The role of Greenways in promoting Sustainable Cultural Landscapes. The case of Greece

A primary focus in the Greek Ministry of Culture is the protection and preservation of its cultural/ archaeological sites as “Treasured Landscapes”. Such sites in Greece face problems of neglect and degradation, lacking in attractiveness and visitor services, comprising spaces of limited socio-cultural/historic/educational/ heritage activities only. The greenways movement has been advocating and implementing greenways and ecological networks internationally (Fabos and Ahern.1995). The paper aims to achieve the goal of promoting and upgrading landscapes through protecting/ conserving/restoring sustainable cultural landscapes/sites: a) by developing a single integrated landscape strategy, that of greenway planning, and b) by defining related actions of implementation of greenways and related green infrastructure, in order to accomplish the desired goal at the national, provincial and local scale. The paper includes three main parts: a) literature review of related terms, b) discussion of greenways as a landscape planning strategy and their role in promoting the sustainable cultural landscapes and archaeological sites of Greece, and c) concluding remarks

The usage and perception of pedestrian and cycling streets on residents’ well-being in Kalamaria, Greece

Pedestrian zones are public spaces intended for the continued and safe mobility of pedestrians and people with disabilities, and they provide multiple benefits to urban areas. They counterbalance the densely built-up areas, decrease atmospheric pollution, increase available green or social space, increase walking and cycling rates, and facilitate active play for children. Done properly, pedestrianization may also increase local business sales. Greece boasts open public spaces and the pedestrianization of common roads. The economic crisis that Greece has been experiencing since 2008 has led people to give up their vehicles and use the pedestrian streets more frequently. The purpose of this paper was to investigate residents’ perceptions and satisfaction rates concerning the pedestrian streets of Kalamaria, Greece, and evaluate their importance for residents’ well-being. Following a random sampling method, 400 residents were interviewed. A two-step cluster analysis was conducted. The survey showed that the urban residents visited pedestrian zones in Kalamaria at least once a week, and the visits lasted 46–60 min. The improvement of urban landscape aesthetics and people’s health and well-being were evaluated as important functions of pedestrian zones. The results also indicate that residents were not satisfied with their quality of life and the existing green infrastructures of the pedestrian streets, even though they have a positive disposition toward the construction or transformation of pedestrian streets. The residents expressed their unwillingness to pay more public taxes for the construction and maintenance of pedestrian and cycling streets. The safety and convenience of the mobility of residents were the most important advantages of the pedestrian streets. Meanwhile, overspill parking and difficulties with finding parking spaces were the main disadvantages for the residents. Local authorities can use the results of the present survey to manage the city’s green infrastructure and use this information in the urban planning framework.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Children and adults' understanding and use of sound-symbolism in novel words

Sound-symbolism is the inherent link between the sound of a word and its meaning. The aim of this thesis is to gain an insight into the nature of sound-symbolism. There are five empirical chapters, each of which aims to uncover children and adults’ understanding of sound-symbolic words. Chapter 1 is a literature review of sound-symbolism. Chapter 2 is a cross-linguistic developmental study looking at the acquisition of sound-symbolism. Chapter 3 looks at childrens use of sound-symbolism in a verb-learning task. Chapter 4 looks at childrens use of sound-symbolism when learning and memorising novel verbs. Chapter 5 consists of two experiments looking at what exact part of a word is sound-symbolic. This study compared different types of consonants and vowels, across a number of domains in an attempt to gain an understanding of the nature of sound-symbolism. Chapter 6 looks at the potential mechanisms by which sound-symbolism is understood. This study is a replication of previous research, which found that sound-symbolic sensitivity is increased when the word is said and not just heard. There are therefore a total of five empirical chapters each of which attempts to look at the nature of sound-symbolic meaning from a slightly different angle

Sustainable Green Infrastructure Planning in Greece: Proposal for an Urban Greenway Network in the Greater Athens Metropolitan Area

Athens, the capital of Greece, epitomizes the opportunities and constraints of modern urbanization, sustainable mobility, green infrastructure, greenway planning, and the associated quality of contemporary Greek civic life. Though the country’s economy has been suffering tremendously for the past consecutive eight years with harsh austerity measures holding back any developmental commotion, signs of recovery and appropriate funding are lately emerging. Physically, Athens has overcome its natural containing barriers, the Pikilo and Hemmitos Mountains on east and west borders, the southern waterfront expanding over to the Thriasio and Mesogeia Fields and the island of Aegina respectively. Culturally, contemporary Athens is thriving, living up to her own historical heritage and legacy. Socially, the latest abrupt surge of immigrant and refugees influx has altered both demographical ratios and civic life in the congested downtown and CBD of the city as well as the dispersed residential neighborhoods within a chaotic urban fabric. Economically, foreign and local investors have shown a keen interest in large scale projects (e.g. the former Hellinikon International Airport) but national debts to both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) have led to governmental hesitation and procrastination of any developmental plans, halting in turn the investors’ much anticipated and crucial momentum. Lastly, clashing stakeholders’ interests within the broader green infrastructure and targeted greenway planning process, provide the fertile basis for a wide spectrum of alternative development scenarios. One of the most discussed and highest-profile projects in Greece today is Hellinikon, an ambitious plan for converting the former Athens airport into an enormous park. The site of Hellinikon lies 8 km southwest of the center of Athens being approximately 1,500 acres and boasting a 3.5 km waterfront, including a marina. Exploiting the Hellinikon site as the main organizing impetus, this paper presents a proposal for an Urban Greenway Network in the Greater Athens Metropolitan Area (GAMA) as a response to prudent city planning, attempting to address the vision, the strategic issues, the governmental and private synergies, the planning criteria, the physical design and standards of greenway planning required for its implementation at the city scale and beyond. At the background, ecological, social, and economic issues weave the sustainability concerns and processes of green infrastructure planning

