Rethinking mobility at the urban-transportation-geography nexus

Building on the main sections of the book, this concluding chapter identifies four thematic areas for future research into the urban-transportation-geography nexus as follows: (1) the everyday experience of transport and mobility in the “ordinary city”; (2) the environment and the urban politics of mobility; (3) connected cities and competitive states; and (4) transportation mobility and new imaginaries of city-regional development

Building-integrated rooftop greenhouses: an energy and environmental assessment in the mediterranean context

A sustainable and secure food supply within a low-carbon and resilient infrastructure is encapsulated in several of The United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals. The integration of urban agriculture in buildings can offer improved efficiencies; in recognition of this, the first south European example of a fully integrated rooftop greenhouse (iRTG) was designed and incorporated into the ICTA-ICP building by the Autonomous University of Barcelona. This design seeks to interchange heat, CO2 and rainwater between the building and its rooftop greenhouse. Average air temperatures for 2015 in the iRTG were 16.5 °C (winter) and 25.79 °C (summer), making the iRTG an ideal growing environment. Using detailed thermophysical fabric properties, 2015 site-specific weather data, exact control strategies and dynamic soil temperatures, the iRTG was modelled in EnergyPlus to assess the performance of an equivalent ‘freestanding’ greenhouse. The validated result shows that the thermal interchange between the iRTG and the ICTA-ICP building has considerable moderating effects on the iRTG’s indoor climate; since average hourly temperatures in an equivalent freestanding greenhouse would have been 4.1 °C colder in winter and 4.4 °C warmer in summer under the 2015 climatic conditions. The simulation results demonstrate that the iRTG case study recycled 43.78 MWh of thermal energy (or 341.93 kWh/m2/yr) from the main building in 2015. Assuming 100% energy conversion efficiency, compared to freestanding greenhouses heated with oil, gas or biomass systems, the iRTG delivered an equivalent carbon savings of 113.8, 82.4 or 5.5 kg CO2(eq)/m2/yr, respectively, and economic savings of 19.63, 15.88 or 17.33 €/m2/yr, respectively. Under similar climatic conditions, this symbiosis between buildings and urban agriculture makes an iRTG an efficient resource-management model and supports the promotion of a new typology or concept of buildings with a nexus or symbiosis between energy efficiency and food production.Postprint (published version

Developing a model to estimate the potential impact of municipal investment on city health

This article summarizes a process which exemplifies the potential impact of municipal investment on the burden of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in city populations. We report on Developing an evidence-based approach to city public health planning and investment in Europe (DECiPHEr), a project part funded by the European Union. It had twin objectives: first, to develop and validate a vocational educational training package for policy makers and political decision takers; second, to use this opportunity to iterate a robust and user-friendly investment tool for maximizing the public health impact of 'mainstream' municipal policies, programs and investments. There were seven stages in the development process shared by an academic team from Sheffield Hallam University and partners from four cities drawn from the WHO European Healthy Cities Network. There were five iterations of the model resulting from this process. The initial focus was CVD as the biggest cause of death and disability in Europe. Our original prototype 'cost offset' model was confined to proximal determinants of CVD, utilizing modified 'Framingham' equations to estimate the impact of population level cardiovascular risk factor reduction on future demand for acute hospital admissions. The DECiPHEr iterations first extended the scope of the model to distal determinants and then focused progressively on practical interventions. Six key domains of local influence on population health were introduced into the model by the development process: education, housing, environment, public health, economy and security. Deploying a realist synthesis methodology, the model then connected distal with proximal determinants of CVD. Existing scientific evidence and cities' experiential knowledge were 'plugged-in' or 'triangulated' to elaborate the causal pathways from domain interventions to public health impacts. A key product is an enhanced version of the cost offset model, named Sheffield Health Effectiveness Framework Tool, incorporating both proximal and distal determinants in estimating the cost benefits of domain interventions. A key message is that the insights of the policy community are essential in developing and then utilising such a predictive tool

Review of Forecasting Univariate Time-series Data with Application to Water-Energy Nexus Studies & Proposal of Parallel Hybrid SARIMA-ANN Model

