scholarly journals Urban resilience in the face of fossil fuel dependency: the case of Rio de Janeiro’s urban mobility

Author(s):  
Vicente Aprigliano Fernandes ◽  
Rainer Rothfuss ◽  
Volker Hochschild ◽  
Marcelino Aurelio Vieira da Silva ◽  
William Ribeiro da Silva ◽  
...  

Abstract Long-term scenarios for mobility within cities usually neglect the energy supply challenge and how the implied risks affect urban mobility services. High levels of private transport and fossil fuel dependency tend to prevail in urban agglomerations of modern cities in many parts of the world. The resilience approach supports a new perspective on transportation solutions, not only based on how to consume less energy or emit less CO2, but how vulnerable urban mobility is in face of a fossil threat. This paper aims to assess the vulnerability of urban mobility in the face of fossil fuel threats under a social and geographical scope. We apply a case study with the city of Rio de Janeiro, confronting city inhabitants with a price increase of gasoline and oil-based public transportation. We found that more than 50% of the districts of Rio de Janeiro presents low-medium or low level of resilience of urban mobility. Furthermore, they are in areas with lower accessibility to metro stations and more citizens with reduced income levels.

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Evandro Holz

The outlook on urban resilience has gone through significant evolution. Its concept has been broadened from an emphasis on endurance of functions, through a focus on adaptability of systems, towards transformative capabilities in the face of uncertainty of events. Most notably, new visions acknowledge both short-term ‘shocks’ (e.g. hurricanes) and longer-term ‘stresses’ (e.g. inequality), recognising crises as intrinsic to the complexities of the world we live in, and actually necessary for our progress. To encompass the uneven and unpredictable circumstances we experience, it is essential that we acknowledge the empowerment of citizens, along with their tangible and intangible assets (e.g. infrastructure and education, respectively), as the main drivers of change (which I refer to as ‘self-managed resilience’). Social housing programmes present a great opportunity to build on this new perspective on resilience. They allow the transformation of a set of issues (including shocks, e.g. natural disaster, and stresses, e.g. poverty) into an opportunity to embrace change and evolve from it. However, they often cause a big disruption in the city fabric and, in the long-term, even replicate the problems beneficiaries faced before it. This article shows how the application of new urban resilience perspectives in social housing, particularly via self-managed practices, can minimize the occurrence of these issues. Drawing on experiences in Brazil, it describes the positive effects in social, economic and environmental resilience derived from beneficiaries’ engagement in all project phases. Moreover, it provides a forward-looking conclusion including recommendations to further improve self-managed resilience and housing practices. Key words: urban resilience, self-managed housing, social housing


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tálita Santos ◽  
Marcelino Aurélio Silva ◽  
Vicente Aprigliano Fernandes ◽  
Greg Marsden

Resilience is the ability of a system to adapt, persist, and transform as a reaction to threats, which may be external or internal to the system, while vulnerability is the state of being susceptible to harm from exposure to stresses associated with environmental and social change and from the inability to adapt. Based on a study of the threats that can affect urban mobility, we identified a gap regarding the analysis of the levels of resilience and vulnerability in the face of subsidy threats that can severely affect developing countries. This article measures the level of resilience and vulnerability due to the absence of public transport fare subsidies. For this purpose, we developed an approach based on fuzzy logic and applied it in 33 administrative regions (ARs) of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We obtained four matrices of the levels of vulnerability and resilience of each of the regions as an origin and destination. The results show that areas nearest to the downtown region and those with high-capacity transportation available (commuter train and/or subway, systems with many transfer points) are more resilient, while a high level of vulnerability is associated with low income, negative socioeconomic indicators, and the predominance of road transportation to reach jobs. The contribution of this paper is the method applied to analyse the levels of vulnerability and resilience of public transport, which includes a threat that can cause a rupture that impacts routines and job accessibility in a region.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-173
Author(s):  
Andrzej Lorkowski ◽  
Robert Jeszke

