Cool roofs can mitigate cooling energy demand for informal settlement dwellers

Cities are critical to meeting our sustainable energy goals. Informal settlement redevelopment programs represent an opportunity to improve living conditions and curb increasing demand for active cooling. We introduce an energy modeling framework for informal settlements to investigate how building design decisions influence the onset of heat stress and energy-intensive cooling demand. We show that occupants of tropically-located informal settlements are most vulnerable to prolonged heat stress year-round. Up to 98% of annual heat stress exposure can be mitigated by improving the building envelope. We find a universal solution (cool roofs) that reduces up to 91% of annual heat stress exposure. Finally, we show how proposed redevelopment building schemes could worsen thermal conditions of dwellers and further increase urban energy demand. Our results underscore how building design affects human well-being and highlight potential near-term and long-term pathways for reducing energy-intensive cooling demand for 800+ million informal settlement dwellers worldwide

The Discourses of Marketing and Development: Towards "Critical Transformative Marketing Research"

In order to understand the connection between development, marketing and transformative consumer research (TCR), with its attendant interest in promoting human well-being, this article begins by charting the links between US ‘exceptionalism’, ‘Manifest Destiny’ and modernisation theory, demonstrating the confluence of US perspectives and experiences in articulations and understandings of the contributions of marketing practice and consumer research to society. Our narrative subsequently engages with the rise of social marketing (1960s-) and finally TCR (2006-). We move beyond calls for an appreciation of paradigm plurality to encourage TCR scholars to adopt a multiple paradigmatic approach as part of a three-pronged strategy that encompasses an initial ‘provisional moral agnosticism’. As part of this stance, we argue that scholars should value the insights provided by multiple paradigms, turning each paradigmatic lens sequentially on to the issue of the relationship between marketing, development and consumer well-being. After having scrutinised these issues using multiple perspectives, scholars can then decide whether to pursue TCR-led activism. The final strategy that we identify is termed ‘critical intolerance’