The necessary materials for most human activities are water and energy. Integrated analysis to accurately forecast water and energy consumption enables the implementation of efficient short and long-term resource management planning as well as expanding policy and research possibilities for the supportive infrastructure. However, the integral relationship between water and energy (water-energy nexus) poses a difficult problem for modeling. The accessibility and physical overlay of data sets related to water-energy nexus is another main issue for a reliable water-energy consumption forecast. The framework of urban metabolism (UM) uses several types of data to build a global view and highlight issues of inefficiency within the network. Failure to view the whole system contributes to the inability to comprehend the complexity and interconnectivity of the issues within the system. This complexity is found in most systems, especially with systems that must be able to support and react to vacillating human interaction and behavior. One approach to address the limitations of data accessibility and model inflexibility is through the application of univariate time-series with heterogeneous hybrid modeling addresses. Time-series forecasting uses past observations of the same variable(s) to analyze and separate the pattern from white noise to define underlying relationships to predict future behavior. There are various linear and non-linear models utilized to forecast time-series data sets; however, ground truth data sets with extreme seasonal variation are neither pure linear nor pure non-linear. This truth has propelled model building into hybrid model frameworks to combine linear and non-linear methodologies to reduce the fallacies of both model frameworks with the other\u27s strengths. This problem report works to illustrate the limitations of complex WEN studies, build a timeline of hybrid modeling analysis using univariate time-series data, and develop a parallel hybrid SARIMA-ANN model framework to increase univariate time-series analysis capabilities in order to address previously discussed WEN study limitations. The parallel Hybrid SARIMA – ANN model performs better in comparison to SARIMA, ANN, and Series hybrid SARIMA-ANN; and shows promise for research expansion with structure flexibility to expand with additional variables

Demand response within the energy-for-water-nexus - A review. ESRI WP637, October 2019

A promising tool to achieve more flexibility within power systems is demand re-sponse (DR). End-users in many strands of industry have been subject to research up to now regarding the opportunities for implementing DR programmes. One sector that has received little attention from the literature so far, is wastewater treatment. However, case studies indicate that the potential for wastewater treatment plants to provide DR services might be significant. This review presents and categorises recent modelling approaches for industrial demand response as well as for the wastewater treatment plant operation. Furthermore, the main sources of flexibility from wastewater treatment plants are presented: a potential for variable electricity use in aeration, the time-shifting operation of pumps, the exploitation of built-in redundan-cy in the system and flexibility in the sludge processing. Although case studies con-note the potential for DR from individual WWTPs, no study acknowledges the en-dogeneity of energy prices which arises from a large-scale utilisation of DR. There-fore, an integrated energy systems approach is required to quantify system and market effects effectively

Urban Heat Transition in Berlin: Corporate Strategies, Political Conflicts, and Just Solutions

In the field of urban climate policy, heat production and demand are key sectors for achieving a sustainable city. Heat production has to shift from fossil to renewable energies, and the heat demand of most buildings has to be reduced significantly via building retrofits. However, analyses of heat transition still lack its contextualization within entangled urban politico-economic processes and materialities and require critical socio-theoretical examination. Asking about the embeddedness of heat transition within social relations and its implications for social justice issues, this article discusses the challenges and opportunities of heat transition, taking Berlin as an example. It uses an urban political ecology perspective to analyze the materialities of Berlin’s heating-housing nexus, its politico-economic context, implications for relations of inequality and power, and its contested strategies. The empirical analysis identifies major disputes about the future trajectory of heat production and about the distribution of retrofit costs. Using our conceptual approach, we discuss these empirical findings against the idea of a more just heat transition. For this purpose, we discuss three policy proposals regarding cost distribution, urban heat planning, and remunicipalization of heat utilities. We argue that this conceptual approach provides huge benefits for debates around heat transition and, more generally, energy justice and just transitions

Review of The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War by Simo Laakkonen, Richard P. Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo, eds.

Review of The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War by Simo Laakkonen, Richard P. Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo, eds

Water-energy-pollutant nexus assessment of water reuse strategies in urban water systems using metabolism based approach

In this study a combined water-energy-pollutant nexus and water metabolism assessment was developed to study the impacts of implementing water reuse in an Urban Water System (UWS). The model was based on the WaterMet2 tool which was able to track down water, energy and eutrophication flows over the main components of the UWS. The suggested method was demonstrated in a real case study in Mexico. Eight hypothetical reuse strategies including six greywater (GW) recycling options (decentralised) and two reclaimed water distribution (centralised) were simulated and compared with Business As Usual (BAU) strategy ('do nothing') over a long-term planning (30 years). The intervention options were set up at either 10% or 50% of adoption rates (proportional to household and demands within the UWS) to be implemented at years 10 and 20. The analysis showed that centralised strategies consume less energy but produce more eutrophication emissions than the BAU as opposed to GW strategies. The treatment technologies (efficiency, energy consumption) and adoption rates are key variables in selecting the least impacting reuse strategy. Combining GW strategies using low-energy treatment (such as wetlands) with high adoption rates the system outperforms the rest of the options in all of the impact categories. The proposed metabolic-nexus approach was able to provide useful information about the performance and environmental impacts of centralised and decentralised water reuse options to support management decisions