The whole world is currently struggling with one of the most disastrous pandemics to hit in modern times – Covid-19. Individual national governments, the WHO and worldwide media organisations are appealing for humanity to universally stay at home, to limit contact and to stay safe in the ongoing fight against this unseen threat. Economists are concerned about the devastating effect this will have on the markets and possible outcomes. One of the countries suffering from potential destruction of this situation is Poland. In this article we will explain how difficult internal energy transformation is, considering the long-term crisis associated with the extraction and usage of coal, the European Green Deal and current discussion on increasing the EU 2030 climate ambitions. In the face of an ongoing pandemic, the situation becomes even more challenging with each passing day.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (45) ◽  
pp. 118-122
Author(s):  
Victor Paes Dias Gonçalves ◽  
Hugo Leonardo Matias Nahmias ◽  
Marcus Menezes Alves Azevedo

Among contact sports, the practice of martial arts offers a greater risk of causing dental trauma and fractures as contact with the face is more frequent. The primary objective of the research is to evaluate the incidence of mouthguard use, and the secondary objective is to verify which type has a greater predominance and the difficulties in its use correlating to the type of mouthguard used. A documentary study was carried out with 273 athletes of different contact sports, among them: MMA, Boxing, Muay Thai, Jiu-Jitsu, and Taekwondo of the city of Campos dos Goytacazes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was concluded that the most commonly used mouthguard is PB Boils and Bites - Type II and its level of approval is poor, interfering with the athletes’ performance, mainly in relation to the breathing factor.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Akmal Hisham ◽  
Devananthan Ilenghoven ◽  
Wan Syazli Wan Ahmad Kamal ◽  
Salina Ibrahim ◽  
Shah Jumaat Mohd Yussof

The emergence of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has revolutionized the prognosis of HIV-infected patients. However, the extended use of HAART is associated with a disfiguring complication termed lipodystrophy, a disorder of body fat maldistribution causing peripheral fat loss (lipoatrophy) and central fat accumulation (lipohypertrophy). Lipoatrophy commonly affects the face, legs, buttocks and arm, whilst lipohypertrophy frequently favours the abdomen, breast and dorsocervical region. To our knowledge, we present only the second documented case in the literature of a labia majora lipohypertrophy in a HIV-positive patient receiving long-term HAART. The severity of labial abnormality caused significant physical and functional morbidities. Labiaplasty with dermolipectomy of the labia majora and excisional lipectomy of the mons pubis was successfully performed. At a 6-month follow-up, patient had no recurrence with resolution of symptoms and resumption of normal activities of daily living (ADL).


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mindaugas Jurkynas

AbstractThe article discusses conceptualisation of populism, Lithuania’s party system and electoral dynamics and their relation to the sustainability of populist parties. Special attention is given to Party Order and Justice, a former populist and protest party, and its leadership, namely to the issues related to scope and competencies of a leader’s intra-partisan power, leadership selection rules and history, development of leaders’ political careers and their electoral activity. The L ithuanian party system now exhibits moderate fragmentation without centrifugal tendencies. Voter volatility is still relatively high, yet the share of new parties has dropped to zero. The protest and populist parties in Lithuania went into the margins of political establishment. Popularity of the Order and Justice party has long been connected to the formerly impeached president Rolandas Paksas. His long-term leadership in the face of plummeting electoral support and an emphasis on his political martyrdom resulted in poor electoral performances, ensuing internal squabbles and his departure. Party Order and Justice’s internal regulations, however, remained favourable to strong leadership.


Author(s):  
John Toye

This book provides a survey of different ways in which economic sociocultural and political aspects of human progress have been studied since the time of Adam Smith. Inevitably, over such a long time span, it has been necessary to concentrate on highlighting the most significant contributions, rather than attempting an exhaustive treatment. The aim has been to bring into focus an outline of the main long-term changes in the way that socioeconomic development has been envisaged. The argument presented is that the idea of socioeconomic development emerged with the creation of grand evolutionary sequences of social progress that were the products of Enlightenment and mid-Victorian thinkers. By the middle of the twentieth century, when interest in the accelerating development gave the topic a new impetus, its scope narrowed to a set of economically based strategies. After 1960, however, faith in such strategies began to wane, in the face of indifferent results and general faltering of confidence in economists’ boasts of scientific expertise. In the twenty-first century, development research is being pursued using a research method that generates disconnected results. As a result, it seems unlikely that any grand narrative will be created in the future and that neo-liberalism will be the last of this particular kind of socioeconomic theory.


