Ken Thurston v. Cache County et al : Brief of Appellants

Appeal from a Judgment Dismissing Plaintiffs\u27 Complaint in the District Court of the First District in and for Cache County, Utah. The Honorable VeNoy Christoffersen, Judge

Identifying modes of managing urban heritage:Results from a systematic literature review

This article presents a systematic literature review on urban heritage. It analyses (a) how urban heritage is conceptualized and interpreted in academic research, (b) urban heritage management modes. This literature review interprets urban heritage as a resource, collective memory, and space. It categorizes urban heritage management practice into six management modes according to stakeholders' collaboration levels: community-led, expert-coordinated, government-led, conflict-resolution, and privatization. These modes are analyzed based on different political regimes. The review observes five approaches to conceptualizing urban heritage: researching people's perspectives towards urban heritage, framing urban heritage, tracing the process of urban heritage forming, reviewing international policies and charters, and exploring the functions of urban heritage. Finally, for the future research agenda, the article recommends a focus on the following themes: the causal relations between factors and effects of adopting different urban heritage modes, researching community engagement and interactions between different levels of government, and analyzing conflict-resolution processes systematically.</p

Towards the development of an integrated sustainability and resilience benefits assessment framework of urban green growth interventions

Considering the current emerging demographic, urbanization and climatic trends, integrating sustainability and resilience principles into urban development becomes a key priority for decision-makers worldwide. Local and national governments, project developers and other urban stakeholders dealing with the complexities of urban development need projects with clear structure and outcomes in order to inform decision-making and ensure sources of financing. The need for developing an integrated assessment methodology that would capture and quantify multiple urban sustainability and resilience benefits of projects in one common framework and eventually lead to verifiable sustainability and resilience outcomes is immense and challenging at the same time. The main objective of this paper is to present the development of a methodological approach that aims to integrate sustainability and resilience benefits, derived from the implementation of green growth urban projects, into a unified framework of criteria addressing environmental, social, economic and institutional perspectives. The proposed sustainability and resilience benefits assessment (SRBA) methodology is a combination of top down and bottom up approaches, including GIS-based scenario building. The different types of sustainability and resilience benefits of urban green growth projects are also identified at different levels (i.e., individual, neighborhood, city and global). Moreover, the proposed methodology creates scenarios that can be illustrated by a map-based approach to enable a better illustration and visualization of benefits. It demonstrates how a map-based approach can assess not only the extent of sustainability and resilience benefits accrued (how much is benefitted), but also their spatial distribution (who is benefitted). The main methodological challenges and issues on developing an integrated sustainability and resilience benefits assessment are identified and discussed

Climate change adaptation projects: integrating prioritization and evaluation

The paper analyses the challenges of evaluating climate change adaptation measures and describes a general assessment framework that takes these challenges into consideration. The framework is integrated into an innovative decision making tool, CLIMate ACTions Prioritization (CLIMACT Prio), for the screening, prioritization and evaluation of climate change adaptation measures. CLIMACT Prio applies Multi Criteria Analysis to assist urban decision makers in identifying a wide range of decision criteria and setting priorities among different objectives. The paper concludes with the description of the preliminary application of the CLIMACT Prio to the case of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the tool was used to prioritise and select alternative adaptation measures aimed at protecting vulnerable areas from floodin

Coming to Financial Close in PPPs: Identifying Critical Factors in the Case of Toll Road Projects in Indonesia

In Indonesia, public–private partnerships (PPPs) schemes have been attracting a lot of attention to meet the huge demand for infrastructure developments. However, their applications are still limited and the financial close of a project tends to be behind the planned schedule. This research therefore aims to investigate the critical success factors (CSFs) causing fast/slow progress in the processes toward the financial close of PPPs toll road projects in Indonesia. The results revealed that, to realize smoother delivery of PPPs toll road projects in Indonesia to the financial close in the future, it is important to improve coordination among the related stakeholders especially between the central and local governments, though the other CSFs are currently well developed. The research also found an issue that should be addressed from a sustainability viewpoint, namely that the government highly depends on state-owned companies (SOEs) for a timely financial close of PPPs toll road projects

