Do sustainability measures constrain urban design creativity?

Planners, architects, urban designers and other built environment professionals engage with a myriad of checkboxes, guidelines, requirements and specifications, all of which potentially compromise creativity and innovation in urban design. Approaches that measure performance are accused of belying the nature of places as messy, plural, organic, accidental and emotive; trying to find a formula that works may tick boxes, but it risks creating soulless spaces, oppressing innovation and incorporation of inappropriate design elements. This paper argues that sustainability assessment methods do have something to contribute to creativity and innovation in urban design precisely because they encourage engagement with challenging and often complex societal priorities. Through interviews with built environment professionals and a critical examination of sustainability assessment methods, the authors suggest that such methods can promote creativity and innovation if they engage competently with sustainability, work at a scale that allows for both breadth and depth (typically greater than the building scale) and incorporate in their design a set of eight key characteristics designed to promote creativity and innovation

Visual conversations on urban futures:participatory methods to design scenarios of liveable cities

Visualisations of future cities usually depict coherent scenarios that rarely express the complexity of urban life. Our research explores ways to articulate conflicts and diversities, rather than mitigate them, when reflecting on possible futures for urban life. We define Visual Conversations on Urban Futures as visualisations of future scenarios that utilise visual methods to generate, facilitate, and represent dialogues of multiple voices imagining possible futures for life in the city. This paper will introduce our research on this topic and reflect on a number of significant examples to draft a description of methods and processes of Visual Conversations on Urban Futures. It will then present three design experiments in which we adopted this approach in the context of interdisciplinary academic research on possible scenarios for urban futures. Finally, as this is an ongoing research project, we will suggest a number of open questions and possibilities for further practical and theoretical exploration

Envisioning Urban Futures as Conversations to Inform Design and Research

Recognising that cities provide the context for, and are often the direct beneficiary of, much civil engineering design and construction, it is essential that the future aspirations of city stakeholders are understood, and accommodated where possible. Without this, our engineering is likely to prove inefficient at best and potentially ineffective. Developing visions for future cities is essential for all urban design, engineering, and planning projects. However, there is a tendency for future visions to be produced in the later stages of research and design processes. Moreover, future visions usually focus on communicating a selection of alternative and coherent scenarios, rather than the complexity of their formation and context. This paper proposes that processes of envisioning urban futures can be designed as conversations among different actors. The resulting visions articulate the multiplicity of perspectives that emerge from such conversations, rather than presenting possible solutions. Drawing from research conducted as part of the Liveable Cities programme, alongside contributions from the Foresight Future of Cities project and Urban Living research, the paper will reflect on how participatory design and information visualisation methods can be adopted to engage participants in developing visions for future cities that articulate complexity and criticalities

The little book of sharing in the city

This little book tells you about research that we did as part of the Liveable Cities project, looking at sharing in cities. Through a series of conversations with researchers and workshops with citizens of Lancaster and Birmingham in 2015, we conclude that: • Cities are important hubs for sharing and they always have been • Sharing is more than just giving something to someone to use- there are a lot of factors to think about when trying to understand what sharing is! • A way of classifying sharing in cities can help make sense of all the examples of sharing and allow for easy comparisons between examples • The presence of physical and digital hubs and bridges and the need to promote sharing in different ways are incredibly important to sharing in cities • There are a multitude of resources about sharing that can be useful if you want to find out more information on the topic • Well-designed and fun exercises can get people mapping their examples of sharing in cities This book therefore not only presents our current understanding of sharing, but illustrates how cities and communities can go about understanding the sharing phenomenon in their locality

Delivering a multi-functional and resilient urban forest

Tree planting is widely advocated and applied in urban areas, with large-scaleprojects underway in cities globally. Numerous potential benefits are used to justify these planting campaigns. However, reports of poor tree survival raise questions about the ability of such projects to deliver on their promises over the long-term. Each potential benefit requires different supporting conditions—relating not only to the type and placement of the tree, but also to the broader urban system within which it is embedded. This set of supportingconditions may not always be mutually compatible and may not persist for the lifetime of the tree. Here, we demonstrate a systems-based approach that makes these dependencies, synergies, and tensions more explicit, allowing them to be used to test the decadal-scale resilience of urban street trees. Our analysis highlights social, environmental, and economic assumptions that are implicit within planting projects; notably that high levels of maintenance and public support for urban street trees will persist throughout their natural lifespan, andthat the surrounding built form will remain largely unchanged. Whilst the vulnerability of each benefit may be highly context specific, we identify approaches that address some typical weaknesses, making a functional, resilient, urban forest more attainable.

