All Doors Lead to the Kitchen – Sustainability and Wellbeing Challenges in a Shared Centrepiece of Living

The kitchen figures a central place in the home where a significant share of a household’s resource consumption takes place. Sharing the kitchen between multiple households has potential to bring positive sustainability effects due to more efficient use of both material resources and energy. The concept of shared kitchens has, however, thus far had a limited diffusion. This paper explores the potential of shared kitchens as a future sustainable living environment by studying user experiences from a Living Lab setting. It builds the base for an overarching larger European collaboration on how future shared kitchens should be designed in order to support everyday practices while optimising the conditions for achieving positive impact on both sustainability and wellbeing. Findings are presented from five focus areas concerning different use contexts: (1) accessing, (2) cooking, (3) living and socialising, (4) storing, and (5) cleaning

One transition, many transitions? A corpus-based study of societal sustainability transition discourses in four civil society’s proposals

When the civil society makes ‘transition’ its label, it cannot be assumed that different civil society actors share compatible varieties of localist or radical transformationists discourses. This study has comparatively analyzed the discourses in four civil society sustainability transition proposals using a corpus-based methodology. We found that the proposals are similar as they identify the economy as an object and an entry point for transition, frame the economy as embedded in the socio–ecological system, ascribe agency to grassroots movements for transitions from the bottom–up. We also found crucial differences among the discourses regarding the role of the State, the degree of reform or radical innovation, the degree of imaginative character of the sustainability vision, the degree of opposition to capitalism. We suggest that insights on how the civil society employs notions of transition with respect to the themes of politics, emotions and place can help advance theorizations and practices of societal sustainability transitions led by the civil society

The transformative effect of the introduction of water volumetric billing in a disadvantaged housing area in Sweden

© IWA Publishing 2014. Domestic water payment schemes are often a product of their time, place and what is perceived to be customary. Aspects that payment schemes can take into account include resource conservation, equity, maintainability, and profitability. In contemporary Sweden profitable environmentally sustainable solutions are promoted, such as the introduction of volumetric billing of water in rental apartments. This paper describes the detailed consequences of this change in the payment structure for domestic water in terms of reduced resource consumption, direct impact on household economies and perceptions of the system's change process. By combining high-resolution quantitative data on water usage and socio-economic household characteristics with qualitative data from semistandardized interviews with residents, it is possible to identify the different impacts of the system's change and how the process was experienced. It was shown that while water usage decreased by 30%, 63% of the households had increased monthly costs, and unemployed residents were further disadvantaged and closer to social exclusion. Focusing on making environmental sustainability profitable, as posited in ecological modernization theory, may shadow negative impacts on social sustainability

Architectural Research in Living Labs: Exploring Occupier Driven Changes in Homes

The chapter reports from a project developing architectural research in connection to a Living Lab. The aim is to create innovative design solutions in order to decrease the environmental loads from material flows over time focusingon occupier driven renovations and alterations to layout, materials and installations of apartments in multi-residential buildings. In a first step, empirical insights from over 300 owner-occupied apartments answers the questions: what changes are made by occupiers, what motivates these changes, and can these changes be linked to different architectural designs? In the continued research the material flows and the environmental impact attributed to these occupier driven renovations and alterations will be estimated giving further indications for more sustainable design of homes

Nuclear structure/nuclei far from stability

This report outlines some of the nuclear structure topics discussed at the Los Alamos Workshop on the Science of Intense Radioactive Ion Beams (RIB). In it we also tried to convey some of the excitement of the participants for utilizing RIBs in their future research. The introduction of radioactive beams promises to be a major milestone for nuclear structure perhaps even more important than the last such advance in beams based on the advent of heavy-ion accelerators in the 1960's. RIBs not only will allow a vast number of new nuclei to be studies at the extremes of isospin, but the variety of combinations of exotic proton and neutron configurations should lead to entirely new phenomena. A number of these intriguing new studies and the profound consequences that they promise for understanding the structure of the atomic nucleus, nature's only many-body, strongly-inteacting quantum system, are discussed in the preceeding sections. However, as with any scientific frontier, the most interesting phenomena probably will be those that are not anticipated--they will be truly new