Potential advantages in combining smart and green infrastructure over silo approaches for future cities

Cities are incorporating smart and green infrastructure components in their urban design policies, adapting existing and new infrastructure systems to integrate technological advances to mitigate extreme weather due to climate change. Research has illustrated that smart green infrastructure (SGI) provides not only climate change resilience but also many health and wellbeing benefits that improve the quality of life of citizens. With the growing demand for smart technology, a series of problems and challenges, including governance, privacy, and security, must be addressed. This paper explores the potential to transition from grey, green, or smart silos to work with nature-based solutions and smart technology to help change cities to achieve considerable environmental and socio-economic benefits. The concepts of grey, green, and smart infrastructure are presented, and the needs, benefits, and applications are investigated. Moreover, the advantages of using integrated smart, green nature-based solutions are discussed. A comprehensive literature review is undertaken with keyword searches and included journal papers, stakeholder and case study reports, and local authority action plans. The methodology adopted multimethod qualitative information review, including literature, case studies, expert interviews, and documentary analysis. Published data and information were analysed to capture the key concepts in implementing SGI systems, such as storm-water control, flood and coastal defence, urban waste management, transportation, recreation, and asset management. The paper investigated the elimination of silo approaches and the alleviation of the destructions caused by extreme weather events using these interdependent SGI systems supported by novel data-driven platforms to provide nature-based solutions to boost the health and wellbeing of the residents

Stakeholder engagement in sustainable housing refurbishment in the UK

The UK government is committed to effectively implement a viable sustainable agenda in the social housing sector. To this end housing associations and local authorities are being encouraged to improve the environmental performance of their new and existing homes. Whilst much attention has been focused on new housing (e.g. the Code for Sustainable Homes) little effort has been focussed on improving the 3.9 (approx) million homes maintained and managed by the public sector (in England), which, given the low rate of new build and demolition (<1% in England), will represent approximately 70% of the public housing stock in 2050. Thus, if UK is to achieve sustainable public housing the major effort will have to focus on the existing stock. However, interpreting the sustainability agenda for an existing housing portfolio is not a straight foreword activity. In addition to finding a ‘technical’ solution, landlords also haveto address the socio-economic issues that balance quality of expectations of tenants with the economic realities of funding social housing refurbishment. This paper will report the findings of a qualitative study (participatory approach) that examined the processes by which a large public landlord sought to develop a long-term sustainable housing strategy. Through a series of individual meetings and group workshops the research team identified: committed leadership; attitudes towards technology; social awareness; and collective understanding of the sustainability agenda as key issues that the organisation needed to address in developing a robust and defendable refurbishment strategy. The paper concludes that the challenges faced by the landlord in improving the sustainability of their existing stock are not primarily technical, but socio-economic. Further, while the economic challenges: initial capital cost; lack of funding; and pay-back periods can be overcome, if the political will exists, by fiscal measures; the social challenges: health & wellbeing; poverty; security; space needs; behaviour change; education; and trust; are much more complex in nature and will require a coordinated approach from all the stakeholders involved in the wider community if they are to be effectively addressed. The key challenge to public housing landlords is to develop mechanisms that can identify and interpret the complex nature of the social sustainability agenda in a way that reflects local aspirations (although the authors believe the factors will exist in all social housing communities, their relative importance is likely to vary between communities) whilst addressing Government agendas

The ANDROID Case Study; Venice and its territory: A general overview.

The Work Package 7 (Research Futures & Special Interest Groups) of the ANDROID project, selected Venice and its territory as an emblematic case study of a region that could be affected by cross-border disastrous events. The paper provides a general overview on the topic, trying to organise the large amount of available scientific literature in some strategic cores, identifying undoubted milestones, open questions and future research needs, following a holistic approach to risk assessment. This case study is carried out not only as an engaging exercise, but with the purpose to provide a reference point for scientists and teachers interested to translate multifaceted knowledge into specific solutions. In fact, the paper is strongly linked as a whole to other three ones (presented at the 4th International Conference on Building resilience), which deepen respectively hazard, vulnerability/resilience, and mitigation about the site taken into consideration. Furthermore, the City of Venice takes part to the UNISDR Program “Making Cities Resilient”, and planned a robust intervention, consisting in the realisation of mobile dikes located at the openings of the lagoon (MOSE project, almost terminated), which has been strongly debated since the beginning, due to possible negative consequences on the environment. At last, the paper analyses drawbacks and benefits of the above said intervention, and suggests further proposals for the global safeguard of Venice and its lagoon

Implementing Data-Driven Smart City Applications for Future Cities

Cities are investing in data-driven smart technologies to improve performance and efficiency and to generate a vast amount of data. Finding the opportunities to innovatively use this data help governments and authorities to forecast, respond, and plan for future scenarios. Access to real-time data and information can provide effective services that improve productivity, resulting in environmental, social, and economic benefits. It also assists in the decision-making process and provides opportunities for community engagement and participation by improving digital literacy and culture. This paper aims to review and analyze current practices of data-driven smart applications that contribute to the smooth functioning of urban city systems and the problems they face. The research methodology is qualitative: a systematic and extensive literature review carried out by PRISMA method. Data and information from different case studies carried out globally assisted in the inductive approach. Content analysis identified smart city indicators and related criteria in the case study examples. The study concluded that smart people, smart living, and smart governance methods that have come into practice at a later stage are as important as smart mobility, smart environments, and smart economy measures that were implemented early on, and cities are opening up to new, transparent participatory governance approaches where citizens play a key role. It also illustrates that the current new wave of smart cities with real time data are promoting citizen participation focusing on human, social capital as an essential component in future cities