Shadeways: Exploring a New Greenway Type Promoting the Mediterranean Bio Climate in Greece

In a Mediterranean climate the bioclimatic design parameters greatly influence and determine a greenway’s successful use in terms of human comfort and should be a key element in landscape planning and decision making. Tourism is probably the best example among human activities in which the linkages between environmental quality and economic prospects are evident (Priestley et al., 1996). Internationally, greenways have proved to be desired living places, with pedestrian access to nearby neighbouring rural towns, improving the overall quality of public space. Sustainable rural greenways geared to leisure and tourism offer mobility, conservation, reuse of natural and cultural heritage sites, recreational amenities for leisure activities, environmentally respectful touristic potential, and quality public spaces through proper greenway and landscape planning

A Decision Support System Web—Application for the Management of Forest Road Network

The present study contributes to the development of an online FRMP (Forest Road Management Platform) that aims to assist in the management of forest road network in a holistic way. This is achieved by the proposed methodology which serves as a database using geoprocessing and geospatial technologies for the handling, and the identification of critical issues in the infrastructure of forest road networks, visualization of forest roads, and the optimization of the management of the forest road network by proposing alternative strategies. In this paper, the development of the decision making web-tool, and presented examples to demonstrate effectively its application and resulting advantages are described. The developed web-application may provide assistance to various forest organizations in the management of forest road networks and associated problems in an effective and sustainable way

Stimulation and measurement patterns versus prior information for fast 3D EIT: A breast screening case study

Imposing prior information is a typical strategy in inverse problems in return for a stable numerical algorithm. For a given imaging system configuration, Picard's stability condition could be deployed as a practical measure of the performance of the system against various priors and noise contaminated measurements. Herein, we make extensive use of this measure to quantify the performance of impedance imaging systems for various injection patterns. In effect, we numerically demonstrate that by varying electrode distributions and numbers, little improvement, if any, in the performance of the impedance imaging system is recorded. In contrast, by using groups of electrodes in the 3D current injection process, a step increase in performance is obtained. Numerical results on a female breast phantom reveal that the performance measure of the imaging system is 15% for a conventional combination of stimulation and prior information, 61% for groups of electrodes and the same prior and 97% for groups of electrodes and a more accurate prior. Finally, since a smaller number of electrodes is involved in the measurement process, a smaller number of measurements is acquired. However, no compromise in the quality of the reconstructed images is observed

A spectrally-accurate FVTD technique for complicated amplification and reconfigurable filtering EMC devices

The consistent and computationally economical analysis of demanding amplification and filtering structures is introduced in this paper via a new spectrally-precise finite-volume time-domain algorithm. Combining a family of spatial derivative approximators with controllable accuracy in general curvilinear coordinates, the proposed method employs a fully conservative field flux formulation to derive electromagnetic quantities in areas with fine structural details. Moreover, the resulting 3-D operators assign the appropriate weight to each spatial stencil at arbitrary media interfaces, while for periodic components the domain is systematically divided to a number of nonoverlapping subdomains. Numerical results from various real-world configurations verify our technique and reveal its universality

Pseudo-Hermiticity and Electromagnetic Wave Propagation: The case of anisotropic and lossy media

Pseudo-Hermitian operators can be used in modeling electromagnetic wave propagation in stationary lossless media. We extend this method to a class of non-dispersive anisotropic media that may display loss or gain. We explore three concrete models to demonstrate the utility of our general results and reveal the physical meaning of pseudo-Hermiticity and quasi-Hermiticity of the relevant wave operator. In particular, we consider a uniaxial model where this operator is not diagonalizable. This implies left-handedness of the medium in the sense that only clockwise circularly polarized plane-wave solutions are bounded functions of time.Comment: 12 pages, Published Versio

Sviluppo delle definizioni consensuali per la terapia occupazionale in Europa

The Tuning Project is directly related to the Bologna Declaration and the resulting process which outlined a framework for a common higher education policy within Europe. Of particular importance in the Bologna process is the implementation throughout Europe by 2010 of a degree system of three cycles of higher education (equivalent to Bachelor, Master and Doctoral levels) with access from one cycle to the next, with the recognition of degrees and study periods assisted by the implementation of the European Credit Transfer System and Diploma Supplements (Confederation of EU Rector's Conferences & the Association of European Universities, 2002).sch_occpub3071pub