Cities are tackling their economic, social and environmental challenges through smart city solutions. To demonstrate that these solutions achieve the desired impact, an indicator-based assessment system is needed. This paper presents the process of developing CITY keys performance measurement system for target setting and monitoring. This European smart city indicator framework was developed by analyzing cities’ needs, existing indicators and gaps.
Human Settlements are in essence, agglomerations of Communities, few or numerous. Communities’ collectively are a complex socio – cultural phenomenon with clear physical manifestations; comprising distinct local groups and their settings, natural and man-made. Urban Communities invariably experience/undergo continuous change and transformation, in response to micro and macro contextual shifts and pressures, as well as direct and indirect interventions, by inhabitants, authorities, pressure groups and neighbouring communities. The changes cover; the various features of communities; physical (buildings, the space-between, networks and infrastructure) and socio-cultural. The present work looks into Communities’ Transformation; representing ‘Community Design’ as a threefold process, comprising three overlapping and interdependent phases, actions and products, namely; designing and implementing community-settings, monitoring communities and enabling interventions and guiding changes (inspiring and coordinating active partners ‘Actors’, roles and contributions, boundaries and levels). Controlling change and sustainability are inherent features of effective Community Design; aiming at and maintaining: quality living, appropriate environmental standards, cultural identity and preserving resources. The proposed process of ‘Designing Communities’ is the result of extended research into the overlapping issues of design, monitor and control community development, undertaken and supervised by the authors; at Cairo University, the Department of Architecture. The regenerated process is presented through a sequence of closely related sections: 1-Representing ‘Community Design’, the process and products, beyond Postmodern Urban Design; threefold and open-ended, combining and coordinating actions; Design and Implement, Monitoring and Enabling Communities, 2-Communities in Transformation; synopsis of research into ‘Community Design’ and highlights of three case-studies from Contemporary Cairo, Egypt – between Initiation, Development and the Present, Interventions and Shortcomings, 3-Guidelines for effective ‘Community Design’, enabling interventions (actors and actions), sustaining environments and enhancing cultural identity.
This study investigates the variation in attachment to place and dwelling with the variation in caste, educational qualification and income with particular focus on people displaced by development projects. Five constructs have been used as the measure of attachment, on which the variation has been investigated. The findings are based on the responses of families living in 3 villages which were being displaced for a power plant project in the state of Orissa, India. Significant difference was found in the attachment to the natural setting, dwelling, place identity and place dependence between the higher and lower castes, and between respondents of varying educational qualification and incomes. However no statistically significant variation (at α = 0.05) was found in the community attachment and cultural identity of respondents of different educational qualification and income. Though variation in attachment has been studied in previous researches, this study focuses on project affected people and is an attempt to understand the variation in losses perceived by people of different social and economic status.
The Portuguese architecture is borderless due to the colonialism period. Many African countries can testify this influence and the cities still sprawling around remaining old buildings. These constructions are characterized by using local resources and adapting Portuguese architecture to the climatic characteristics and answering local natural hazards. The work developed presents a systematic approach about the constructive changes, identifying the solutions adopted for answering climatic demands. The passive solar systems used were categorized and some examples were selected according to examples found in African cities with Portuguese influence as Beira (Mozambique), Lubango, Namibe and Luanda (Angola) and Praia (Cape Verde). This analysis encompasses strategies to improve thermal behavior of buildings, as ventilation trough the analysis of ventilated roofs or windows geometry, shadowing devices as large eaves, brises and second facades, among other issues. The local construction was also analyzed in order to find out traditional techniques for cooling buildings in a natural way.
The decision to rehabilitate Architectural Heritage (AH) in a sustainable way is complex, because the associated costs require different levels assessment, given their relevance to all stakeholders in decision-making, and are not always easily quantifiable. Following recent decisions of the EU, it is urgent to carry studies to support AH sustainable rehabilitation projects. In this context, the use of methodologies based on Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) contributes positively to base decisions on AH rehabilitation investment projects. CBA is a method to assess the net economic impact of a public investment project and can be used for a variety of interventions. CBA is based on the conversion to monetary values of all costs and benefits, even when they are intangible. The purpose of a CBA is to evaluate if a project is feasible from the point of view of social welfare through the algebraic sum of their costs and benefits discounted over time. This paper presents a proposal for socio-economic evaluation of AH sustainable rehabilitation projects based on CBA, which integrates the development of community policies and financial instruments. It aims to provide technical support and contribute to the reflection about co-financing rates modulation.
Since the Yom Kippur War, and the subsequent Oil Crisis, the energy issue invaded the political, economic and academic debate. Several manufacturing sectors, the building industry as well, have since been committed to achieving a higher level of efficiency in energy use. Under this framework, starting from the end of the seventies, a specific research branch has been devoted to deepening the issue of the energy embodied in various commodities and goods, and, among others, in the construction materials. Nonetheless, during the following decades, this promising research branch has been partly neglected, due to a prominent interest in the building energy consumption in operation. On the contrary, during the last few years, the embodied energy topic has gone back to be a major research item, according to the growing awareness that the energy used to produce the buildings represents a remarkable share of the life-cycle energy. Such a circumstance is not at all peculiar if we consider high-performance buildings, as is the case of the passive house, and it has been validated by several reccnt studies.
In a recently published study, we show that the energy embodied in building products, except for raw materials, is a positive logarithmic function of their production cost. The embodied energy is inferred by the inventory edited by Hammond and Jones at the University of Bath. Besides, the costs are gathered from a price list of building products, which is commonly used to arrange the bill of quantities of any construction project. In this paper, starting from the aforementioned empirical finding, we aim at providing further insights into the relation tying together the embodied energy and the cost of building materials.
Rather than assuming one-shot estimates of the costs, for each of the considered building materials, we investigate their variation range. Subsequently, relying on a random distribution of all the costs within the identified ranges, we perform a Monte Carlo simulation. By running several trials of one hundred thousand iterations each, we are able to outline the probability distributions of the interpolation functions. The main empirical findings arc as follows: There is a well-established relation between the construction cost and the embodied energy, so the former represents a reliable predictor of the latter, and this relation is stronger for some homogeneous subsets of building products.