Achieving Low Carbon Social Housing Through Innovation

Achieving a low carbon future continues to be one of the most challenging issues facing today’s built environment professionals. While significant advances have been made in the area of new build, the same cannot be said for the existing housing stock. In the UK 70% of the housing that will exist in 2050 has already been built. If the UK is to have any chance of meeting its 2050 carbon reduction targets, effective refurbishment strategies that significantly reduce the carbon footprint of existing housing need to be developed. However, whilst it is generally acknowledged that retrofit to existing buildings is more complicated than new build, the issues that need to be addressed are not primarily technical, but organisational and managerial. The combination of attitudes towards risk and awareness of innovative solutions result in organisational barriers to the wide uptake of low/zero carbon technologies. This paper presents the findings of a research study into the level of perceived organisational sustainability and factors that influence refurbishment decision making amongst 57 UK social housing providers. It identifies a range of maturity indicators from Initiation, through Contagion and Control, to Maturity that can be used to distinguish between approaches to sustainable refurbishment. A research questionnaire was used to establish the level of maturity (in the sustainability innovation context) and decision making characteristics of the responding organisation along with their experiences of sustainable refurbishment of their housing stock. The paper identifies a range of organisational characteristics and maps these against the organisation’s position along a “general” innovation journey through an S curve maturity model. The paper identifies a shift from national level drivers and barriers to local level interpretation of the wider sustainability agenda as the key differences between Initiator and Mature organisations. The paper concludes that it is possible to profile UK social housing providers and develop management instruments to accelerate their journey along the sustainable innovation curve. This in turn will accelerate the uptake of sustainable refurbishment programmes

The Influence of Lighting Settings on Museum’s Brand Image and Human Satisfaction in Exhibition Halls Using Virtual Reality

This paper analyses the influence of museum lighting design on the brand image and human satisfaction inside exhibition halls, taking Birmingham museum and art gallery as the case study of this research focusing on the exhibition that included the ancient Egyptian displays. Four different generated lighting scenes using virtual reality were generated. The results showed that the lighting had an impact on the brand image and affect the willingness of people to revisit the museum and recommend it to family and friends. This research considers the museum’s visitors as active participants not just passive recipients of environmental stimuli. The research tried to provide a better understanding of how the exhibition environment in terms of lighting is perceived and provide further insight into how exhibition lighting design can enhance the visitor’s experience and create a brand image. According to the research results, visitors tend to be willing to return and stay longer in the presence of diverse and exciting lighting settings

Impact of computerized accounting information systems’ effectiveness in increasing the efficiency of human capital

The study aimed to identify the impact of Computerized Accounting Information Systems‘ effectiveness in increasing the efficiency of human capital in the financial departments in the public Sri Lankan universities. The population of this study consists of all employees in the financial departments in fifteen Sri Lankan public universities. The sample was selected from the three public universities which are located in Eastern province in Sri Lanka. Conclusion of this study has explained the significant model. The variables interpret the positive correlation and the significant relationship with the level of the skill and the innovation with the efficiency of computerized accounting information system in finance department of the Sri Lankan public universities

Critical success factors, barriers and challenges for adopting offsite prefabrication: a systematic literature review

Egypt suffers from a huge deficit in low-income housing despite several mitigation attempts. The housing deficit has reached 3.5 million units in 2017 due to several issues including high population increase rate, overcrowding, slum dwellings, poor housing stock and poor performance of the construction sector. In order to address these challenges, offsite prefabrication has been proffered as an innovative solution to provide decent housing to the least advantaged households. This paper presents the findings of a systematic review of selected literature on adopting offsite prefabrication in several developing and developed countries. The review concluded that the housing deficit would not be reduced through conventional construction methods; hence, a new construction approach is needed that integrates manufacturing with construction. On the other hand, the critical success factors for successful adoption of offsite prefabrication include governmental support, adopting new building codes, integration of the private sector, industrial capabilities and social and cultural factors. It is concluded that offsite prefabrication can leverage low-income houses delivery in addition to improving the performance of the Egyptian construction sector

Climate change impacts on hydrology and water resources of the Upper Blue Nile River Basin, Ethiopia

Climate change / Hydrology / River basins / Runoff / Precipitation / Models / Dams / Operating policies / Water power / Drought / Analysis / Africa / Ethiopia / Egypt / Sudan / Upper Blue Nile River Basin

Full-Newton-Step Interior-Point Method for the Linear Complementarity Problems

In this thesis, we present a new Interior-Point Method (IPM) for monotone Linear Complementarity Problem (LPC). The advantage of the method is that it uses full Newton-steps, thus, avoiding the calculation of the step size at each iteration. However, by suitable choice of parameters the iterates are forced to stay in the neighborhood of the central path, hence, still guaranteeing the global convergence of the method under strict feasibility assumption. The number of iterations necessary to find 2-approximate solution of the problem matches the best known iteration bounds for these types of methods. The preliminary implementation of the method and numerical results indicate robustness and practical validity of the method