2019 ◽  
Vol 155 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Slotwinski ◽  
Alois Stutzer ◽  
Roman Uhlig

Abstract In the face of recent refugee migration, early integration of asylum seekers into the labor market has been proposed as an important mechanism for easing their economic and social lot in the short as well as in the long term. However, little is known about the policies that foster or hamper their participation in the labor market, in particular during the important initial period of their stay in the host country. In order to evaluate whether inclusive labor market policies increase the labor market participation of asylum seekers, we exploit the variation in asylum policies in Swiss cantons to which asylum seekers are as good as randomly allocated. During our study period from 2011 to 2014, the employment rate among asylum seekers varied between 0 and 30.2% across cantons. Our results indicate that labor market access regulations are responsible for a substantial proportion of these differences, in which an inclusive regime increases participation by 11 percentage points. The marginal effects are larger for asylum seekers who speak a language that is linguistically close to the one in their host canton. Summary Inclusive labor market access regulations substantially increase the employment chances of asylum seekers, in particular if the language distance is short.


Materials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 421
Author(s):  
Chang-Hwan Lee ◽  
Iman Mansouri ◽  
Jaehoon Bae ◽  
Jaeho Ryu

A new type of composite voided slab, the TUBEDECK (TD), which utilizes the structural function of profiled steel decks, has recently been proposed. Previous studies have confirmed that the flexural strength of TD slabs can be calculated based on the full composite contribution of the steel deck, but for long-span flexural members, the deflection serviceability requirement is often dominant. Herein, we derived a novel deflection prediction approach using the results of flexural tests on slab specimens, focusing on TD slabs. First, deflection prediction based on modifications of the current code was proposed. Results revealed that TD slabs exhibited smaller long-term deflections and at least 10% longer maximum span lengths than solid slabs, indicating their greater efficiency. Second, a novel rational method was derived for predicting deflections without computing the effective moment of inertia. The ultimate deflections predicted by the proposed method correlated closely with the deflection under maximum bending moments. To calculate immediate deflections, variation functions for the concrete strain at the extreme compression fiber and neutral axis depth were assumed with predictions in good agreement with experiments. The proposed procedure has important implications in highlighting a new perspective on the deflection prediction of reinforced concrete and composite flexural members.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 733-734
Author(s):  
Lindsay Peterson ◽  
David Dosa ◽  
Patricia D’Antonio

Abstract Preparedness of residents in long-term care (LTC) in the face of hurricane emergencies is a contested and largely unanswered question. Our prior work involving the U.S. Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005-08 showed that exposure to various storms on nursing home (NH) residents resulted in significantly more deaths than reported by health care officials. This work also highlighted that evacuation of NH residents, compared to sheltering in place, was independently associated with morbidity and mortality. Hurricane Irma struck Florida on Sept. 10, 2017, prompting the evacuation of thousands of NH and assisted living community (ALC) residents. This symposium will discuss the effects of Hurricane Irma on vulnerable older adults residing in NHs and ALCs using mixed quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The first presentation will discuss morbidity and mortality of NH residents exposed to Hurricane Irma and will stratify by long stay/short stay status and hospice enrollment. The second presentation will discuss improvements and continued barriers to NH preparedness based on interviews with 30 administrators following Hurricane Irma. Using a novel methodology to identify residents of ALCs using secondary data sources, the third presentation will document AL resident morbidity and mortality risk following Hurricane Irma. The final presentation will highlight results of interviews with 70 stakeholders from small and large ALCs concerning the hurricane experiences of residents, including those with dementia. This symposium offers a multi-faceted view of a disaster’s effects on LTC residents across Florida, including novel data from the NH environment and lesser-examined ALCs.


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