Regulating sustainable construction in Europe: An inquiry into the European Commission's harmonization attempts

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is first, to gain insight into how the European member states have addressed the concept of sustainability in their building regulatory frameworks; and second, to gain insight in the effects of harmonization attempts o

Guest editorial: governing the challenges of climate change and energy transition in cities

Cities form the key context within which social, economic and environmental challenges for sustainable development will manifest in the years to come. As they face the grand societal challenges of climate change and the greening of energy systems, city governments are confronted with the challenge of designing and implementing workable policy strategies. We find that although much attention has been paid to low carbon energy transition in cities, there is surprisingly little attention to the dimension of governance, policy and politics in the scholarly literature. The main question in this guest editorial of the thematic issue, entitled ‘Governing the Climate Change Mitigation and Energy Transition Challenges in Cities’, is: How can effective policy strategies be designed and implemented to govern the challenges of climate change and energy transition in cities? We develop some preliminary answers to this question based on seven research papers that form the contribution to the thematic series. In particular, the various roles that cities play in governing the climate change challenges and energy transition require further description and analysis, specifying the different governing roles of urban actors and how the city—socially, institutionally or geophysically—forms the context within which governance initiatives and arrangements are formed and implemented, while cities themselves are in turn part of larger physical, infrastructural and institutional networks that influence and condition the local governance opportunities. A research agenda to explore the topic further must include particularly the following areas: the role of local government in the interplay between governance initiatives at multiple levels, the influence and the confluence of current (sectoral) policies, learning from a variation of practices of local low carbon policy, mapping the institutional dimension, mapping design and implementation practices of urban low carbon policy, assessing the effects and legitimacy of urban low carbon policies, further understanding of strategic action fields and lines of conflicts between (coalitions of) actors and identifying workable governance frameworks and policies supporting community-led energy initiatives

The Defining Characteristics of Urban Living Labs

The organization of supported and sustainable urban interventions is challenging, with multiple actors involved, fragmented decision-making powers, and multiple values at stake. Globally, urban living labs have become a fashionable phenomenon to tackle this challenge, fostering the development and implementation of innovation, experimentation, and knowledge in urban, real-life settings while emphasizing the important role of participation and co-creation. However, although urban living labs could in this way help cities to speed up the sustainable transition, urban living lab experts agree that, in order to truly succeed in these ambitious tasks, the way urban living labs are being shaped and steered needs further research. Yet, they also confirm the existing variation and opaqueness in the definition of the concept. This article contributes to conceptual clarity by developing an operationalized definition of urban living labs, which has been used to assess 90 sustainable urban innovation projects in the city of Amsterdam. The assessment shows that the majority of the projects that are labelled as living labs do not include one or more of the defining elements of a living lab. In particular, the defining co-creation and development activities were found to be absent in many of the projects. This article makes it possible to categorize alleged living lab projects and distill the “true” living labs from the many improperly labelled or unlabelled living labs, allowing more specific analyses and, ultimately, better targeted methodological recommendations for urban living labs

Between Flexibility And Relativism: How Students Deal With Uncertainty In Sustainability Challenges

Universities open their doors to society, inviting the complexity of the world to enter engineering education through challenge-based courses. While working on complex issues, engineering students learn to deal with different kinds of uncertainty: uncertainty about the dynamics of a real-world challenge, the knowledge gaps in the problem, or the conflicting perspectives amongst the people involved. Although we know from previous research that students are likely to encounter these uncertainties in sustainability challenges, which metacognitive strategies they use to deal with them is unclear. We interviewed nine MSc students at the end of a challenge-based course at a Dutch university of technology. We asked the students how they dealt with uncertainty in collaboration with the commissioner, their student team, and the teachers. The interviews were analyzed through grounded, consensus-based coding by two researchers. Preliminary results show students use three main strategies. First, the different perspectives from peers in their team inform the position of the student. Second, students find expectation management of the commissioner essential, yet students struggle with how to do this in a professional and timely way. Third, students frame the uncertainties they encounter as part of the learning process, which allows them to accept the possibility of failure. This study provides first insights in metacognitive uncertainty strategies and suggests those strategies should become a more prominent topic in coaching students. When uncertainty becomes an explicit part of challenge-based education, students learn to deal with both the known and unknown in the transition to a sustainable society

Contrasting stories on overcoming governance challenges: the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive in the Netherlands

The European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD) has provided the European Member States with a range of interacting governance challenges. This article studies three of these (the need for new administrative arrangements, public participation, and th

Actoren en stakeholders in de bouw en stakeholderanalyse

De bouwkundig ingenieur werkt in een complex en veranderend speelveld van actoren, belangen, spelregels en praktijken. Om goed op dit speelveld te kunnen opereren en een waardevolle bijdrage aan de gebouwde omgeving te kunnen leveren, is het van belang om te weten hoe dit speelveld eruitziet en de dynamiek van het spel te begrijpen. Dit hoofdstuk legt de voornaamste begrippen uit, laat zien hoe het speelveld eruitziet en hoe je dit kunt analyseren, en gaat in op (verwachte) ontwikkelingen van het speelveld. Daarbij wordt gebruik gemaakt van inzichten uit disciplines als bestuurskunde en organisatie- en managementwetenschappen, toegepast op de bouwkundige praktijk.Urban Development Managemen

Management van Stedelijke Ontwikkeling: Beleid, sturing en institutionele veranderingen voor duurzame steden

