scholarly journals Place-making Through Time: Future-proofing Tauranga Borough through the evolution of 'Place Identity'

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Callum Gibb
Keyword(s):  
Community Engagement ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Place Identity ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Spatial Use ◽  
Urban Issues ◽  
Community Spaces ◽  
The Impact

<p>The water’s edge is a vital element in New Zealand’s natural environments and established communities. Development of industrial infrastructure along this threshold, has left many coastal settlements stagnant and slipping into demise, negatively impacting the connection with the land and people, while industries continue to thrive. This research responds to this problem by exploring the potential of a place’s identity to become a catalyst to moderate the impact of industrial infrastructure on inner city consumption, community engagement and urban use.  Tauranga City provides appropriate testing grounds for this research. It has an under-utilized and uninspiring city centre, that suffers from the impact of industrial domination. The lack of diversity in civic and community spaces and opportunity for community engagement and interaction with Tauranga’s water’s edge has encouraged its community to move out of the city into more vibrant neighbouring suburbs and cities. This situation is contributing to the gradual demise of Tauranga City.  This investigation considers the studies of Tauranga’s original settlement and evolution to its current condition, before turning to literature on place-making and resiliency for both people and environments. Appropriate and relevant cases from architectural practice, which address these urban issues, have been selected. Applying these studies, a speculative design has been developed which also sources other literature for guidance and idea generation.  This has resulted in a process of pro-grammatically representing place identity for spatial use, along with iteratively testing the organization and prioritisation of people and infrastructure within a city centre in a coastal context. Exploring the potential for prioritizing people over infrastructure, has resulted in the realization that we must engage, involve and consult with people to mediate the displaced developments of community and the impact of growth of industrial activity.</p>

scholarly journals Place-making Through Time: Future-proofing Tauranga Borough through the evolution of 'Place Identity'

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Callum Gibb
Keyword(s):  
Community Engagement ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Place Identity ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Spatial Use ◽  
Urban Issues ◽  
Community Spaces ◽  
The Impact

<p>The water’s edge is a vital element in New Zealand’s natural environments and established communities. Development of industrial infrastructure along this threshold, has left many coastal settlements stagnant and slipping into demise, negatively impacting the connection with the land and people, while industries continue to thrive. This research responds to this problem by exploring the potential of a place’s identity to become a catalyst to moderate the impact of industrial infrastructure on inner city consumption, community engagement and urban use.  Tauranga City provides appropriate testing grounds for this research. It has an under-utilized and uninspiring city centre, that suffers from the impact of industrial domination. The lack of diversity in civic and community spaces and opportunity for community engagement and interaction with Tauranga’s water’s edge has encouraged its community to move out of the city into more vibrant neighbouring suburbs and cities. This situation is contributing to the gradual demise of Tauranga City.  This investigation considers the studies of Tauranga’s original settlement and evolution to its current condition, before turning to literature on place-making and resiliency for both people and environments. Appropriate and relevant cases from architectural practice, which address these urban issues, have been selected. Applying these studies, a speculative design has been developed which also sources other literature for guidance and idea generation.  This has resulted in a process of pro-grammatically representing place identity for spatial use, along with iteratively testing the organization and prioritisation of people and infrastructure within a city centre in a coastal context. Exploring the potential for prioritizing people over infrastructure, has resulted in the realization that we must engage, involve and consult with people to mediate the displaced developments of community and the impact of growth of industrial activity.</p>

scholarly journals 13.D. Workshop: SDGs in the focus of environmental and health issues

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
The World ◽  
Environmental And Health Issues ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This workshop is dedicated on SDGs in the focus of environmental and health issues, as very important and actual topic. One of the characteristics of today's societies is the significant availability of modern technologies. Over 5 billion (about 67%) people have a cellphone today. More than 4.5 billion people worldwide use the Internet, close to 60% of the total population. At the same time, one third of the people in the world does not have access to safe drinking water and half of the population does not have access to safe sanitation. The WHO at UN warns of severe inequalities in access to water and hygiene. Air, essential to life, is a leading risk due to ubiquitous pollution and contributes to the global disease burden (7 million deaths per year). Air pollution is a consequence of traffic and industry, but also of demographic trends and other human activities. Food availability reflects global inequality, famine eradication being one of the SDGs. The WHO warns of the urgency. As technology progresses, social inequality grows, the gap widens, and the environment continues to suffer. Furthermore, the social environment in societies is “ruffled” and does not appear to be beneficial toward well-being. New inequalities are emerging in the availability of technology, climate change, education. The achievement reports on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also point out to the need of reviewing individual indicators. According to the Sustainable Development Agenda, one of the goals is to reduce inequalities, and environmental health is faced by several specific goals. The Global Burden of Disease is the most comprehensive effort to date to measure epidemiological levels and trends worldwide. It is the product of a global research collaborative and quantifies the impact of hundreds of diseases, injuries, and risk factors in countries around the world. This workshop will also discuss Urban Health as a Complex System in the light of SDGs. Climate Change, Public Health impacts and the role of the new digital technologies is also important topic which is contributing to SDG3, improving health, to SDG4, allowing to provide distance health education at relatively low cost and to SDG 13, by reducing the CO2 footprint. Community Engagement can both empower vulnerable populations (so reducing inequalities) and identify the prior environmental issues to be addressed. The aim was to search for public health programs using Community Engagement tools in healthy environment building towards achievement of SDGs. Key messages Health professionals are involved in the overall process of transformation necessary to achieve the SDGs. Health professionals should be proactive and contribute to the transformation leading to better health for the environment, and thus for the human population.

