Active Commuting and Active Transportation

This book focuses on active transport as a way to increase physical activity levels. Active commuting and active transportation on foot or by bicycle create opportunities for physical activity, provide transportation options for those without a car, encourage social cohesion, and reduce contributions to air pollution

SBE16 Brazil & Portugal - Sustainable Urban Communities towards a Nearly Zero Impact Built Environment

Vol. IThe organizers of SBE 16 Brazil & Portugal were challenged to promote discussions and the development of solutions for an important and, at the same time, very ambitious topic ? Sustainable Urban Communities towards a Nearly Zero Impact Built Environment. This is the main focus of the international conference SBE16 Brazil & Portugal; the only event of the SBE16/17 conference series being held in Latin America, more precisely, in Vitória (Espírito Santo), Brazil, from the 7th until the 9th of September 2016. The conference offered a unique opportunity to bring together researchers from all over the world to share evidence-based knowledge in the field and succeeded to achieve its goals since many contributions from various parts of the planet were received, addressing a tiny part of the problem or trying to perform the difficult task of making the sum of the parts a coherent whole.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

SBE16 Brazil & Portugal - Sustainable Urban Communities towards a Nearly Zero Impact Built Environment

Vol. IThe organizers of SBE 16 Brazil & Portugal were challenged to promote discussions and the development of solutions for an important and, at the same time, very ambitious topic ? Sustainable Urban Communities towards a Nearly Zero Impact Built Environment. This is the main focus of the international conference SBE16 Brazil & Portugal; the only event of the SBE16/17 conference series being held in Latin America, more precisely, in Vitória (Espírito Santo), Brazil, from the 7th until the 9th of September 2016. The conference offered a unique opportunity to bring together researchers from all over the world to share evidence-based knowledge in the field and succeeded to achieve its goals since many contributions from various parts of the planet were received, addressing a tiny part of the problem or trying to perform the difficult task of making the sum of the parts a coherent whole.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Rediscovering urban design through walkability : an assessment of the contribution of Jan Gehl

Urban design is being rediscovered. For most of the past 50 years it has lacked the concrete theory necessary to guide praxis. As a field it has related only sporadically and selectively to experiential knowledge and was essentially still entrenched within formulistic Modernist approaches. This has limited urban design as practiced to a design profession focused on aesthetics and individual projects without being part of the mainstream city-shaping process. The vacuum in city politics has been filled by modernist traffic engineering and car-based planning. This has limited urban design’s ability as a field to respond to the need for sustainable, vibrant and inclusive urban environments. In particular, it has failed to address the force and power of car-based planning. However, there is scope for a profession of urban design that considers a city holistically and is an advocate for the needs of pedestrians. In particular, there is scope for an urban design practice that is able to challenge the pre-eminence of the auto-focused shaping of cities. These determinations necessitate a different approach to designing our cities. Through work in over 40 cities, Danish urban designer Jan Gehl has begun to demonstrate a new theory and practice of urban design that rediscovers it potency through an emphasis on walkability.This study considers the theory and practice of urban design from a walkability perspective in order to facilitate a more effective, sustainable, humanistic and responsive approach, developing an evaluation framework based on Jon Lang’s (1994) call for a more encompassing urban design approach. This framework is then applied to the work of Gehl, as a case study of an urban designer who has constantly focused on the needs of people within city design, asking what is the significance of Gehl’s work and theory to urban design?Fundamentally urban design is concluded to be about creating cities, or improving existing ones, to be vibrant and sustainable places that relate to people’s use and needs—especially pedestrians—using the skills and theories of various disciplines and depending to a large degree on the public and political process to define the values and priorities. It is about creating hopeful resilient places that are able to adapt and respond to varying social, environmental and economic needs and about creating positive changes in urban environments. The study concludes that there is scope for urban design to move beyond its current limitations to work from a base of experiential knowledge about the city and its use that is focused on a reflective and experiential approach, building on solid practice based theory and on planning for pedestrians.Gehl’s work, both in theory and practice, is explicitly humanist, offering normative urban design theories based on substantive research, is part of organic urban theory and is embedded in ideas of pedestrian based transport planning. As a practitioner, Gehl’s methods enable experiential knowledge to come to the forefront of urban design concerns. Building from Gehl’s focus on the need to overcome formulistic and automobile-dominated urban planning would enable urban design’s aesthetic and prescriptive based theories to have a new and deeper meaning: sustainable urban design is at its heart planning and designing for walkability. This thesis determines that a core component of urban design theory and practice is advocating for the needs of pedestrians

