Signals of sustainability transition: Sensing enabling factors through cultural initiatives

This article reports a first attempt to combine the analysis of socio-technical mechanisms and initiative-based learning to sense sustainability transition signals in cities. Relying on the analysis of cultural initiatives in six European Cities, the study identifies those factors that enabled social impact generation. It then formulates hypotheses about their contribution to the inception and rooting of sustainability transition dynamics. As a result, the article proposes a set of analytical categories of enabling factors acting across niches and regimes. The same factors are then reinterpreted by referring to scaling mechanisms (scaling up, out and deep). The proposed analytical scheme seeks to offer a broader reflection on the conceptual and methodological challenges related to sensing and interpreting urban sustainability transition pathways

Rank Order for a Rehabilitation Program Using Multiple Criteria

In this study we investigate an urban planning problem where an area is to be rehabilitated. The area is divided into several sub-areas any of which could be the starting point for the rehabilitation process. The ultimate goal is to find a rank order for the alternative sub-areas, which simultaneously solves the problem of where to start the rehabilitation. If all information are given on the ordinal scale, we could use e.g. the classical minimum violation principle to solve this problem. In this paper, we have generalized this approach to cover the cardinal scale and pairwise information

Innovation Capacity and the City. The Enabling Role of Design

This open access book makes up one of the key milestones of the DESIGNSCAPES project, a H2020 CSA (Coordination and Support Action) research project funded by the European Commission under the Call “User-driven innovation: value creation through design-enabled innovation. It shows that adopting Design enables to embed Innovation within the City in order to conceptualize feasible answers to complex global challenges. By so doing, innovation can become disruptive for the values it brings while at the same time igniting dynamics of gradual change in the "urbanscape" it acts within. To explore this potential, the concept is developed of “Design enabled Innovation in urban environments” looking at the role that the City can play in promoting and facilitating the adoption of Design by public and private sector innovators. This leads to a possible evaluation framework whereby an urbanscape is considered with respect to both its innovation generation capacity and to the nature (more or less Design dependent, or prone) of the innovative initiatives it hosts. This thread of reasoning has many promising implications, including the proposal of a "third way" between the dreamers of an alternative economic model where revenues and growth are sacrificed on the altar of social and environmental respect, and the supporters of traditional market based view, who think it is enough to add a touch of responsibility and concern to a system that should continue rewarding the profitability of innovations

An approximate analytical solution for dynamic heat transfer of building walls

The present work deals with an approximate analytical solution for the dynamic temperature field due to the coupled effect of building walls to the adjacent environment. The solution is derived within the framework of weighted residuals and can be used as a handy tool to realize a reasonable estimation of the building thermal performance and to elucidate the dependence on the room descriptive parameters. Results from the present model are compared with predictions arising from both a commercial FEM code and the analytical solution from the standard EN 13786, showing satisfactory results. This conclusion is not surprising since it is demonstrable in view of the characteristic-time responses of the climatic forcing and the building walls. Finally, as an example of application of this approach, the model was focused on describing the thermal response of an open-loop regulated indoor environment

New Developments in Spin Labels for Pulsed Dipolar EPR

Spin labelling is a chemical technique that enables the integration of a molecule containing an unpaired electron into another framework for study. Given the need to understand the structure, dynamics, and conformational changes of biomacromolecules, spin labelling provides a relatively non-intrusive technique and has certain advantages over X-ray crystallography; which requires high quality crystals. The technique relies on the design of binding probes that target a functional group, for example, the thiol group of a cysteine residue within a protein. The unpaired electron is typically supplied through a nitroxide radical and sterically shielded to preserve stability. Pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) techniques allow small magnetic couplings to be measured (e.g., <50 MHz) providing information on single label probes or the dipolar coupling between multiple labels. In particular, distances between spin labels pairs can be derived which has led to many protein/enzymes and nucleotides being studied. Here, we summarise recent examples of spin labels used for pulse EPR that serve to illustrate the contribution of chemistry to advancing discoveries in this field