Stakeholder engagement in sustainable housing refurbishment in the UK

The UK government is committed to effectively implement a viable sustainable agenda in the social housing sector. To this end housing associations and local authorities are being encouraged to improve the environmental performance of their new and existing homes. Whilst much attention has been focused on new housing (e.g. the Code for Sustainable Homes) little effort has been focussed on improving the 3.9 (approx) million homes maintained and managed by the public sector (in England), which, given the low rate of new build and demolition (<1% in England), will represent approximately 70% of the public housing stock in 2050. Thus, if UK is to achieve sustainable public housing the major effort will have to focus on the existing stock. However, interpreting the sustainability agenda for an existing housing portfolio is not a straight foreword activity. In addition to finding a ‘technical’ solution, landlords also haveto address the socio-economic issues that balance quality of expectations of tenants with the economic realities of funding social housing refurbishment. This paper will report the findings of a qualitative study (participatory approach) that examined the processes by which a large public landlord sought to develop a long-term sustainable housing strategy. Through a series of individual meetings and group workshops the research team identified: committed leadership; attitudes towards technology; social awareness; and collective understanding of the sustainability agenda as key issues that the organisation needed to address in developing a robust and defendable refurbishment strategy. The paper concludes that the challenges faced by the landlord in improving the sustainability of their existing stock are not primarily technical, but socio-economic. Further, while the economic challenges: initial capital cost; lack of funding; and pay-back periods can be overcome, if the political will exists, by fiscal measures; the social challenges: health & wellbeing; poverty; security; space needs; behaviour change; education; and trust; are much more complex in nature and will require a coordinated approach from all the stakeholders involved in the wider community if they are to be effectively addressed. The key challenge to public housing landlords is to develop mechanisms that can identify and interpret the complex nature of the social sustainability agenda in a way that reflects local aspirations (although the authors believe the factors will exist in all social housing communities, their relative importance is likely to vary between communities) whilst addressing Government agendas

Contextualising energy justice in low-income built environment: Towards data-driven policy interventions for addressing distributive injustices in slum rehabilitation housing of the Global South

Around a billion people live in slums today globally, and rehabilitating them to formal housing is a significant challenge. Slum rehabilitation housing is a policy effort to solve this crisis and alleviate urban poverty. However, the question of whether slum rehabilitation programmes are accomplishing more good than harm or whether they are creating a whole host of new problems remains unexplored in the literature. This thesis investigates the effect of slum rehabilitation on household energy demand in Brazil, India and Nigeria through the lens of distributive energy justice. Furthermore, this thesis makes methodological innovation to aid in just policy design by improving the objectivity of including local and contextual knowledge on how poor households live and use energy. Doing so makes novel theoretical and methodological contributions: a theoretical contribution to temporality and spatial energy justice studies on how to offer cross-sectional depictions of energy demand within the slum rehabilitation housing, which was evaluated through structural equation modelling, and a methodological contribution in developing a deep-narrative analysis framework using natural language processing and machine learning-based Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm to capture the grounded narratives of distributive injustices objectively. This research highlighted the significance of contextualisation in planning for energy justice in slum communities and the role of digital tools like natural language processing in objectively integrating grounded narratives in just policy design. The contextualisation was done through zoom-in and zoom-out of the grounded narratives enabled through the multi-method approach. Zooming-out view of distributed injustices in the study areas of Mumbai (India), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Abuja (Nigeria) revealed inefficiencies in the administration of electricity distribution companies, lumped billing periods and lack of people-centric built environment design considerations. Similarly, zooming-in the case studies revealed that the poor design of the slum rehabilitation-built environment influenced the increase in energy intensity in the Mumbai case, leading to energy poverty. Whereas created distinct poverty traps in the Brazilian and Nigerian cases through frequent power cuts, high cost of appliance repair, and poor housing design. Finally, policy implications were drawn as per the policy actors across municipal, state and national levels that suggested leveraging digital tools like the deep-narrative analysis and the heavy penetration of Information and Communication Technology devices in such low-income communities. Such tools can improve accountability in decision-making and improve the representation of the occupants through their narratives of injustices associated with living in such communities. Thus, this thesis uniquely forwarded a data-driven pathway for integrating local collective intelligence in just policy design.Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the Gates Cambridge Scholarship under the Grant Number OPP1144

USAID Water and Development Strategy, 2013-2018

The first global Water and Development Strategy released by the US Agency for International Development outlines the approach that will guide USAID's water programming through 2018. The Strategy emphasizes sustainability, working through host country systems, using emerging science and technology, and learning from past efforts

Managing Complex Social Housing Urban Redevelopment Projects through Improved Project Management and Value Generation

Book of abstracts of the workshop:Managing Complex Social Housing Urban Redevelopment Projects through Improved Project Management and Value Generatio

Design for amelioration : leveraging a human-centered approach in designing a sustainable product-service system for Jakarta’s urban poor.

