Linking ecosystem goods and services to sustainability, risks and opportunities : informing decision-making in the Msunduzi Municipality, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.Sustainable development’s wide scale adoption has resulted in the rapid emergence of the field Sustainability Science. This trans-disciplinary field of research attempts to understand the interconnectedness, relationships and complexity between the natural environment and society. To understand these relationships and integration between the natural environment, the economy and society within a sustainability context, an ecosystem goods and services (EGS) approach can be taken. EGS research is being incorporated into mainstream environmental decision-making and strategic thinking, particularly within the corporate sector, however, adoption has been slow. The Corporate Ecosystem Services Review (ESR) is a framework, developed by the World Research Institute (WRI), which aims to assess the dependence and impact that a company has on EGS through a systematic approach. This methodological framework can be adapted into a tool that assists in more informed environmental decision-making at a local government level. This adapted tool highlights EGS issues within particular open spaces and links these issues to sustainability targets and identifies risks and opportunities for local government. For this research, the ESR tool was tested on open spaces within the Msunduzi Municipality, KwaZulu-Natal, by adapting the ESR methodological framework to relate to local government decision-making and by incorporating existing tools and strategic documents, namely the Environmental Management Framework (EMF) and the Spatial Development Framework (SDF), into the EGS assessment tool. Site-specific EGS issues were identified at two open space study sites through posing different development scenarios, and results from testing the tool revealed linkages between EGS and risks and opportunities for sustainability. The tool has applicability to local level decision-making, particularly in the early stages of development planning, by providing a more holistic input into the environmental decision-making process

Urban potential in Bio-based Circular Economy

Circular Economy (CE) will accelerate the emerging shift in resource consumption from finite to renewable and plants are key in enabling the switch as industries would opt more and more for resources with a bio-based origin.\ua0 Cities have an important role in the process not only as the main consumers of the resources but also because vegetation provides numerous intangible ecosystem services essential for the wellbeing of urban dwellers. But the urban lands are heavily burdened with present activities and ongoing urbanization. Retrofitting the now obsolete and potentially contaminated brownfields provides an opportunity to engage bio-based land uses within the city periphery. At the same time, vegetation can be incorporated with Gentle Remediation Option (GRO), an alternative and more sustainable option over common ‘dig and dump’ remediation to eradicate the contamination concern and restore soil health. ‘Opportunities of bio-based production in urban brownfields’, a Ph.D. research project, concerns with such topics aiming to investigate the possibilities and preconditions for preparing urban brownfields urban bio-based production to foster a bio-based circular economy in the cities. This literature review is performed as part of the research effort to support and capture the wider scope of the project. The review work is focused on outlining the topics, ‘CE’, and ‘urban brownfields’; and establishing a common ground merging these topics from where the rest of the research work can be based on. The novel concept (i.e. CE) are explored in this literature review together with the well-established topic (i.e. brownfields) to set the backdrop and their common subsets (i.e. cities in CE, urban land potential in bio-based CE) are further investigated to guide the review in delivering information necessary for the future project work. Urban Greenspaces (UGSs) and the ecosystem services (ESs) that can be derived from them are discussed as consecutively the potential bio-based land uses and the bio-based products in an urban setting. 14 UGSs are additionally explored to better understand the scope of ESS in the cities

Urban disaster resilience: learning from the 2011 Bangkok flood

Reducing disaster risk, managing rapid urbanisation and tackling poverty is an enormous challenge, particularly in vulnerable neighbourhoods in low and middle-income countries. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in towns and cities, with 95 per cent of future urban expansion in the global South. At the same time, disasters are increasing in frequency, severity and intensity. Poorer people in vulnerable neighbourhoods are least equipped to cope with the threat of disaster. When flooding struck Thailand’s capital city Bangkok in 2011, the United Nations estimated that 73 per cent of low-income households were badly affected (UNISDR 2013). With disasters in cities on the rise, current thinking suggests that resilience offers valuable insights for reducing risk. This research seeks to develop and validate a conceptual framework for understanding urban disaster resilience in low-income neighbourhoods. It combines two urban approaches. The first, complex adaptive systems (CAS), views the city as a combination of inter-dependent parts working together at a multitude of scales that shapes its overall behaviour. The second, urban morphology, seeks to understand the creation of urban form by establishing connections between the city’s historical economic, political and social transformations to its modern day form. The conceptual framework was applied to three low-income neighbourhoods in Bangkok affected by the 2011 flood. Through a case study approach, qualitative information was gathered and analysed in order to understand city-scale and neighbourhood level transformations that built patterns of vulnerability and resilience to chronic stresses and acute shocks. This research concludes that combining CAS and morphology provides a valuable conceptual framework for understanding urban disaster resilience. Such a framework places people at the centre while providing a scalar and temporal analysis of co-evolving acute and chronic risks in urban areas. Moreover, the intersections of CAS and urban morphology identify dimensions of resilience, where human systems and the built environment affect each other in a positive or negative ways – before, during and after a disaster. Overall, this research concludes that resilience needs to be built both before and after a disaster to be effective, and that disaster itself is a test of how systems and the built environment have learned from history about how to cope with and adapt to shocks and stresses. To these ends, urban disaster resilience can be defined as the ways in which the built environment, complex adaptive systems and people interact to cope, adapt and transform in order to reduce disaster risk

