International Journal of Sustainable Built Environment最新文献

This study presents a cost-effectiveness analysis and mapping requirements for three arsenic mitigation technologies sponsored by the government of India in the state of Bihar, offering recommendations for the technologies most likely to benefit 12 million at-risk people. The three arsenic mitigation technologies investigated in this paper are arsenic treatment (ATU) units, new hand pump (NHP) units, and new tube wells with stand post (NTWSP) units. For 100% coverage of arsenic mitigation in the arsenic-affected districts of Bihar, 314–5111 ATU and NHP and 16–256 NTWSP in Buxar and Jehanabad, respectively, are required. NHP and NTWSP units were found to be the most cost-effective arsenic mitigation interventions in the state, whereas ATU was found to be the dominant intervention. Installation of NHP could be the most efficient arsenic mitigation intervention in areas where the population is scarce and illiterate. NTWSP could be the most cost-effective arsenic mitigation intervention in regions having higher rates of literacy and of arsenic awareness among their communities. The cost-effectiveness of arsenic mitigation technologies should be carefully evaluated before designing and implementing arsenic mitigation policies.

Urban cities of developing countries are witnessing rapid urbanization that has elevated issues in the field of urban planning like a gap in demand and supply of infrastructure services and utilities, traffic congestions, pollution, reduction in natural green cover, peri-urban settlement typology etc, thus affecting the natural and built environment adversely. These prevailing issues will worsen over the coming decades as the urban population is increasing at a phenomenal rate, thus highlighting the urgency to take appropriate actions.

Smart development has been identified as a sustainable world-wide solution to the existing urban planning issues, whose principles aims at providing a better quality of life and advertises livable communities; though the concept is vague to define, as no universal definition exists. The soul reason for the concept to be vague is the number of dimensions in which it is represented and therefore, the concept needs to be standardized in order to scale development worldwide.

India has undergone rapid urbanization over the last few decades and the witnessing cities are mostly of Class-I & II tiers. To cater the issues developed by this phenomenon, the governing authorities have taken up initiatives over the years, in the form of programmes that have mainly focused on providing basic infrastructure services and utilities to the cities and have not paid much attention in achieving sustainability in the approach. Recently, India has introduced the smart city mission, which is somewhat on the similar lines of smart development. Since the development is been interpreted differently among the nations due to no standardization of the concept, it’s important to understand how the concept has been represented in the Indian context.

The paper intended to analyse the concept of smart development and explore the sustainability quotient in the smart city mission introduced by the Government of India. And, concluding that whether the initiative taken up, achieves sustainability in the field of urban planning. To achieve the above-mentioned goals, an in-depth analysis was conducted of the various concepts associated with smart development.

The Finnish transportation sector is the second biggest greenhouse gas emitting sector in Finland. Despite large-scale investment and government commitments to promote biofuels for transport sectors in Finland, little is known about the public acceptance of this alternative transport fuels. Public’s opinion, awareness and knowledge can contribute to social acceptance of new renewable energy and to the overall improvement of consumers' energy behaviour. This study examines public acceptance in terms of public’s opinion and knowledge about biofuels and their consumer patterns of transportation fuels by designing a multiple-choice questionnaire with four groups of questions: background information, community perspective, social perspective, and market perspective. The analysis of 90 respondents’ survey shows that 50% of the respondents think that there is a direct effect of biofuel production on food prices and would not buy biofuels derived from food crops. Only 60% of them are willing to switch towards purchasing biofuels; however, the lack of information about biofuels prevents them to use biofuels for their transports. Finally, 63 respondents of the car owners, their ideal fuel would be hydrogen (20%), electricity (60%), and other (20%), which meant hybrid. Study findings have important policy implications related to the public acceptance of biofuels in the transport sector.

This study is based on labor intensive factory, located in Dhaka, Bangladesh which was adversely impacted due to extreme hot conditions. The analysis started with the implementation of green roof (GR) as one of the passive design strategies to reduce indoor heat stress. Impact of indoor heat stress indicated by wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) and prediction of heat strain (PHS) model for green roof have been evaluated through numerical studies and indoor environmental data of local factory was measured by portable weather station. A factory energy model (by Energyplus and Open Studio) based on one of the surveyed factory’s production space including different activity zones and lab test material’s properties was developed and different roof variables were evaluated. The result indicated that GR has significant contributions on indoor heat stress reduction and substrate indoor temperature decreases (2.5–3.5 °C) with increasing vegetal coverage. It has been also examined the ratio of indoor temperature fluctuation and relatively higher standard deviation (SD) observed for non-green roof (n-GR) condition. For summer, it was also quantified that indoor WBGT and PHS criteria for the workers became 2–2.5 times lower from the high risk level due to the effectiveness of GR.

Water supply and sanitation services are essential to human and environmental well-being. Globally one of the biggest challenges to sustainable development is lack of access to improved water supply and sanitation services. Yet it is less obvious what sustainable development means in countries with high coverage of these services. In this article sustainable development is explored from the perspective of Finnish water supply and sanitation services. The study consists of eight semi-structured interviews with water sector experts and their views are analysed in relation to literature. In this article sustainable development is understood as a learning process and dialogue of values.

The interviewed water sector experts primarily perceive sustainable development from an environmental point of view, and treat it in a rationalistic and mechanistic manner. Challenges are tackled by technological fixes, such as improving energy and material efficiency. It is argued in this paper that this kind of approach undermines the complexity and dynamicity of sustainable development and can suppress learning. Sustainable development is mostly explored only from the perspective of water services, although some of the interviewees recognise their role for wider societal development. Interaction and dialogue between water sector experts and the community regarding sustainable development is lacking or skills to accomplish this interaction are inadequate.

Every assessment of urban spatial structure requires determining the importance of activity centres. This paper gives an attempt to analyse the spatial and temporal changes experienced by major activity centres in the Sydney metropolitan area. The objectives of the research were first, to explore the role of main activity centres on the distribution of job opportunity across the metropolitan area, second to find out whether or not these key activity centres were influential in making the Sydney’s urban structure more poly-centric rather than being a mono-centric. It also estimates how accessible these activity centres are for the workforce and what their corresponding labour catchment areas are. Eleven activity centres were chosen based on the preliminary analysis of Sydney’s planning and development documents and exist evidences on living and working spots. A number of analysing techniques such as mapping of journeys to work in these centres, influence circles of centres, employment preference functions, and tabular data on the levels of employment were applied. The results of the analysis show that apart from the CBD, North Sydney, Parramatta and Inner City the remaining activity centres appear to exert slight impact on employment distribution across the metropolitan area. There does not seem to be evidence for a significant polycentric structure in Sydney metropolitan area in regarding with employment recruitment, seeking and retention.

The value of a sustainable building is the quality of building performance delivered to solve problems of consumers – developers, owners, and building users – within the constraints of time and cost of resources used to deliver the quality. The delivery of functional, environmentally responsible and liveable, maintainable and easy to operate, safe and secure building will solve consumers’ problems. The difficulty of delivering the required sustainable building value to consumers is due to several building delivery professionals working in silos – fragmentation. This paper discusses the role of building information modeling (BIM) in reducing the fragmentation among professionals at each and across building delivery stages using evidences from the literature. It is evident from the literature that BIM provides a virtual repository that allows easy access to and sharing of information and knowledge in real time. Thus, BIM provides a platform for professionals to work in an integrated environment at any stage of the building delivery process. However, the maximization of the benefits BIM provides through the virtual repository depends on the contracting method adopted for the building delivery. The identification of knowledge gained and gap from the literature led to suggestion of future research direction needed to improve the delivery of sustainable building value to the consumers.