This research is an investigation into sustainable product-service systems in addressing the problems of the poor. The focus of this research is the poor population of Jakarta that live in slums located close to river banks, canals, and drainage areas. This study is built upon relevant literature on design for the base of the pyramid, design for sustainability, and sustainable design guidelines and tools. The main objective of this research is to understand how human-centered design, combined with sustainable product-service system design, can help ameliorate some of the issues experienced by the poor. The methodology is predominantly modelled on the approach of human-centered design (HCD). Participatory methods, being important aspects of the human-centered design methodology, are central to this research. The key participatory aspect of this study was the partnership with the Indonesian Street Children Organization Foundation, a non-governmental organization already active in many slum areas in Jakarta. A pilot study to test the methods and confirm the feasibility of the study was conducted before proceeding with the actual fieldwork. The fieldwork itself was conducted over six months, in situ in Jakarta. Participants comprise different groups of the slum community: adolescents, parents, and community workers. The fieldwork was conducted in three stages; adhering to the human-centered design process. First, a series of semi-structured interviews with the assistance of visual tools, to gain insights into slum inhabitants’ living situations as well as their aspirations. Second, a co-creation session was conducted collectively with the inhabitants, where they actively participated in the design process of generating a solution. The co-designed solution took the form of a clean water service that offered an alternative payment of recyclable materials. The prototype was then deployed and tested in the community itself for a period of time. Finally, in the third session, a live prototyping session was conducted, followed by a focus group discussion and product usability interview with the servicepersons who operated the prototype and performed the water service during the testing period. The last session was a platform where participants offered suggestions on ways to improve the solution. Upon discovering the inadequacies of available sustainable design tools, a new framework of a more comprehensive sustainable design tool called the Design for Amelioration was devised. This proposition, which represents an integration of human-centered design methodology and design for sustainability principles, was then used to assess the solution generated in the fieldwork as well as the design process as a whole. Lastly, the Design for Amelioration framework was then further developed to be an appropriate approach that can tackle the challenges of designing for communities

City indicators : now to Nanjing

This paper provides the key elements to develop an integrated approach for measuring and monitoring city performance globally. The paper reviews the role of cities and why indicators are important. Then it discusses past approaches to city indicators and the systems developed to date, including the World Bank's initiatives. After identifying the strengths and weaknesses of past experiences, it discusses the characteristics of optimal indicators. The paper concludes with a proposed plan to develop standardized indicators that emphasize the importance of indicators that are measurable, replicable, potentially predictive, and most important, consistent and comparable over time and across cities. As an innovative characteristic, the paper includes subjective measures in city indicators, such as well-being, happy citizens, and trust.Cultural Policy,City Development Strategies,Cultural Heritage&Preservation,ICT Policy and Strategies,Housing&Human Habitats

Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals

The UN Millennium Project has been a unique undertaking. Its 10 task forces, Secretariat, and broad array of participants from academia, government, UN agencies, international financial institutions, nongovernmental organizations, donor agencies, and the private sector created a worldwide network of development practitioners and experts across an enormous range of countries, disciplines, and organizations. The Project was made possible by the unique commitment, skills, and convictions of the task force coordinators, who led their groups to take on some of the most challenging development questions of our generation, and by the task force members, who gave remarkably of their time. This has been a global effort, in the service of a great global cause—the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Our Project has been a microcosm of a larger truth: achieving the Millennium Development Goals will require a global partnership suitable for an interconnected world. The world truly shares a common fate. This has been a labor of love for the many participants in the task forces and Secretariat. Individuals have volunteered vast amounts of effort and expertise to the Project. Their contributions, far beyond any reasonable expectation, have immeasurably sharpened and strengthened the messages contained in the Project’s many outputs, including this report, the task force final reports, the newly developed tools for needs assessment, and the advisory support for MDG-based planning in several countries.https://www.scams.info/unmillenniumproject-org

The Role of Geospatial Information and Effective Partnerships in the Implementation of the International Agenda for Sustainable Development

The former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon (2014), repeated the core promise in the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development, in which the General Assembly called for an approach guaranteeing meaningful participation of everyone in development and the fair distribution of the benefits of that development. To this end, partnerships are central and can lead to the dignity of the citizens involved as they participate in the development of their own communities. This dissertation research conducted in Manyatta A and B in the Port City of Kisumu, Kenya sought to do just that. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the role of participatory development planning and collaborative technology platforms of geographic information systems (GIS) and GeoDesign in strengthening sustainable development and enhancing of human dignity. The study used a multimethod design comprised of participatory action research, situational analysis, problem tree analysis, and stakeholder analysis approaches in partnership with the government, academia, business, civil society, and other stakeholders. The study shows how the newly formed government structure, post devolution, provides a functional framework to assist county and city governments to better determine and envision the future they want. This vision can be realized more rapidly through integrated planning to achieve poverty eradication and social, economic, and environmental sustainability, which are the three pillars of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The citizens of informal settlements represent those who are farthest behind and who should be given priority. This study demonstrated the potential of inclusive and participatory development planning in restoring the dignity of those groups. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/, and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.ed

Rural Regeneration in Egypt: A Review of Existing Typologies in Borderline Areas

Tracking rural areas and studying them may not be an easy task. The concept of whether the area at hand is urban or rural could be simple, but lately rural areas could carry many features that may deviate the definition into one which is unclear. In urbanized rural development, reversing the urbanization spotted may not be the ideal way to go, urban developers often suggest that to go back to the roots is to regenerate the area back into rural, however, regenerating rural areas using rural parameters and definitions may not be what the urban area in hand needs and the changes and challenges that are facing rural communities in Egypt need to be understood before any plan can be deemed as effective or even worthwhile The rapid increase in urbanization and how it affects agriculture land, shorelines, and rural land, has affected badly the rural capacity, and led to a constant threat of overhaul in place of towns, cities, and other urban activities. However, rural areas are the lungs of the planet alongside forests and other green areas and having them diminish substantially will lead to an inevitable catastrophe. Regenerating rural areas should focus on revitalizing and embedding them into the social, cultural, and economic structure of the region, however, it may not always involve turning them back to what is commonly termed as rural.This research attempts to review and discuss the meaning and definitions of rural regeneration with a view to propose a strategic plan to regenerate borderline areas in Egypt