat gain, of shutters, of night passive ventilation. In particular, a single family house has been designed as prototype building to be studied by means of parametric analysis with dynamic state modelling. The influence of thermal inertia (in particular the superficial thermal capacity and the periodic thermal transmittance) has been analyzed in different configuration considering the users activity in the building (with particular reference to the use of shutters) and the thermal transmittance of the building envelope as invariant. The building presents a rectangular plant given by the sum of simple squared modules, the main axis has a east-west direction and, in the so called ‘base configuration’, the windows surface of the south façade is the 30% of the overall surface. Comparing the hourly trend of indoor air temperature in the base configuration with the ones in the others configurations, the maximum, minimum and average deviation in different hours of the day have been evaluated considering the dynamicity of the envelope and the influence on inner comfort conditions using, during summer period, the adaptive comfort theory. Copyright © 2010IAHS.
