The Interrelationship of Planning, Participation and ICT: the Case of Developing a Curriculum in Agia Varvara, Athens, Greece

One of the main problems in recent urban planning is how to make more practical very broad and commonly used theoretical, and interrelated, principles such as sustainability and governance. The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate how one of the main issues of urban governance, i.e. public participation in planning, can be helped through the use of new technologies. The data are provided by the PICT (Planning Inclusion of Clients through e-training) project which was a three-year (2002-5) pilot project co-funded by the Leonardo da Vinci Programme of the European Commission. The main aim of the project was to encourage and facilitate effective public participation in planning by providing the necessary skills to planners and the public to communicate with each other and by developing the appropriate tools that would make such communication meaningful. The project addresses all participants in the planning process, the key objectives being to introduce key IT skills, fight technophobia and disbelief, improve communication skills, acquire an understanding of the built environment and spatial representations, and finally introduce game like activities to implement VR support tools. The PICT partners came from the UK, Greece, Belgium and Hungary. The Project Contractor was Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council (UK) and the Project Coordinator was PRISMA Centre for Development Studies (Greece). The paper focuses on the curriculum developed for the Municipality of Agia Varvara which lies to the west of the City of Athens. It has a population of approximately 30,500 people with a multicultural identity and high unemployment rates. The developed curriculum consists of three parts: a ‘core’ part that is shared by both planners and the public, and two distinct parts: one addressing the public and the other the planners. Each part consists of several modules, to cater for different learning levels, abilities and interests. The structure is flexible and the whole idea was to have a curriculum with a scientific, and not a ‘journalistic’, basis that could, at the same time, be simple, but not simplistic.

Performance appraisal of sportshall and swimming pool buildings in Greece

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Load calculations of radiant cooling systems for sizing the plant

AbstractThe aim of this study was, by using a building simulation software, to prove that a radiant cooling system should not be sized based on the maximum cooling load but at a lower value. For that reason six radiant cooling models were simulated with two control principles using 100%, 70% and 50% of the maximum cooling load. It was concluded that all tested systems were able to provide an acceptable thermal environment even when the 50% of the maximum cooling load was used. From all the simulated systems the one that performed the best under both control principles was the ESCS ceiling system. Finally it was proved that ventilation systems should be sized based on the maximum cooling load

Experimental study of energy performance in low-temperature hydronic heating systems

Energy consumption, thermal environment and environmental impacts were analytically and experimentally studied for different types of heat emitters. The heat emitters studied were conventional radiator, ventilation radiator, and floor heating with medium-, low-, and very-low-temperature supply, respectively. The ventilation system in the lab room was a mechanical exhaust ventilation system that provided one air change per hour of fresh air through the opening in the external wall with a constant temperature of 5 °C, which is the mean winter temperature in Copenhagen. The parameters studied in the climate chamber were supply and return water temperature from the heat emitters, indoor temperature, and heat emitter surface temperature. Experiments showed that the mean supply water temperature for floor heating was the lowest, i.e. 30 °C, but it was close to the ventilation radiator, i.e. 33 °C. The supply water temperature in all measurements for conventional radiator was significantly higher than ventilation radiator and floor heating; namely, 45 °C. Experimental results indicated that the mean indoor temperature was close to the acceptable level of 22 °C in all cases. For energy calculations, it was assumed that all heat emitters were connected to a ground-source heat pump. Analytical calculations showed that using ventilation radiator and floor heating instead of conventional radiator resulted in a saving of 17% and 22% in heat pump's electricity consumption, respectively. This would reduce the CO2 emission from the building's heating system by 21 % for the floor heating and by 18% for the ventilation radiator compared to the conventional radiator.QC 20160128</p