LEAP Collaborative: A Demonstration of Sustainable Practices

Located on in the heart of downtown Knoxville along West Church Avenue, the LEAP Collaborative is imagined as a collection of landscape architects, engineers, architects, and planners who contract projects with an emphasis on sustainable design. Therefore, for the design of their headquarters, we wanted to express that commitment to sustainable design and display some of those practices clearly to the pedestrian and passer-by. One of the main goals was the clarity of programmatic pieces. The retail comes out to the street edge to invite shoppers. The laboratory, highly visible, pushes forward towards the street edge but is less accessible to the public by being raised up on pilotis. The multiple terraces are connected through the use of plantings that even move vertically along walls to connect plaza to upper roof terraces. The use of planting was important to bringing habitats and greenery back to an asphalt parking lot site in the middle of the city

Understanding visual engagement with urban street edges along non-pedestrianised and pedestrianised streets using mobile eye-tracking

Existing knowledge of street edge experience has often been constructed using methods that offer a limited opportunity to gain empirical insight from the first-hand perspective of pedestrians. In order to address this, mobile eye-tracking glasses were used during the current investigation to provide a detailed understanding of pedestrian visual engagement with street edges along both non-pedestrianised and pedestrianised urban streets. Through this, the current study advances empirical knowledge of street edge experience from a perspective that has previously been challenging to capture and quantify. The findings demonstrate that people visually engage with street edge ground floors more than their upper floors, that visual engagement is distributed more towards the street edge on the walked side of non-pedestrianised streets than the opposite side, and that visual engagement with street edges of pedestrianised streets is balanced across both sides. The study findings also highlight how the everyday activities of pedestrians and different streets being walked often influence the amount of visual engagement within these street edge areas. These insights provide a new understanding that develops existing knowledge of pedestrian street edge experience. Significantly, they also provide an empirical foundation from which to examine how design intervention can become more considerate of peoples’ routine use of and experiential engagement with street edges along non-pedestrianised and pedestrianised urban streets

A RELIABILITY-BASED ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR VEHICULAR AD-HOC NETWORKS

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), an emerging technology, would allow vehicles to form a self-organized network without the aid of a permanent infrastructure. As a prerequisite to communication in VANETs, an efficient route between communicating nodes in the network must be established, and the routing protocol must adapt to the rapidly changing topology of vehicles in motion. This is one of the goals of VANET routing protocols. In this thesis, we present an efficient routing protocol for VANETs, called the Reliable Inter-VEhicular Routing (RIVER) protocol. RIVER utilizes an undirected graph that represents the surrounding street layout where the vertices of the graph are points at which streets curve or intersect, and the graph edges represent the street segments between those vertices. Unlike existing protocols, RIVER performs real-time, active traffic monitoring and uses this data and other data gathered through passive mechanisms to assign a reliability rating to each street edge. The protocol then uses these reliability ratings to select the most reliable route. Control messages are used to identify a node’s neighbors, determine the reliability of street edges, and to share street edge reliability information with other nodes

Visual engagement with urban street edges: insights using mobile eye-tracking

This study provides empirical insight into the extent to which pedestrians visually engage with urban street edges and how social and spatial factors impact such engagement. This was achieved using mobile eye-tracking. The gaze distribution of 24 study participants was systematically recorded as they carried out everyday tasks on differing streets. The findings demonstrated that street edges are the most visually engaged component of streets; that street edge visual engagement is impacted by everyday social tasks as well as the spatial and physical materiality of edges on differing streets; and that street edges, which attract a lot of visual engagement while undertaking optional tasks, also attract greater amounts of visual engagement while undertaking necessary tasks. These findings offer new insight into urban street edge engagement from the direct perspective of street inhabitants and in doing so provide greater understanding of how street edges are experienced

Benchmarking leakage from water reticulation systems in South Africa

A project to assess the levels of leakage in 30 water utilities throughout South Africa was initiated by the Water Research Commission. The BENCHLEAK software was used to evaluate the water utilities and performance indicators calculated by the model were used to compare levels of non-revenue water. Results showed that utilities ranked differently according to the different indicators, and that the South African results are similar to world norms. Feed back from the water utilities showed that some of the data requested were confusing and required clarity. The number of service connections, apparent losses and length of pipe between the street edge and the meter were looked at in more detail. Standard drawings were developed to assist water utilities in determining their number of service connections. A table is presented to assess the apparent losses of each water utility in a more pragmatic way. Water SA Vol. 30 (5) 2005: pp.25-3

Predictive Display with Perspective Projection of Surroundings in Vehicle Teleoperation to Account Time-delays

Teleoperation provides human operator sophisticated perceptual and cognitive skills into an over the network control loop. It gives hope of addressing some challenges related to vehicular autonomy which is based on artificial intelligence by providing a backup plan. Variable network time delays in data transmission is the major problem in teleoperating a vehicle. On 4G network, variability of these delays is high. Due to this, both video streaming and driving commands encounter variable time delay. This paper presents an approach of providing the human operator a forecast video stream which replicates future perspective of vehicle field of view accounting the delay present in the network. Regarding the image transformation, perspective projection technique is combined with correction given by smith predictor in the control loop. This image transformation accounts current time delay and tries to address both issues, time delays as well as its variability. For experiment sake, only frontward field of view is forecast. Performance is evaluated by performing online vehicle teleoperation on street edge case maneuvers and later comparing the path deviation with and without perspective projection

