Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

MoMoWo Symposium 2018

The stimulating four-day Symposium of the successful MoMoWo European project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, and organised by International Coordinators Caterina Franchini (DIST) and Emilia Garda (DISEG) closed at the Campus Lingotto of Politecnico di Torino the 16th June 2018. It has been an outstanding cultural and educational opportunity for international scholars, students as well as for professional architects and engineers. After almost 19 months of a large variety project activities, this Symposium continued to increase the visibility of creative women, to foster in Europe and beyond, interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches to the study of the built environment and to facilitate the exchange of research results and professional practices in the different fields of architecture, civil engineering and design

Resilience at UMass Amherst: A Sustainable Sites Initiative Inspired Master\u27s Project

A new movement to plan and design monitorable green stormwater infrastructure is beginning to emerge. Faced with the imminent effects of climate change, sustainability is becoming a more important part of municipal long-term planning and design strategies. Accumulating evidence demonstrating the myriad of environmental and aesthetic of green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) has given rise to programs that offer sustainability guidelines such as the sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) guidelines. SITES encourages resilient landscapes that are designed to: maximize ecosystem service benefits, be monitored for benefits or lack thereof, provide educational opportunities, and improve human health and well-being. In using these wholistic guidelines on a range of projects at multiple scales, municipalities may develop resilient and responsive sustainable landscape practices, in which the ecological management of stormwater plays a critical role. This master\u27s project proposes that the University of Massachusetts Amherst pilot an ecosystem-service based green stormwater infrastructure demonstration site and educational platform in front of the Fine Arts Center, utilizing the SITES guidelines to explore monitoring methods that could provide useful data for future campus GSI planning initiatives

Passive action strategies in schools: a scientific mapping towards eco-efficiency in educational buildings

The research field on passive intervention strategies in schools is broad, complex, and fragmented due to the great diversity of disciplines, climates, and approaches. This article applies the scientific mapping software SciMAT to analyse research trends and developments from 1982 to 2020 of 537 papers and identifies the best available 24 passive intervention strategies in schools in 42 countries. The results show that, in the early years, research focused on natural ventilation, especially in arid climates. From 2010 onwards, and coinciding with the rise of energy efficiency regulations, green roofs increased as an alternative to declining urban forests and as a solution for urban heat island mitigation. In recent years, growing concerns about climate change, sustainable development, and numerical measurement methods have driven work on occupant comfort and IAQ, while research on cost overruns and payback of passive versus active design. The need for passive, climate- resilient design techniques is highlighted, building on the progress already made. It identifies the most optimised measures to promote guidelines to serve for future regulations. This study is a valuable contribution because it provides a detailed understanding of the status quo for re- searchers, practitioners, and policymakers and predicts the dynamic directions of the fiel

Writing in Conservation Biology: Searching for an Interdisciplinary Rhetoric

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88135/1/samraj.pd

Among Scales: Programming the New Modernity of Belgrade (Workshop)

The main subject of research challenged within the workshop relates to the exploration of landscape as a heritage construct. Recognizing changes in natural conditions within the landscape and diversity in nature as a reflection of social, cultural and economic circumstances, the workshop examines the development of new analytical strategies towards establishing (1) integrated research of landscape patterns and (2) understanding of city morphogenesis. The workshop subject is the research of the relationship between urban and rural landscape, as well as the transformation of the natural into the cultural landscape. Workshop employed case study-based research through multiscale approach that are structured in several phases from phenomenon identification to their graphical interpretation

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 2 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division 9 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 12 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 14 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 16 Advertisements IEEE

Review : Best Practices In Educating Sustainability and Heritage

This result has been produced as a part of O1 INTELECTUAL OUTPUT "01: Review of the Best Practices on Educating Sustainability and Heritage" within HERSUS project, Erasmus + Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Complex Urban Systems: Challenges and Integrated Solutions for the Sustainability and Resilience of Cities

For decades, from design theory to urban planning and management, from social sciences to urban environmental science, cities have been probed and analyzed from the partial perspective of single disciplines. The digital era, with its unprecedented data availability, is allowing for testing old theories and developing new ones, ultimately challenging relatively partial models. Our community has been in the last years providing more and more compelling evidence that cities are complex systems with emergent phenomena characterized by the collective behavior of their citizens who are themselves complex systems. However, more recently, it has also been shown that such multiscale complexity alone is not enough to describe some salient features of urban systems. Multilayer network modeling, accounting for both multiplexity of relationships and interdependencies among the city's subsystems, is indeed providing a novel integrated framework to study urban backbones, their resilience to unexpected perturbations due to internal or external factors, and their human flows. In this paper, we first offer an overview of the transdisciplinary efforts made to cope with the three dimensions of complexity of the city: the complexity of the urban environment, the complexity of human cognition about the city, and the complexity of city planning. In particular, we discuss how the most recent findings, for example, relating the health and wellbeing of communities to urban structure and function, from traffic congestion to distinct types of pollution, can be better understood considering a city as a multiscale and multilayer complex system. The new challenges posed by the postpandemic scenario give to this perspective an unprecedented relevance, with the necessity to address issues of reconstruction of the social fabric, recovery from prolonged psychological, social and economic stress with the ensuing mental health and wellbeing issues, and repurposing of urban organization as a consequence of new emerging practices such as massive remote working. By rethinking cities as large-scale active matter systems far from equilibrium which consume energy, process information, and adapt to the environment, we argue that enhancing social engagement, for example, involving citizens in codesigning the city and its changes in this critical postpandemic phase, can trigger widespread adoption of good practices leading to emergent effects with collective benefits which can be directly measured

Metrics for Graph Comparison: A Practitioner's Guide

Comparison of graph structure is a ubiquitous task in data analysis and machine learning, with diverse applications in fields such as neuroscience, cyber security, social network analysis, and bioinformatics, among others. Discovery and comparison of structures such as modular communities, rich clubs, hubs, and trees in data in these fields yields insight into the generative mechanisms and functional properties of the graph. Often, two graphs are compared via a pairwise distance measure, with a small distance indicating structural similarity and vice versa. Common choices include spectral distances (also known as $\lambda$ distances) and distances based on node affinities. However, there has of yet been no comparative study of the efficacy of these distance measures in discerning between common graph topologies and different structural scales. In this work, we compare commonly used graph metrics and distance measures, and demonstrate their ability to discern between common topological features found in both random graph models and empirical datasets. We put forward a multi-scale picture of graph structure, in which the effect of global and local structure upon the distance measures is considered. We make recommendations on the applicability of different distance measures to empirical graph data problem based on this multi-scale view. Finally, we introduce the Python library NetComp which implements the graph distances used in this work