Sustainability and resilience after COVID-19: A circular premium in the fashion industry

COVID-19 has challenged so many of humanity’s certainties, but it has also shown that we are able to react to serious threats. Moreover, it is possible to see a great opportunity: to create a real, sustainable renaissance. However, the challenge is so complex that it requires the involvement of as many categories of stakeholders as possible, and the implementation of low-carbon models in different production sectors [1]. A single closed-loop supply chain can be reconfigured as a multi-loop system, in which both reused and recycled materials from a previous life cycle are reintroduced into the market as new products and values. In particular, this editorial focuses on on the fashion industry, which unquestionably characterizes the lives of all citizens and identifies a potential circular premium

Urban commoning in a civic social network: the case study of FirstLife

The integration of ICTs in the urban management is increasing at all levels of public administrations in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness of public services, but their role is still instrumental rather than drive a change toward a more collaborative local governance. On the other hand, there is a raising expectation of the civil society to participate in decision making processes and contribute in defining local policies about sensitive topics. These purposes are often addressed by using or creating community digital tools designed for a specific contextual scope, resulting in a deep fragmentation of information about civic initiatives and social innovation projects and a lack of continuous communication among urban stakeholders even working in the same area. The challenge is to design an ICT solution to refactor the current practices of cooperation between private and public sector and support a real change in the city management processes from the local to the territorial level. In this contribution, we present the development of FirstLife, a map-based civic social network, designed to represent the complex environment of the city through geo-referenced time framed crowdsourced data about urban entities as events, places, groups, initiatives, projects, stories, news, etc. The main goals of the platform are to support the action of multiple stakeholders in alternative processes of co-management of common or shared resources, as for instance public spaces, green areas and buildings hosting collective institutions, to enable the co-production of services based on a reform of local administrative protocols toward the We-government model, and to empower mixed local networks. The development of FirstLife followed a participatory action design research methodology involving several stakeholders among associations, local authorities and institutions, businesses and the University in the city of Turin in the last two years. The participatory process started from the requirement elicitation, and continued with the collection of applicative scenarios based on the context analysis of internal/external relations of groups of stakeholders and the balancing of their goals in a common platform. Then, the co-design of features has been undertaken in the stakeholders’ working environments to model the platform functionalities on the real processes and practices defining social acceptable technological solutions, ready to be adopted by institutional and civic organizations. The platform has been tested-in-use in multiple living labs and pilot projects, experimenting a number of use patterns representing the common actions in the city carried out by public or private actors. These activities have been integrated in an iterative development cycle that brought so far at four progressively improved versions of FirstLife, from a map-based tool to share georeferenced information to a common workbench for multiple stakeholders acting in the same area (from the neighbourhood to the city level) where open groups can self-organize initiatives and cooperate with others. The result of this process is a digital space for urban commoning practices,reflecting the organization of society in individuals and structured public and private entities, the spatial framework of their actions and the temporal development of city transformations and initiatives

Implementation of an asymmetric network equilibrium problem with detailed representation of unsignalized and signalized urban intersections

This paper discusses the implementation of an asymmetric network equilibrium model with detailed representation of unsignalized and signalized urban intersections. A software has been developed to solve the deterministic user equilibrium (DUE) problem which takes into account real urban intersections in their detailed configurations. During the first phase this software was tested on a “toy” network and then on the real network of Villafranca (a town near Verona Italy). The comparison between the equilibrium flow patterns resulting from the model and some traffic counts on the Villafranca network confirms that the model is good

Large Polarization and Susceptibilities in Artificial Morphotropic Phase Boundary PbZr1−xTixO3 Superlattices

The ability to produce atomically precise, artificial oxide heterostructures allows for the possibility of producing exotic phases and enhanced susceptibilities not found in parent materials. Typical ferroelectric materials either exhibit large saturation polarization away from a phase boundary or large dielectric susceptibility near a phase boundary. Both large ferroelectric polarization and dielectric permittivity are attained wherein fully epitaxial (PbZr0.8Ti0.2O3)n/(PbZr0.4Ti0.6O3)2n (n = 2, 4, 6, 8, 16 unit cells) superlattices are produced such that the overall film chemistry is at the morphotropic phase boundary, but constitutive layers are not. Long- (n ≥ 6) and short-period (n = 2) superlattices reveal large ferroelectric saturation polarization (Ps = 64 µC cm−2) and small dielectric permittivity (εr ≈ 400 at 10 kHz). Intermediate-period (n = 4) superlattices, however, exhibit both large ferroelectric saturation polarization (Ps = 64 µC cm−2) and dielectric permittivity (εr = 776 at 10 kHz). First-order reversal curve analysis reveals the presence of switching distributions for each parent layer and a third, interfacial layer wherein superlattice periodicity modulates the volume fraction of each switching distribution and thus the overall material response. This reveals that deterministic creation of artificial superlattices is an effective pathway for designing materials with enhanced responses to applied bias

High-temperature optical spectral weight and Fermi liquid renormalization in Bi-based cuprates

The optical conductivity and the spectral weight W(T) of two superconducting cuprates at optimum doping, Bi2Sr2-xLaxCuO6 and Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8, have been first measured up to 500 K. Above 300 K, W(T) deviates from the usual T2 behavior in both compounds, even though the zero-frequency extrapolation of the optical conductivity remains larger than the Ioffe-Regel limit. The deviation is surprisingly well described by the T4 term of the Sommerfeld expansion, but its coefficients are enhanced by strong correlation. This renormalization is due to strong correlation, as shown by the good agreement with dynamical mean field calculations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Physical Review Letters in pres

Optical Properties of (SrMnO3)n/(LaMnO3)2n superlattices: an insulator-to-metal transition observed in the absence of disorder

We measure the optical conductivity of (SrMnO3)n/(LaMnO3)2n superlattices (SL) for n=1,3,5, and 8 and 10 < T < 400 K. Data show a T-dependent insulator to metal transition (IMT) for n \leq 3, driven by the softening of a polaronic mid-infrared band. At n = 5 that softening is incomplete, while at the largest-period n=8 compound the MIR band is independent of T and the SL remains insulating. One can thus first observe the IMT in a manganite system in the absence of the disorder due to chemical doping. Unsuccessful reconstruction of the SL optical properties from those of the original bulk materials suggests that (SrMnO3)n/(LaMnO3)2n heterostructures give rise to a novel electronic state.Comment: Published Online in Nano Letters, November 8, 2010; http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl1022628; 5 pages, 3 figure

Far infrared properties of the rare-earth scandate DyScO3

We present reflectance measurements in the infrared region on a single crystal the rare earth scandate DyScO3. Measurements performed between room temperature and 10 K allow to determine the frequency of the infrared-active phonons, never investigated experimentally, and to get information on their temperature dependence. A comparison with the phonon peak frequency resulting from ab-initio computations is also provided. We finally report detailed data on the frequency dependence of the complex refractive index of DyScO3 in the terahertz region, which is important in the analysis of terahertz measurements on thin films deposited on DyScO3

Beyond National Institutions: Labor Taxes and Regional Unemployment in Italy

By focusing on the Italian experience, we ask whether the relationship between labor taxes and unemployment varies across regions. In spite of similar national labor market institutions, we show that this relationship is significantly stronger in the highly industrialized North than in the underdeveloped South, where unemployment is much higher. An important source of variation in the regional responsiveness of unemployment originates from the fact that regional gross wages in the North increase more than in the South in response to a hike in labor taxes. Regional wage setting affects regional employment (and unemployment) both directly and indirectly, via its impact on regional profits and the capital stock