scholarly journals Spatiotemporal Variance Assessment of Urban Rainstorm Waterlogging Affected by Impervious Surface Expansion: A Case Study of Guangzhou, China

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 3761 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huafei Yu ◽  
Yaolong Zhao ◽  
Yingchun Fu ◽  
Le Li
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Pattern ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Impervious Surface ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Impervious Surfaces ◽  
Surface Expansion ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Gwr Model ◽  
Runoff Plots

Urban rainstorm waterlogging has become a typical “city disease” in China. It can result in a huge loss of social economy and personal property, accordingly hindering the sustainable development of a city. Impervious surface expansion, especially the irregular spatial pattern of impervious surfaces, derived from rapid urbanization processes has been proven to be one of the main influential factors behind urban waterlogging. Therefore, optimizing the spatial pattern of impervious surfaces through urban renewal is an effective channel through which to attenuate urban waterlogging risk for developed urban areas. However, the most important step for the optimization of the spatial pattern of impervious surfaces is to understand the mechanism of the impact of urbanization processes, especially the spatiotemporal pattern of impervious surfaces, on urban waterlogging. This research aims to elucidate the mechanism of urbanization’s impact on waterlogging by analysing the spatiotemporal characteristics and variance of urban waterlogging affected by urban impervious surfaces in a case study of Guangzhou in China. First, the study area was divided into runoff plots by means of the hydrologic analysis method, based on which the analysis of spatiotemporal variance was carried out. Then, due to the heterogeneity of urban impervious surface effects on waterlogging, a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model was utilized to assess the spatiotemporal variance of the impact of impervious surface expansion on urban rainstorm waterlogging during the period from the 1990s to the 2010s. The results reveal that urban rainstorm waterlogging significantly expanded in a dense and circular layer surrounding the city centre, similar to the impervious surface expansion affected by urbanization policies. Taking the urban runoff plot as the research unit, GWR has achieved a good modelling effect for urban storm waterlogging. The results show that the impervious surfaces in the runoff plots of the southeastern part of Yuexiu, the southern part of Tianhe and the western part of Haizhu, which have experienced major urban engineering construction, have the strongest correlation with urban rainstorm waterlogging. However, for different runoff plots, the impact of impervious surfaces on urban waterlogging is quite different, as there exist other influence factors in the various runoff plots, although the impervious surface is one of the main factors. This result means that urban renewal strategy to optimize the spatial pattern of impervious surfaces for urban rainstorm waterlogging prevention and control should be different for different runoff plots. The results of the GWR model analysis can provide useful information for urban renewal strategy-making.

scholarly journals Hotspots of boundary accumulation: dynamics and statistics of micro-swimmers in flowing films

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (115) ◽  
pp. 20150936 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold J. T. M. Mathijssen ◽  
Amin Doostmohammadi ◽  
Julia M. Yeomans ◽  
Tyler N. Shendruk
Keyword(s):  
Solid Wall ◽  
Critical Value ◽  
Hydrodynamic Interactions ◽  
Critical Flow ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Flow Strength ◽  
Surfaces And Interfaces ◽  
Biological Flows ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Systematic Framework