Standardising the city: A material-discursive genealogy of CPA-I_001, ISO 37120 and BSI PAS 181

City standards are a rapidly growing and highly innovative new area of international standards development. They propose tools, techniques and guidelines for the governance of smart and sustainable cities. In this thesis, I survey the standards literature, develop a methodology for their study, and analyse three city standards, the institutions that support them and the material-discursive apparatuses that allow them to take shape. CPA-I_001 is a diagram for seeing, measuring and managing the city as a system of systems. ISO 37120 defines 100 performance indicators for assessing and benchmarking city services and quality of life. And BSI PAS 181 recommends practices for smart city leadership in the integration and management of government services. My decision to focus on the development, circulation and implementation of these standards prompted the use of semi-structured interviews and document analysis; methods capable of following their specific global movements. Drawing on data thus generated, I argue that city standards act as an effective political technology in three capacities: by propagating ideas, materials and techniques; by steering outcomes towards desirable goals; and by assuring city leaders and decision-makers. The case study analysis is augmented by an exploration of the broader intellectual traditions on which the three standards draw. This allows me to reveal their political assumptions and logics, and intervene upon their role in the production of future cities. My research contributes to: empirical work on standards in cities; research methodologies in human geography, and science and technology studies; and conceptual and theoretical debates within Foucault studies, the new materialism, nonrepresentational theory and urban theory

Building a sustainable and desirable economy-in-society-in-nature

This report is a synthesis of ideas about what this new economy-in-society-innature could look like and how we might get there. Most of the ideas presented here are not new. The coauthors of this report have published them in various forms over the last several decades, and many others have expressed similar ideas in venues too numerous to mention. What is new is the timing and the situation. The time has come when we must make a transition. We have no choice. Our present path is clearly unsustainable. As Paul Raskin has said, Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it is business as usual that is the utopian fantasy; forging a new vision is the pragmatic necessity [10]. But we do have a choice about how to make the transition and what the new state of the world will be. We can engage in a global dialogue to envision the future we want, the theme of Rio+20, and then devise an adaptive strategy to get us there, or we can allow the current system to collapse and rebuild from a much worse starting point. We obviously argue for the former strategy. In this report, we discuss the need to focus more directly on the goal of sustainable human well-being rather than merely GDP growth. This includes protecting and restoring nature, achieving social and intergenerational fairness (including poverty alleviation), stabilizing population, and recognizing the significant nonmarket contributions to human well-being from natural and social capital. To do this, we need to develop better measures of progress that go well beyond GDP and begin to measure human well-being and its sustainability more directly

Midterm evaluation Research 2016-2018:

The research of TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (Faculteit Bouwkunde) covers the full spectrum of design, engineering, planning, and management of the built environment. Its research portfolio comprises the research that is conducted by four departments: Architecture Architectural Engineering + Technology (AE+T) Management in the Built Environment (MBE) Urbanism The faculty’s research focusses specifically at improving the design and performance of buildings, districts, cities and regions in order to better meet the requirements and expectations of their users and communities. From that perspective, much of the research that is conducted can be understood as applied science, appealing to the curiosity and the needs of other researchers, practitioners and the broader public alike. The research is a blend of humanities, social and engineering sciences. The humanities are strongest represented in the Architecture department, social sciences in the MBE and Urbanism departments, while the engineering sciences find their strongest representation in AE+T

Exploring the relationship between course pedagogy and learning in workplaces: the case of the National Diploma in Environmental Education Training and Development Practice

This case study research provides insights on course pedagogy in the National Diploma in Environmental Education Training and Development Practice as registered with the South African Qualifications Authority. The study draws its findings from interviews, observations, and document analysis of course materials and workshop processes. The two case studies of employees working in a municipal and a provincial context in South Africa provide rich insights into workplace practices and its implications for pedagogical approaches in work-integrated courses. The role of scaffolding, reflexivity and situated learning in creating learning experiences that learners have a reason to value emerge as significant approaches to be considered in pedagogy for work-integrated courses. Critical open-ended questions supported by course material design, dialogue, participation in cooperative learning situation underpinned by reading and the use of case studies and real situated experiences emerge as important pedagogical approaches enabling scaffolding and reflexivity to support a “critical mode of being”. The significant role of pedagogical approaches in maintaining relevance to workplace practices are seen as important in developing capabilities of participants to value what they do on courses. Linked to the insights gained from this study three important recommendations are made. The first recommendation suggests that a pedagogical approach, which involves learner-practitioners and workplace representatives in the curriculum design, would help to maintain relevance of the assignments to the workplace. The second recommendation suggests creative and innovative pedagogical approaches to capture workplace practices in real authentic and meaningful situations for assessment. The third recommendation suggests that pedagogies used in workplace courses need to consider social-ecological sustainability competencies that transgress job tasks across occupations which foster appreciation and imagination of new possibilities in the work learner-practitioners engage in

