The Warden Attitude: An investigation of the value of interaction with everyday wildlife

Using a discrete choice experiment, we elicit valuations of engagement with ‘everyday wildlife’ through feeding garden birds. We find that bird-feeding is primarily but not exclusively motivated by the direct consumption value of interaction with wildlife. The implicit valuations given to different species suggest that people prefer birds that have aesthetic appeal and that evoke human feelings of protectiveness. These findings suggest that people derive wellbeing by adopting a warden-like role towards ‘their’ wildlife. We test for external validity by conducting a hedonic analysis of sales of bird food. We discuss some policy implications of the existence of warden attitudes

Biophilic architecture: a review of the rationale and outcomes

Contemporary cities have high stress levels, mental health issues, high crime levels and ill health, while the built environment shows increasing problems with urban heat island effects and air and water pollution. Emerging from these concerns is a new set of design principles and practices where nature needs to play a bigger part called “biophilic architecture”. This design approach asserts that humans have an innate connection with nature that can assist to make buildings and cities more effective human abodes. This paper examines the evidence for this innate human psychological and physiological link to nature and then assesses the emerging research supporting the multiple social, environmental and economic benefits of biophilic architecture

Heat Fluxes in a Green Façade System: Mathematical Relations and an Experimental Case

The need of greater environmental sustainability in today’s living contexts can be significantly coped through the introduction of green infrastructures. Their benefits concern improvement of climate and comfort conditions. Among green infrastructures, vertical greenery systems, applied to buildings, contribute to the energy efficiency of buildings and to the improvement of outdoor and indoor microclimatic conditions. Green façades, a typology of vertical greenings, allow a considerable energy saving for air conditioning, by reducing the surface temperature of buildings and increasing the envelope thermal insulation. A realistic description of the functioning of green façades is essential to comprehend the real extent of their advantages. This paper aims to provide a first answer to the need of energy simulation models for green façades’ thermal behavior. The paper proposes a theoretical and an experimental approach. The main heat fluxes involved into the green façade system are investigated and described, by resorting to a schematic representation. The defined mathematical relations are applied to data collected during an experiment on a green façade conducted at the University of Bari. This work represents a contribution to the development of a model to forecast the thermal behavior of green façades and of the microclimate of buildings equipped with them