After Dark:temporal matter in the nighttime city

Cities are often understood as complex meshes of people, technologies and ‘animated spaces’ (Amin, 2015). However, the atmosphere of cities can change distinctly at night. For in the nocturnal hours identities become slippery, motives less easily defined, and architecture itself may appear far less assured of its role. Structures, rules and regulations that engender ‘tactile sterility’ (Sennett, 1994) in the urban realm quickly break down at night. The city at night may evolve into the ‘terrain vague’ (Levesque, 2002) with places undergoing transformation through conspicuous absence or cultures of darkness. This paper will seek to examine an underrepresented perspective on the nighttime urban landscape, and offer a new dialogue with the city. The processes of change that occur when walking in the city and urban hinterlands at night may be understood as ‘inscriptive practice’ enriched with the potentialities that Bergson (1913) describes. Freed from the spaces of everyday life, the vectors (Gatt, 2013) of nighttime walking enable us to reconnect with the city and give things our undivided attention, which affords the ‘divining’ (De Boeck, 2015) of a different experience of place, providing a welcome respite from the ongoing erosion and subdivision of our time and sense of belonging in the world. This paper will draw on extensive empirical data and personal experience in order to elucidate on the on-going entanglement that occurs at the boundaries of body and urban landscape; day and night; space and materiality

Dark Futures:the loss of night in the contemporary city?

The artificial but widely held binary conceptions of day versus night find themselves condensed in cities where strategies to recalibrate the nocturnal urban landscape are abundant. This transformation requires considerable energies and technologies to facilitate illumination. The night-time city remains poorly understood, requiring new inquiries to examine the tensions and coexistences of light and darkness. This article examines the city of Manchester, United Kingdom, its pioneering history of industrialisation, and subsequent phases of regeneration and gentrification to explore its contemporary urban landscape. It draws on extensive autoethnography of experiences in the city to consider the potential of different lights and darknesses for how we might think more holistically with regard illumination, and the reciprocity between our senses and the urban environment

Urban Imaginaries and the Palimpsest of the Future

How and why should we imagine new, positive urban futures? As we look forwards, the world seems highly likely to be shaped by its cities. We anticipate that cities will become the ultimate destination of future generations and they will play a crucial role in the lives of everyone around the globe. How these urban futures look, feel and operate has long been, and will continue to be, an important series of issues. Urban imaginaries have been conceived throughout history but their paths are increasingly critical as we seek to develop sustainable practices and environments for our collective tomorrow. The role of imagination is fundamental to processes of conceptualisation, envisioning and performing urban futures. The importance of such creativity extends in other ways to their questioning of reality, reshaping our spatial conceptions or providing expressions of alternatives. This chapter, therefore, examines the power of visions for urban futures across multiple media and how they contribute to our social imaginary. Considering these projections from a historical perspective can provide new insights and greater understanding of the developments and patterns that shape the present and, in turn, their implications for our future. The chapter also aims to provide insights for the way urban imaginaries have evolved and converged different ideas of the city. It thus explores dominant paradigms and how these have emerged, echoed or perished over time enabling certain futures to be visible, even if their trade-offs are less so

Future of health and healthcare provision in cities

This paper is concerned with the future of health and healthcare provision in cities in the UK. The primary data was collected at a facilitated workshop held at the Academy of Medical Sciences in September 2015. The workshop was designed to guide participants through a series of exercises in order to explore what the current, near future and far future trends in health and healthcare provision are likely to be for cities. The paper is organised into six sections. First, we describe the importance of understanding health and healthcare provision within cities and the intrinsic relationship between people and their built environment with regard both of these topics. Second, we examine the significant transformations within the sector of health and healthcare provision over the last fifty years. Third, we explore potential worst case scenarios for the future of such provision in cities. Fourth, we identify four possible future cities for healthy cities and effective healthcare provision. Fifth, we establish which policy developments would need to be designed and prioritised to facilitate delivery of these future cities. In conclusion, we establish a synthesis of the prevalent patterns and emergent relationships of themes raised during the workshop in order to draw together our findings and further understand how health and healthcare provision may impact the future of cities

Pseudocapacitive oxide materials for high-rate electrochemical energy storage

Electrochemical energy storage technology is based on devices capable of exhibiting high energy density (batteries) or high power density (electrochemical capacitors). There is a growing need, for current and near-future applications, where both high energy and high power densities are required in the same material. Pseudocapacitance, a faradaic process involving surface or near surface redox reactions, offers a means of achieving high energy density at high charge–discharge rates. Here, we focus on the pseudocapacitive properties of transition metal oxides. First, we introduce pseudocapacitance and describe its electrochemical features. Then, we review the most relevant pseudocapacitive materials in aqueous and non-aqueous electrolytes. The major challenges for pseudocapacitive materials along with a future outlook are detailed at the end

Where Do Batteries End and Supercapacitors Begin?

Electrochemical measurements can distinguish between different types of energy storage materials and their underlying mechanisms

BIM for infrastructure: An overall review and constructor perspective

The subject of building information modelling (BIM) has become a central topic to the improvement of the AECOO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operator) industry around the world, to the point where the concept is being expanded into domains it was not originally conceived to address. Transitioning BIMinto the domain of infrastructure projects has provided challenges and emphasized the constructor perspective of BIM. Therefore, this study aims to collect the relevant literature regarding BIM within the Infrastructure domain and its use from the constructor perspective to review and analyse the current industry positioning and research state of the art, with regards to the set criteria. The review highlighted a developing base of BIM for infrastructure. Fromthe analysis, the related research gapswere identified regarding information integration, alignment of BIM processes to constructor business processes & the effective governance and value of information. From this a unique research strategy utilising a framework for information governance coupled with a graph based distributed data environment is outlined to further progress the integration and efficiency of AECOO Infrastructure projects

Validation of a single camera, spatio-temporal gait analysis system

such as tennis. However during competition, it is impracticable to instrument players. A markerless, view-independent, footsurface contact identification (FSCi) system was developed and validated. The FSCi system analysed standard colour video sequences of walking and running (barefoot and shod) from four unique camera perspectives; output data were compared to three-dimensional motion analysis. Results demonstrated that data for 99.6% of foot contacts (all camera perspectives) were identified. The calculation of gait variables, i.e. step length etc., was performed automatically for 91.3% of foot contact data; 8.7% of data required manual intervention for analysis. Resultant direction root-mean square error (RMSE) for foot contact position was 52.1 and 52.2 mm for barefoot and shod walking respectively. Resultant direction RMSE for foot contact position during running was 91.4 and 103.4 mm for barefoot and shod conditions respectively. The FSCi system measured basic gait parameters of walking and running without interfering with the activity being observed. The system represents a flexible approach which could be used for in situ gait analysis. The FSCi system could be used for gait analysis in competitive tennis however performance of the system when applied to larger filming areas, e.g. tennis courts, must be evaluated

ASSESSING TENNIS PLAYER INTERACTIONS WITH TENNIS COURTS

Different types of tennis injury have been associated with play on different court surfaces and current knowledge of tennis player and court interactions is limited. This paper provides a brief overview of tennis injury incidence, player movements and the biomechanics of slips. The discussion proposes a new direction for assessing tennis player-surface interactions and outlines current work. It is envisaged that current work will contribute to the understanding of tennis player-surface interactions and be of practical use in the future regulation of tennis courts