Operation Summer Care: Territories of the Stewardship-Hospitality Complex

Operation Summer Care studies the expanding interest that the hospitality industry takes in the biogeophysical environment. Natural surroundings have long been an essential operational precondition of tourism in the global sunbelt, but contemporary environmental anxieties increasingly motivate different strata of hosts to take a more active role in environmental management. Usually the domain of the state, biogeophysical entities and their spaces—plants and animals, sand formations, wetlands, entire ecosystems and protected areas—are measured, ordered, and managed by actors adjacent to the tourism industry. At the same time, the socio-technical mechanisms of environmental intervention and calculation are conveniently framed as practices of care and stewardship for the shared infrastructures of the summer. Attending to both these tendencies, the project examines how, and through which narratives, the hospitality industry overlaps with environmental science and management to create the conditions for a calculative governance of the biogeophysical. The apparatus of this relatively novel and evolving entanglement between the tourism industry and environmental management—one that involves not just hotels, operators, and tourists, but also municipalities, NGOs, civilian associations, research institutes, activists, awards, standards, and new technologies—is what I call the stewardship-hospitality complex. To understand the phenomenon, I review three empirical cases in Greece, in which the techno-scientific apparatus of environmental calculation mixes with fables of both paradisic quiescence and planetary stewardship: a popular eco-certification scheme for beaches, the environmental management practices of a large hospitality corporation, and an island municipality’s responses to geologic events. In all three cases I show how stewardship and hospitality weave into each other, strengthening both the moral and infrastructural apparatus of tourism in the global sunbelt. Amidst the interrelated imaginaries of ecological collapse and Anthropocenic care, environmental stewardship is presented as yet another benefit that tourism can offer. As a result, not only is the identity of “the host” infused with imaginaries of “the environmental steward,” but also coastal natures are fixed with tourism, as their organization and priorities are defined through the programs of human leisure

An approach to understanding community members' perceptions of climate change in three rural indigenous Mexican communities

Master's Project (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017This case study describes an approach to understanding community members' perceptions of climate change in three rural indigenous communities in the Tehuacan-Cuicatlan Biosphere Reserve in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Seven participatory tools were applied to assess community members' experience of current climate change conditions, the challenges posed by changing conditions, and their communities' efforts to adapt. Tools, such as the Stratified Timeline, that provided community members time to work in groups and reflect on the questions they were asked allowed them to better express their knowledge of climate change than tools that isolated community members or used technical language such as the Pre and Post-Test. Although community members were generally aware of changes in their climate, they were unfamiliar with the concept of adaptation or of how certain activities could help them adapt. Through their responses to these seven tools, community members expressed their belief that the climate is in fact changing in their region of Oaxaca. The biggest concern in all three communities was the lack of seasonal rains, which was affecting their ability to farm and ensure food security. Some adaptations, provided through soil and water conservation projects, were being undertaken in the region through governmental entities such as the Tehuacan-Cuicatlan Biosphere Reserve, but there is great need and much interest in having more of these types of projects implemented, to help communities adapt to climate change

African New Towns:

Since the economic shifts of the 1990s, New Towns have become an increasingly popular approach to urban development across the African continent. While New Towns are not a new development model, their contemporary materialisation often targets middle- and highincome buyers, leaving no space for low-income residents. Strict regulations in these exclusive developments often impede spatial appropriations by the informal sector such as fresh markets, unregulated housing, street kiosks and ‘public’ transit options. As a result, this approach may exacerbate spatial segregation and increase the visibility of economic inequality. This research addresses contemporary African New Towns as a group through the lens of urban design, identifying shared spatial challenges across a dataset of 146 New Towns. Through three case studies (Sheikh Zayed City, Egypt; BuraNEST, Ethiopia, and Kilamba, Angola) it takes a deeper look at the idiosyncrasies of individual New Towns, and the diversity of examples within this group. By bringing together wider trends with the case studies, this study translates challenges into potentials for future New Towns in the form of adaptive planning and design principles. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, transdisciplinary workshops and Research Through Design exercises, the principles are tested, refined, and validated by peer review. The study concludes that these principles can be an effective starting tool for developers, planners, and decision-makers initiating New Towns in Africa. It also concludes that the principles must be adapted locally according to geographic, political, and social contexts and urgencies