28 research outputs found

    Sustainable Urban Development - a Nexus of Understanding, Methodology, and Governance

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    Sustainability management requires facing tradeoffs between socioeconomic and environmental objectives, while integrating contextual variations into strategic and business goals to create a win-win situation. However, sustainability literature has shown a lack of consensus on the conceptualization, measurement, and operationalization of sustainability. Context-driven objectives demand multidimensional and multilateral synergies and tradeoffs that do not possess a simple generic pathway to achieve sustainable urban development. This dissertation explores the role of conceptual and methodological approaches in determining sustainability objectives, evaluating the policy development process and its implications, and identifying opportunities and constraints for local governance to localize sustainability. The study identified constraints to localizing Sustainable Development Goals and affordable housing that include distribution of authority, functional and geographic mapping, and assigning roles and responsibilities. These factors set a foundation for the subsidiarity principle, which guarantees delegation of commitment to a lower level of governance provided the federal government's role in ensuring systematic implementation of regulations and provision of necessary resources. Furthermore, the interconnectedness of SDGs requires synergies and tradeoffs to overcome potential hindrances and supplement multilateral efforts. Similarly, the complexity of the housing system demands a multidimensional approach, multisectoral integration, and a tradeoff between socioeconomic and environmental objectives. Such complexity wouldn’t be easy to address without innovative and out-of-the-box solutions to address socioeconomic and geographic differences between cities. In a complex urban environment, policies developed without considering functional and normative objectives, intergovernmental relationships, and local capacity may lead to unaccounted outcomes. Findings from this research highlight that the housing policies developed and implemented without an integrated approach may fail to achieve their intended objectives. The study confirms that speculation taxes are not an effective tool in curbing house prices. Similarly, considering the role of property taxes in providing public services, delinking property taxes from a potential contributor to house prices would provide a better lens to develop local housing policies. Furthermore, the study also confirms that the housing market can be better assessed at a local scale, considering geographical influence in conjunction with investment trends. The research advances the knowledge and theory in housing system analysis, sustainable housing, and policy-related decision-making. It paves the way for a theoretical extension of the subsidiarity theory, facilitating local government to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals framework. The evaluation further helps to generalize the conceptual approach for the subsidiarity principle in governing sustainability at a local level

    Energy Supply within Sustainable Agricultural Production: Challenges, Policies and Mechanisms

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    Providing the security of a broad-based energy and slowing the speed of climate change are the main challenges today of the basic of legal framework to stimulate the development of alternative energy sources. Energy from renewable sources is one part of the system, which not only enables to provide energy self-sufficiency, but also contributes to the reduction heating of the Earth’s atmosphere. International climate agreements indicate the need to intensify the prevention of global warming and accelerate the reduction in CO2 emissions. The implementation of such challenging plans as outlined in the European Green Deal or "Fit for 55," among others, entails the almost complete elimination of GHG emissions in the energy sector, which can be very challenging for some member states. In the EU, the preferred direction of development of RES use is distributed generation and increasing the share of the use of by-products and organic waste for the production biofuels. This creates great opportunities for rural areas, which until the last century were identified with agriculture and the production of food or raw materials. While the role of agriculture will not diminish, as incomes are rising in relatively poor countries with a high elasticity of demand for food, these areas will increasingly perform a number of other important functions as well. The production of energy raw materials and energy, which is no longer a mere idea, but is becoming, thanks to the development of new technologies, a mainstream energy sector that can make contribution to improving energy security and achieving climate neutrality

    Assessment of Socio-Economic Sustainability and Resilience after COVID-19

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    The pandemic period has caused severe socio-economic damage, but it is accompanied by environmental deterioration that can also affect economic opportunities and social equity. In the face of this double risk, future generations are ready to be resilient and make their contribution not only on the consumption side, but also through their inclusion in all companies by bringing green and circular principles with them. Policy makers can also favor this choice

    Knowledge Capturing in Design Briefing Process for Requirement Elicitation and Validation

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    Knowledge capturing and reusing are major processes of knowledge management that deal with the elicitation of valuable knowledge via some techniques and methods for use in actual and further studies, projects, services, or products. The construction industry, as well, adopts and uses some of these concepts to improve various construction processes and stages. From pre-design to building delivery knowledge management principles and briefing frameworks have been implemented across project stakeholders: client, design teams, construction teams, consultants, and facility management teams. At pre-design and design stages, understanding the client’s needs and users’ knowledge are crucial for identifying and articulating the expected requirements and objectives. Due to underperforming results and missed goals and objectives, many projects finish with highly dissatisfied clients and loss of contracts for some organizations. Knowledge capturing has beneficial effects via its principles and methods on requirement elicitation and validation at the briefing stage between user, client and designer. This paper presents the importance and usage of knowledge capturing and reusing in briefing process at pre-design and design stages especially the involvement of client and user, and explores the techniques and technologies that are usable in briefing process for requirement elicitation

    An Investigation on Benefit-Cost Analysis of Greenhouse Structures in Antalya

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    Significant population increase across the world, loss of cultivable land and increasing demand for food put pressure on agriculture. To meet the demand, greenhouses are built, which are, light structures with transparent cladding material in order to provide controlled microclimatic environment proper for plant production. Conceptually, greenhouses are similar with manufacturing buildings where a controlled environment for manufacturing and production have been provided and proper spaces for standardized production processes have been enabled. Parallel with the trends in the world, particularly in southern regions, greenhouse structures have been increasingly constructed and operated in Turkey. A significant number of greenhouses are located at Antalya. The satellite images demonstrated that for over last three decades, there has been a continuous invasion of greenhouses on all cultivable land. There are various researches and attempts for the improvement of greenhouse design and for increasing food production by decreasing required energy consumption. However, the majority of greenhouses in Turkey are very rudimentary structures where capital required for investment is low, but maintenance requirements are high when compared with new generation greenhouse structures. In this research paper, life-long capital requirements for construction and operation of greenhouse buildings in Antalya has been investigated by using benefit-cost analysis study

    Updated discussions on ‘Hybrid multiple criteria decisionmaking methods: a review of applications for sustainability issues’

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    A recent review discussed a variety of hybrid multiple criteria decision-making (H.M.C.D.M.) methods on the subject of sustainability issues. Some soft computing techniques, such as the fuzzy set, have contributed significantly to H.M.C.D.M. studies, emulating the imprecise or uncertain judgments of experts/decision makers in a complex environment. Nevertheless, a new rising trend in H.M.C.D.M., known as multiple rule-based decision-making (M.R.D.M.), which has the advantage of revealing understandable knowledge for supporting systematic improvements based on influential network relation maps (I.N.R.M.), was not discussed in the review. This study therefore attempts to extend the review by introducing recent developments and the associated work on M.R.D.M. for solving practical problems, updating the discussion
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