The Magnitude of Global Marine Species Diversity

Background: The question of how many marine species exist is important because it provides a metric for how much we do and do not know about life in the oceans. We have compiled the first register of the marine species of the world and used this baseline to estimate how many more species, partitioned among all major eukaryotic groups, may be discovered. Results: There are ∼226,000 eukaryotic marine species described. More species were described in the past decade (∼20,000) than in any previous one. The number of authors describing new species has been increasing at a faster rate than the number of new species described in the past six decades. We report that there are ∼170,000 synonyms, that 58,000–72,000 species are collected but not yet described, and that 482,000–741,000 more species have yet to be sampled. Molecular methods may add tens of thousands of cryptic species. Thus, there may be 0.7–1.0 million marine species. Past rates of description of new species indicate there may be 0.5 ± 0.2 million marine species. On average 37% (median 31%) of species in over 100 recent field studies around the world might be new to science. Conclusions: Currently, between one-third and two-thirds of marine species may be undescribed, and previous estimates of there being well over one million marine species appear highly unlikely. More species than ever before are being described annually by an increasing number of authors. If the current trend continues, most species will be discovered this century

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Dissecting the Shared Genetic Architecture of Suicide Attempt, Psychiatric Disorders, and Known Risk Factors

Background Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, and nonfatal suicide attempts, which occur far more frequently, are a major source of disability and social and economic burden. Both have substantial genetic etiology, which is partially shared and partially distinct from that of related psychiatric disorders. Methods We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 29,782 suicide attempt (SA) cases and 519,961 controls in the International Suicide Genetics Consortium (ISGC). The GWAS of SA was conditioned on psychiatric disorders using GWAS summary statistics via multitrait-based conditional and joint analysis, to remove genetic effects on SA mediated by psychiatric disorders. We investigated the shared and divergent genetic architectures of SA, psychiatric disorders, and other known risk factors. Results Two loci reached genome-wide significance for SA: the major histocompatibility complex and an intergenic locus on chromosome 7, the latter of which remained associated with SA after conditioning on psychiatric disorders and replicated in an independent cohort from the Million Veteran Program. This locus has been implicated in risk-taking behavior, smoking, and insomnia. SA showed strong genetic correlation with psychiatric disorders, particularly major depression, and also with smoking, pain, risk-taking behavior, sleep disturbances, lower educational attainment, reproductive traits, lower socioeconomic status, and poorer general health. After conditioning on psychiatric disorders, the genetic correlations between SA and psychiatric disorders decreased, whereas those with nonpsychiatric traits remained largely unchanged. Conclusions Our results identify a risk locus that contributes more strongly to SA than other phenotypes and suggest a shared underlying biology between SA and known risk factors that is not mediated by psychiatric disorders.Peer reviewe

Measurement of the tt¯tt¯ production cross section in pp collisions at √s=13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A measurement of four-top-quark production using proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb−1 is presented. Events are selected if they contain a single lepton (electron or muon) or an opposite-sign lepton pair, in association with multiple jets. The events are categorised according to the number of jets and how likely these are to contain b-hadrons. A multivariate technique is then used to discriminate between signal and background events. The measured four-top-quark production cross section is found to be 26+17−15 fb, with a corresponding observed (expected) significance of 1.9 (1.0) standard deviations over the background-only hypothesis. The result is combined with the previous measurement performed by the ATLAS Collaboration in the multilepton final state. The combined four-top-quark production cross section is measured to be 24+7−6 fb, with a corresponding observed (expected) signal significance of 4.7 (2.6) standard deviations over the background-only predictions. It is consistent within 2.0 standard deviations with the Standard Model expectation of 12.0 ± 2.4 fb

Measurements of Higgs bosons decaying to bottom quarks from vector boson fusion production with the ATLAS experiment at √=13TeV

The paper presents a measurement of the Standard Model Higgs Boson decaying to b-quark pairs in the vector boson fusion (VBF) production mode. A sample corresponding to 126 fb−1 of s√=13TeV proton–proton collision data, collected with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, is analyzed utilizing an adversarial neural network for event classification. The signal strength, defined as the ratio of the measured signal yield to that predicted by the Standard Model for VBF Higgs production, is measured to be 0.95+0.38−0.36 , corresponding to an observed (expected) significance of 2.6 (2.8) standard deviations from the background only hypothesis. The results are additionally combined with an analysis of Higgs bosons decaying to b-quarks, produced via VBF in association with a photon