Cities, as economic and cultural centres in our society, are major consumers of resources. They not only contribute to problems such as climate change, but also experience the risks and consequences thereof. Technological solutions to these problems are difficult to implement. They require larger-scale system changes, or encounter resistance. Making cities sustainable not only requires technical solutions, but also institutional innovation. A socio-technical-ecological system approach to cities shows the coherence and complexity of issues. Issues play on multiple scales, are cross-sectoral, and require an interaction of citizens, companies, and governments. Moreover, the playing field between these groups of actors is changing rapidly, technological empowerment in particular has made the citizen a much more equal player alongside the government and business. Existing instruments and approaches are not sufficient to approach sustainability issues. To identify and address these issues, cooperation between science and society is necessary. Multi- and transdisciplinary learning environments enable researchers and students to identify issues, to answer questions and to try out solutions together with stakeholders. Such environments are indispensable for the development of sustainable cities.Urban Development Managemen

Urban Living Labs: A living lab way of working

Urban living labs have become a popular phenomenon in today’s cities. The Living Lab approach would provide real life research with its multiple stakeholders in a co-innovating inclusive setting, crucial in creating metropolitan solutions with impact, that will be adopted smoothly and swiftly by all involved, and thus help achieve prosperous living environments that are more liveable, sustainable, resilient and just. With these ambitions, urban living labs are important links in the achievement of the goals of AMS Institute as well as the City of Amsterdam. But what exactly are urban living labs?The aim of the research was to develop a methodology to facilitate systematic achievement of the living lab goals and ambitions in practice. How do urban living labs work? How can they contribute to a more sustainable environment? And how can you set up a successful urban living lab?Based on a literature review of living labs and urban living labs and a quick scan of 90 local innovation projects in the Amsterdam region, defining characteristics of urban living labs have been identified.Also the core methodological components of urban living labs have been distilled from proposed living lab methodologies and process aspects repetitively referred to in urban living lab literature. In-depth case studies of the innovation processes of innovations that have emerged in living labs in Amsterdam have been conducted to research how urban living labs work in practice. This has led to conditions that have shown to be necessary for allowing successful emergence, implementation and replication of innovations in urban context

Supporting local energy transition in urban districts:The case of GO2Zero, a serious role playing game

The depletion of fossil sources for our energy system requires new ways and new sources to fulfil our energy demand. But more important these fossil sources have a large influence on the CO2 emission. Other sources than fossil ones (wind, sun, biomass) and technologies (wind turbines, solar cells, biomass combustion) are available and need to be implemented. A transition towards a more sustainable energy system is necessary. This requires not only the use of renewable sources but requires a more holistic approach that addresses cost savings, energy efficiency and institutional innovation as well. In many cities, there is not such a clear agenda and commitment to contribute to the renewable energy transition by adopting particular technologies. Questions of authority, allocation of costs and benefits (including split incentives), scale (concerning the appropriate geographical and administrative level to apply certain technologies), ownership, renewables and technologies (both sources and technologies can differ with regards to availability, costs and benefits, lock-in etc.) can lead to different transition paths. Consequently, the current transition process is scattered. Several stakeholders see the urgency of a more sustainable energy system. However, they act alone and their actions and implementations are limited to what they individually can do. If these actions are more in collaboration or aligned, it is expected that better results in terms of effectiveness are achieved against lower costs. Then, the questions arise, who needs to take the lead in this process, which stakeholders need to be involved and what will their role become? Do municipalities or other public organisations need to take the lead or can citizens cooperate and start their local initiative? And what is the impact (in CO2 reduction, sustainability, costs) of different approaches towards a transition to a sustainable district? This paper presents the serious multi-player tabletop game GO2Zero about a transition process to a sustainable city district. In the scope of half a day, about twenty participants (citizens, from local energy related organisation and public institutes) play a role of a local authority, a housing corporation, a tenant, a homeowner, a local sustainable energy supplier, a grid operator, a local renewable energy supplier or a contractor offering retrofitting measures and technologies. Their collaborative objective is to bring the CO2 production in the district back to zero, to reduce the energy consumption with 50% and to produce local sustainable energy. At the same time, the participants have to reach their personal objectives, like profit, energy label or stability of the grid. The participants start with a phase where they can decide upon their strategy, focussing on production or reduction of energy, working alone or together etc. After the strategy, participants have to decide if and which retrofitting investments they will make, in three consecutive rounds, each representing several years. They can choose from a number of retrofitting measures, and have to get an understanding of the pros and cons of each. After playing the game, the participants have more insight in the different opportunities for the transition, the effect of different retrofitting strategies and the dynamics of the institutionally fragmented decision-making context.The paper will report on the experiences of sessions played with local stakeholders involved in energy transition in the cities of Dubrovnik, Amsterdam and Delft. Based on preliminary results, we conclude that the game give insights in the consequences of different personal strategies (as owner work towards going off grid) for the performance on district level (business case for a heat network). Further, the sessions gave a lively discussion about the legal system as well as how to organize this process in their local situation

European Sustainable Construction Regulation: Homogeneity and Attention

Understanding the negative impact of the construction industry and the built environment on the ecological environment, the European Commission (EC) aims to harmonise and improve sustainable construction regulatory frameworks in Member States of the European Union. This paper discusses the topics of sustainable construction that are currently regulated in Europe. It asks to what extent there is homogeneity among Member States in doing so; and what strategies the EC may apply in improving both the homogeneity in, and attention for sustainable construction regulation among Member States. It finds that current EC Directives have a positive effect, but may be too resource-intensive to address the ecological risks generated by the construction industry and the built environment in the EU in a timely fashion