Should Meaningful Online Learning Experiences be Fun for Higher Education students in Indonesia?

Indonesia is the ‘most diverse multi-ethnic state in the world with very low enrolment rate in tertiary education (36%) comparing to primary education (93%) and secondary education (79%) according to UNESCO Institute for Statistics. There are 4 kinds of tertiary education institutions in Indonesia, namely polytechnics, academies, institutes and universities. A key issue highlighted by the Ministry of Education and Culture is to provide ‘meaningful’ online learning experiences for their H.E. students, which was aggravated by the pandemic. Eight million of tertiary students are experiencing distance education for the first time in Indonesia. Examining approaches to ‘meaningful’ online learning experiences became extremely relevant. 80% of institutions whose students have left campus and returned to their home locations are concerned about how to support students’ retention and progress. To explore the needs and views of H.E. students, this work examines epistemic beliefs and relationships between fun and learning. In addition, previous work in Indonesia suggests that international epistemological research needs to have a more differentiated view of learning models in order to better understand and inform how more meaningful pedagogies can be applied (Budiyanto et al, 2018) in all levels of education. This study in Indonesian tertiary education is supported by a recent research (Okada & Sheehy, 2020a) which has identified two key factors students’ epistemological beliefs and their beliefs about fun in learning. These factors are relatively underexplored in distance education. Through a mixed-method approach, this study examined questionnaire responses from 774 students from across Indonesia. Findings shows that five themes emerged which reflected relationships between students’ epistemological beliefs and beliefs about study and enjoyment. A key issue that emerged from the findings is the lack of enjoyment with online study including a dissatisfaction with a content delivery approach to online teaching. These findings will be used to provide recommendations for tertiary education in Indonesia

Environment and Seasons in an Aging Population: an Epidemiological Approach

Part of the increasing burden of climate change can be attributed to the increase of the population with high susceptibility to environmental challenges, due to population ageing trend worldwide. This implies that the pool of population with an age-related decline of physiological reserve capacity, deteriorated immune system response, and reduced cognitive capacity is increasing. Therefore, in order to cope with the upcoming challenges of environmental deterioration and climate change, it is necessary to enhance the adaptive capacity of the society. This involves improving our understanding of the influence of environmental factors in the health of the population, and the susceptibility of population subgroups, such as the elderly. In this thesis I examined some of the most urgent health issues that potentially will affect the susceptibility of elderly population under the upcoming challenges of climate change. This includes the seasonal variation of lifestyle factors, cardiovascular risk factors, cognition, and antibiotic resistance and exposure to air pollution. The objectives of this thesis was first, to examine the seasonal variation and explored potential underlying mechanisms of seasonality of lifestyle factors, cardiovascular risk factors, and cognition in the Rotterdam Study; as well as the seasonality of antibiotic resistance using a systematic review of the literature. Second, to examine the exposure to air pollution according to mode of transport in two systematic reviews and to describe the estimation and preliminary findings of the exposure to air pollution among a population-based cohort of adult participants living in the Ommoord district in Rotterdam. The burden of the seasonal variation of cardiovascular risk factors, insulin resistance, antimicrobial resistance, and cognition is expected to increase, as the susceptibility of the population to environmental deterioration and changes in daily temperature r