Smart energy transition: An evaluation of cities in South Korea

One positive impact of smart cities is reducing energy consumption and CO2 emission through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Energy transition pursues systematic changes to the low-carbon society, and it can benefit from technological and institutional advancement in smart cities. The integration of the energy transition to smart city development has not been thoroughly studied yet. The purpose of this study is to find empirical evidence of smart cities' contributions to energy transition. The hypothesis is that there is a significant difference between smart and non-smart cities in the performance of energy transition. The Smart Energy Transition Index is introduced. Index is useful to summarize the smart city component's contribution to energy transition and to enable comparison among cities. The cities in South Korea are divided into three groups: (1) first-wave smart cities that focus on smart transportation and security services; (2) second-wave smart cities that provide comprehensive urban services; and (3) non-smart cities. The results showed that second-wave smart cities scored higher than first-wave and non-smart cities, and there is a statistically significant difference among city groups. This confirms the hypothesis of this p

A Sustainable Approach to Innovation Adoption in Light-rail Transport

This article primary aims to understand how the Light-Rail Transport (LRT) pricing and infrastructural innovations from a Chinese context have been adopted to the Addis-Ababa city context. Secondly, it wishes to show what were the economic, social and environmental effects of these adapted innovations on passenger service delivery and Multi-National Corporations (MNCs) and what effects did the resident’s proximity have on commercial activities along the LRT route. Thirdly, it identified re-adaptations to a more sustainable LRT with respect to the passengers, MNCs, and residents. This study has revealed economic, social and environmental effects that may influence innovation adoption, such as: reduction in carbon emissions; fare evasion; inconvenience; affordability; less revenue; less proximity to commercial activities; and an increase in travel distances for pedestrians. A mixed method for a single case study was used, which included semi-structured interviews with light-rail experts and a passenger survey. The results show that economic sustainability factors account for 12 out of 14 sustainability factors and 2 out of 14 social and environmental sustainability factors. The results are intended to be used as a decision support system for innovation adoption in other cities with similar context, in order to develop a sustainable approach to LRT planning

The Sustainable Development Goal on Water and Sanitation

Target 7c of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 7c) aimed to halve the population that had no sustainable access to water and basic sanitation before 2015. According to the data collected by the Joint Monitoring Programme in charge of measuring progress towards MDG 7c, 2.6 billion people gained access to safe water and 2.3 billion people to basic sanitation. Despite these optimistic figures, many academics have criticised MDG 7c. We provide an overview of this critique by performing a systematic literature review of 61 studies conducted over the MDG implementation period (2002-2015) and shortly after. Our objective is to contribute to the debate on the operationalisation of the Sustainable Development Goal on water and sanitation (SDG 6). The academic debate on MDG 7c mainly focused on the effectiveness of the indicators for safe water and sanitation and on the political dynamics underlying the selection of these indicators. SDG 6 addresses some of the concerns raised on the indicators for safe water and sanitation but fails to acknowledge the politics of indicator setting. We are proposing additional indicators and reflect on the limitations of using only quantitative indicators to measure progress towards SDG 6

Adapting Urban Light-Rail Transport to the African Context

A contextual approach to Light-Rail Transport (LRT) needs to be tailored towards specific contexts, in terms of situations or contingencies, such as socio-economic and environmental factors. This research intends to discuss the societal benefits comprised of well-informed contextual factors for policymakers and urban transport authorities, to enable them to be able to formulate objective policies for a city's socio-economic development. The aim of this article is to analyze the contextual factors in three cities which are responsible for the contextualization of infrastructural innovations of urban light-rail transport from China. The methodology that has been used is a qualitative method using multiple case studies, which includes a pilot and semi-structured interview. The analysis compares the similarities and differences within Nigeria, and between Nigeria and Ethiopia. The most perceptible contextual factors which influence infrastructural innovations in Nigeria include an electric energy supply, modernization of LRT and their stations, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), and seamless integration of LRT with other transport modes. The most conspicuous factors

Frugality in multi-actor interactions and absorptive capacity of Addis-Ababa light-rail transport

Cities in transition need strategies to do more and better using less or limited resources, i.e., to be frugal in approach, especially when implementing expensive infrastructures. Addis-Ababa city in recent years acquired the light-rail transport (LRT) from China, which entails different multi-actors interacting to achieve resource-efficient LRT in terms of cost, technical knowledge and time. Addis-Ababa re-organized their organizational structure to interact with multi-actors, in providing affordable LRT, measurable technological transfer and learning routine via structured absorptive capacity, delivering an environmentally sound electrified light-rail, as a zero-carbon emission transport system. Using mixed research methods, consisting of light-rail expert's semi-structured interviews and passenger surveys, this article aims to know how the multi-actor interaction processes and absorptive capacity structure have delivered frugality in urban rail transport. Thus, delivering the LRT, despite inadequate country-owned financial resources, less technological and knowledge capability of LRT, within a limited period of three years. Results show that frugality strongly dep