Sustainability: Its adaptation and relevance in remote area housing

Little consideration has been given to the context of housing in remote areas.  It is important for the economic survival of many remote communities that appropriate and sustainable housing solutions are decided and implemented. This report examines housing at St Pauls, Moa Island in the Torres Strait, using site information, historical research and a review of cultural and geo-political factors to compare the current model with similar studies in self-build housing undertaken in the region between 1986 and 1992.  It not only demonstrates tangible economic benefits, but also evaluates the environmental and social improvements which can be achieved with a re-examination of the existing model.  It is important to consider the value of investing in policies and practices of sustainable development that can play a pivotal role in potential capacity building within such communities. Current land tenure policy means that families wishing to own their own homes must leave St Pauls, or build illegally.  Economically they cannot establish businesses so must leave the island or remain on welfare.  The result of this is an exponential increase in the cost of providing community housing and the associated increase in social and health stresses.  Acknowledgement at a policy level of the links between social and emotional well-being, and ‘Closing the Gap’ initiatives, have the potential to offer a wide range of funding opportunities and innovative approaches to solving the housing crisis in remote Australia, if they can be implemented in an open and effective manner

Papua New Guinea’s Vernacular Architecture, from Relics to Reframing Culture: Kunguma and Tubusereia

Vernacular architecture (VA) research considers the interrelationship of architecture, society and culture, and traditional knowledge embedded in design, so mitigating global trends in cultural uniformity. Earlier studies, associated VA with primitive buildings of preliterate societies, fragile remnants within static timeless space. Latterly, an anthropological lens celebrates its enduring dynamism, responsive to cultural, environmental and technological change.Considering the altered built environment of the Papua New Guinea (PNG) region of Oceania, the KUK Swamp archaeological site reveals 10,000-year-old dwellings of comparable form to their regional contemporaries. Nevertheless, post-colonial impacts on spiritual, technological and socio-cultural behaviours engendered cultural borrowings and abandonment of some aspects of this built environment.This chapter discusses the relevance of VA for contemporary planning and architectural practice from the findings of anthropological architectural case studies, (Study Areas 1 and 2 respectively) in PNG: Kunguma Village, Western Highlands Province (WHP) and Tubusereia Village, Central Province.<br/

A Quantitative Investigation of the Effect of Scan Planning and Multi-Technology Fusion for Point Cloud Data Collection on Registration and Data Quality: A Case Study of Bond University’s Sustainable Building

The construction industry requires comprehensive and accurate as-built information for a variety of applications, including building renovations, historic building preservation and structural health monitoring. Reality capture technology facilitates the recording of as-built information in the form of point clouds. However, the emerging development trends of scan planning and multi-technology fusion in point cloud acquisition methods have not been adequately addressed in research regarding their effects on point cloud registration quality and data quality in the built environment. This study aims to extensively investigate the impact of scan planning and multi-technology fusion on point cloud registration and data quality. Registration quality is evaluated using registration error (RE) and scan overlap rate (SOR), representing registration accuracy and registration coincidence rate, respectively. Conversely, data quality is assessed using point error (PE) and coverage rate (CR), which denote data accuracy and data completeness. Additionally, this study proposes a voxel centroid approach and the PCP rate to calculate and optimize the CR, tackling the industry’s challenge of quantifying point cloud completeness