Biological flows over surfaces and interfaces can result in accumulation hotspots or depleted voids of microorganisms in natural environments. Apprehending the mechanisms that lead to such distributions is essential for understanding biofilm initiation. Using a systematic framework, we resolve the dynamics and statistics of swimming microbes within flowing films, considering the impact of confinement through steric and hydrodynamic interactions, flow and motility, along with Brownian and run–tumble fluctuations. Micro-swimmers can be peeled off the solid wall above a critical flow strength. However, the interplay of flow and fluctuations causes organisms to migrate back towards the wall above a secondary critical value. Hence, faster flows may not always be the most efficacious strategy to discourage biofilm initiation. Moreover, we find run–tumble dynamics commonly used by flagellated microbes to be an intrinsically more successful strategy to escape from boundaries than equivalent levels of enhanced Brownian noise in ciliated organisms.

scholarly journals Ability of near-infrared spectroscopy and chemometrics to predict the age of mosquitoes reared under different conditions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oselyne Ong ◽  
Elise Kho ◽  
Pedro Esperança ◽  
Chris Freebairn ◽  
Floyd Dowell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Infrared Spectroscopy ◽  
Near Infrared Spectroscopy ◽  
Near Infrared ◽  
Field Application ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Island Population ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Pls Regression ◽  
Field Methods ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Background: Practical, field-ready age-grading tools for mosquito vectors of disease are urgently needed because of the impact that daily survival has on vectorial capacity. Previous studies have shown that near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), in combination with chemometrics and predictive modeling, can forecast the age of laboratory-reared mosquitoes with moderate to high accuracy. It remains unclear whether the technique has utility for identifying shifts in the age structure of wild-caught mosquitoes. Here we investigate whether models derived from the laboratory strain of mosquitoes can be used to predict the age of mosquitoes grown from pupae collected in the field. Methods: NIR spectra from adult female Aedes albopictus mosquitoes reared in the laboratory (2, 5, 8, 12 and 15 days old) were compared to spectra from mosquitoes emerging from wild-caught pupae (1, 7 and 14 days old). Different partial least squares (PLS) regression methods trained on spectra from laboratory mosquitoes were evaluated on their ability to predict the age of mosquitoes from more natural environments. Results: Models trained on spectra from laboratory-reared material were able to predict the age of other laboratory-reared mosquitoes with moderate accuracy and successfully differentiated all day 2 and 15 mosquitoes. Models derived with laboratory mosquitoes could not differentiate between field-derived age groups, with age predictions relatively indistinguishable for day 1-14. Pre-processing of spectral data and improving the PLS regression framework to avoid overfitting can increase accuracy, but predictions of mosquitoes reared in different environments remained poor. Principle component analysis confirms substantial spectral variations between laboratory and field-derived mosquitoes despite both originating from the same island population. Conclusions: Models trained on laboratory mosquitoes were able to predict ages of laboratory mosquitoes with good sensitivity and specificity though they were unable to predict age of field-derived mosquitoes. This study suggests that laboratory-reared mosquitoes do not capture enough environmental variation to accurately predict the age of the same species reared under different conditions. Further research is needed to explore alternative pre-processing methods and machine learning techniques, and to understand factors that affect absorbance in mosquitoes before field application using NIRS.

scholarly journals Activity density of carabid beetles along an urbanisation gradient

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (Suppl.) ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Simone Fattorini ◽  
Cristina Mantoni ◽  
Davide Bergamaschi ◽  
Lorenzo Fortini ◽  
Francisco J. Sánchez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Carabid Beetles ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Intermediate Disturbance ◽  
Rural Environments ◽  
Activity Density ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Several works have investigated the impact of urbanisation on carabid activity density using urban-rural gradients. Such works compared activity density recorded from green spaces located in different parts of a city and assigned to categories of increasing urban intensity, which poses two problems: (1) since the gradient is divided into categories, it is impossible to model continuous variations in biotic responses, and (2) sites representative of different urbanisation levels are not true segments of the same ecological continuum. To surpass these problems, we modelled variations in carabid activity density along an urban-rural transect within a single green space extending from the city centre of Rome to rural environments. Carabids were sampled by pitfall traps from sites distributed along the entire gradient. We used breakpoint regressions to model how (1) carabid activity density, (2) carabids/beetles ratio, (3) carabids/insects ratio and (3) carabids/arthropods ratio varied along the gradient. As already observed for various organisms in urban environments, we found that activity density of carabids and their contribution to the abundance of beetles, insects and arthropods, peaked in the middle of the gradient. This supports the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, according to which moderate urbanisation may favour diversity by increasing habitat heterogeneity.

scholarly journals The Use of Non-Canonical Amino Acids as a Novel Biocontainment Strategy

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jourdan Witt
Keyword(s):  
Oral Delivery ◽  
Genetically Modified Organisms ◽  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Open Systems ◽  
Genetically Modified ◽  
Environmental Safety ◽  
Genetically Engineered ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Delivery Vector ◽  
The Impact