Design for change : five proxies for resilience in the urban form

The sheer complexity and unpredictability characterizing cities challenges the adequacy of existing disciplinary knowledge and tools in urban design and highlights the necessity to incorporate explicitly the element of change and the dimension of time in the understanding of, and intervention on, the form of cities. To this regard the concept of resilience is a powerful lens through which to understand and engage with a changing world. However today resilience is addressed by urban designers only superficially, and an explicit effort to relate elements of urban form to resilience principles is still lacking, representing a great limit for urban designers, as form is their elective medium of intervention in the urban system. As first steps to overcome this gap, we explore in this work the combination of established knowledge in urban morphology and urban design, with knowledge developed in resilience theory and we look at the configuration of, and interdependencies between, different urban elements from the perspective of five proxies of urban form resilience, namely diversity, redundancy, modularity, connectivity and efficiency. After defining each proxy in resilience theory and in relation to urban form, we address them at five different scales which are relevant to urban morphology and urban design: plot, street edge, block, street and sanctuary area / district

Social Housing: Chatsworth Gardens, Ashchurch Place, Fleet Street Hill, Baden Powell Close, Hannibal Road Gardens

This return comprises five social housing projects undertaken by Peter Barber between 2009 and 2013, some built, some unbuilt. The un-built projects contribute significantly to the development of Barber’s research agenda over this period. The primary research questions addressed by the projects are: Can urban life can be regenerated through well designed, mixed use high-density housing? Can sustainable development can be achieved through good design? Can better use of land and resources can be achieved through higher densities in housing? How can energy saving objectives be met in high-density housing? Each of the projects was developed through observational site visits and discussions with clients, community members and local planning officers. Conceptual design strategies drew on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Jane Jacobs, in line with Barber’s on-going interest in the cultural life of the urban street, and in-depth analysis of vernacular housing typologies and the work of his contemporaries. Key urban design moves were established early on in design processes and remained consistent through their evolution. Extensive physical model making, three-dimensional sketching and other forms of visualisation tested design options and refined the overall configuration of the buildings in terms of accessibility, circulation, lighting, housing typology and general functional viability. The many exploratory physical models for each scheme were all constructed with the same logic as the real construction operations would be on site, being regularly and quickly updated throughout the whole process. Positive coverage of these projects has appeared in the architectural press and popular media. Hannibal Road Gardens was awarded a 2013 RIBA London National Award. Baden Powell Close was shortlisted for a 2010 RIBA Award. In the same year, Peter Barber Architects was awarded the 2010/2011 Building Design Architect of the Year Award for Housing. This followed commendation in the 2008 Civic Trust Awards

S. Pearl Freeman, AIA / M.Arch, 1976

San Bernardino Justice Center | Owner: Judicial Council of California | Manager: Capital Program, S. Pearl Freeman, AIA | Architect: SOM, Managing Partner, Gene Schnair, FAIA, Manager Director, Steve Sobel, FAIA Opened in May 2014, the San Bernardino Justice Center bridges the scales of downtown development to unify the urban fabric, creating a visible landmark for the city while engaging the public with vibrant open space. Situated at the intersection of San Bernardino’s County Government Center and the Downtown City Center, the Justice Center serves as the nexus for the city’s political and economic development and is the first high-rise and base isolated courthouse for the judicial branch of California. The new building dramatically improves the courts efficiency by consolidating functions that were previously scattered in 13 different facilities across the county. The 361,000 sf facility complements the adjacent historic courthouse and the court facility to create a community with a flexible, modern, and sustainable center for justice. The project consists of an 11-story courtroom tower visible on the skyline, and a linear, three-story-podium that holds the street edge. As the feature spaces of the building, the courtrooms balance the functional requirements of judicial proceedings with highly refined interiors that reflect the dignity of the Court.https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/wia_profiles/1046/thumbnail.jp

Contaminación del aire a filo de calle en Quito, caso estudio Guayaquil y Espejo.

Se estudió la contaminación del aire a filo de calle en el Centro Histórico de Quito (DMQ) en un punto de alto flujo vehicular mediante el monitoreo continuo de gases y material particulado entre el 5 y 12 de abril de 2018. Se obtuvieron los perfiles horarios de las concentraciones de contaminantes y se pudo explicar su comportamiento. Las mediciones en el estudiono sobrepasaron los límites permisibles nacionales ni internacionales de calidad del aire; sin embargo se observaron picos anómalos en el caso del dióxido de azufre. Se evaluó la correlación cruzada de las series de tiempo entre los datos reportados por estaciones regionales de la Secretaria de Ambiente del DMQ y los datos obtenidos en este estudio, hallándose que el monóxido de carbono presenta una mayor concentración a filo de calle. Al realizar el análisis de componentes principales (ACP) se determinó varios contaminantes correlacionados, lo que corroboran sus ciclos de formación y demuestran la influencia de factores meteorológicos en la contaminación de aire a filo de calle. Finalmente se determinó que las concentraciones de pm 10 en aire interior son mayores a lo registrado en aire exterior en el sitio de muestreo.Air pollution at the street edge was studied in the Historical downtown of Quito (DMQ) at a point of high vehicular flow by continuous gas monitoring and particulate material between April 5 and 12, 2018. Time profiles were obtained of the pollutant concentrations and their behavior was explained. The measurements in the study did not exceed the national and international permissible limits of air quality, however abnormal peaks were observed in the case of sulfur dioxide. the cross-correlation of the time series between the data reported by regional stations of the secretary of Environment of the DMQ and the data obtained in this study was evaluated, finding that carbon monoxide presents a higher concentration on the street edge. When performing the main components analysis (PCA), several correlated pollutants were determined, which corroborates their formation cycles and demonstrates the influence of meteorological factors on air pollution at the street edge. Finally, it was determined that the concentrations of pm in indoor air are higher than that registered in outdoor air in the sampled point