Advancements in synthetic biology have led to the use of genetically modified organisms in research and industrial fields. Bacteria were one of the first organisms to be genetically engineered due to their fast growth and simple genetics, and have emerged as a major scientific and commercial interest. For instance, modified commensal bacteria can be used as an oral delivery vector of therapeutics, or as probiotics to target specific pathogens in the gastrointestinal tract. The impact of the release of pathogens used in research or vaccine development could be catastrophic to the environment and public health. In addition, there is growing concern about using genetically modified organisms in open systems, as there is a possibility for unintentional proliferation into natural environments. Therefore, is imperative that the environmental safety of genetically modified organisms are addressed, and that adequate biocontainment mechanisms are developed.

Measuring circadian lighting through high dynamic range photography

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (5) ◽  
pp. 742-763 ◽  
Author(s):  
B Jung ◽  
M Inanici
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Range ◽  
High Dynamic Range ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Design Decisions ◽  
High Dynamic ◽  
Ocular System ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Strong Linear Relationship ◽  
Internal Body

The human ocular system functions in a dual manner. While the most well-known function is to facilitate vision, a growing body of research demonstrates its role in resetting the internal body clock to synchronize with the 24-hour daily cycle. Most research on circadian rhythms is performed in controlled laboratory environments. Little is known about the variability of circadian light within the built and natural environments. Currently, very few specialized devices measure the circadian light, and they are not accessible to many researchers and practitioners. In this paper, tristimulus colour calibration procedures for high dynamic range photography are developed to measure circadian lighting. Camera colour accuracy is evaluated through CIE trichromatic (XYZ) measurements; and the results demonstrate a strong linear relationship between the camera recordings and a scientific-grade colorimeter. Therefore, it is possible to correct for the colour aberrations and use high dynamic range photographs to measure both photopic and circadian lighting values. Spectrophotometric measurements are collected to validate the methodology. Results demonstrate that measurements from high dynamic range photographs can correspond to the physical quantity of circadian luminance with reasonable precision and repeatability. Circadian data collected in built environments can be utilized to study the impact of design decisions on human circadian entrainment and to create guidelines and metrics for designing circadian friendly environments.

Coda

2018 ◽  
pp. 207-213
Author(s):  
Joanna Hofer-Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The World ◽  
Physical Effects ◽  
Urban Issues ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
The Impact

The Coda offers a reprise of the book’s the central arguments. Namely, that Dickens’s legacies can be traced in surprising, physical effects in London’s built environment. By exploring polymodal afterlives of his fiction over which he had no control, as well as his interventions in contemporary urban issues, Dickens and Demolition proposes that the impact of literary works lingers in the world around us in ways of which we may not always be conscious. Indeed, Dickensian afterlives are traceable in demolitions that have erased areas of Old London from the capital. The Coda restates that the potential of Dickensian afterlives to effect public debate and physical spaces in this manner was enabled by a particular set of circumstances, which were already being reformed during Dickens’s lifetime. Nevertheless, questions are raised about other authors, cities and countries.

Brand community motives and their impact on brand community engagement: variations between diverse audiences

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matti Haverila ◽  
Caitlin McLaughlin ◽  
Kai Christian Haverila ◽  
Julio Viskovics
Keyword(s):  
Community Engagement ◽  
North American ◽  
Population Sample ◽  
Effect Sizes ◽  
Sample Population ◽  
Brand Community ◽  
Student Sample ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Brand Communities ◽  
The Impact

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to compare two different sample populations (student and general) to determine the impact of brand community motives on brand community engagement.Design/methodology/approachTwo samples were drawn for the purpose of the current research. The first sample was drawn among the members of various brand communities from a general North American population sample (N = 503). The second sample was drawn purely from students, belonging to a variety of brand communities, from a middle-sized Canadian university (N = 195). Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to analyse the strength, significance and effect sizes of the relationships between brand community motive and engagement constructs.FindingsThe findings indicate that the impact of brand community motives varied by sample population. The information and entertainment motives were significantly related to brand community engagement in both sample populations with roughly equal effect sizes. The social integration motive was again significantly related to the brand community engagement construct in the student sample population – but not for the general North American general population sample. Further, the self-discovery motive and status enhancement motives were significantly related to brand community engagement in the North American sample, but not for the student sample. This indicates significant differences between the two sample populations.Originality/valueThe results of the current research demonstrate that student populations are significantly different from the general population regarding their motives towards brand communities. This indicates that brand community managers need to be aware of the motives of different brand community members and also that they need to exercise caution about utilizing purely student data to make decisions about brand community management.

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