scholarly journals Performance Evaluation: Identifying Barriers and Enablers for Landscape Architecture Practice

Architecture ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-160
Author(s):  
Guanyu Chen ◽  
Jacky Bowring ◽  
Shannon Davis
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Performance Evaluation ◽  
Landscape Architecture ◽  
Environmental Design ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
Performance Evaluations ◽  
Barriers And Enablers ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
Benefits And Costs ◽  
Two Barriers

Performance evaluation is crucial for environmental design and sustainable development, especially so for architecture and landscape architecture. However, such performance evaluations remain rare in practice. It is argued that the concerns over potential negative evaluations and a lack of funding are the two main barriers preventing the undertaking of performance evaluations. This research investigated how these two barriers were overcome in practice by studying 41 evaluation cases in the New Zealand landscape architecture field, as well as several international and architectural case studies for comparison. A range of enablers for performance evaluation practices were identified by this research, including funding sources and models that were not documented by existing literature, as well as two strategies for handling the risks of negative evaluation. All of the identified enablers share the same underlying logic—the benefits and costs of an evaluation should be well-regulated by certain mechanisms to keep the benefits of an evaluation greater than, or at least balanced with, the costs, for all the parties involved in the evaluation.

scholarly journals Exploring cross-border cooperation in Eastern Europe: What kind of initiatives have developed in the Romanian-Hungarian border area?

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-43
Author(s):  
Elena Grad-Rusu
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Border Area ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
Cross Border Cooperation ◽  
The Eu

Since the beginning, the European Union has believed and promoted the idea that an increase in cross-border cooperation contributes to enhanced European integration. This means that cross-border cooperation supports sustainable development along the EU’s internal and external borders, helps reduce differences in living standards and addresses common challenges across these borders. The aim of this paper is to examine the cross-border initiatives between Romania and Hungary with a special focus on the INTERREG projects, which have provided new sources of funding for cross-border activities and regional development in the RomanianHungarian border area. In this context, the cooperation has intensified in the last two decades, especially since Romania joined the EU in 2007. The research proves that cross-border projects and initiatives represent an important source of funding for this type of intervention, when no similar funding sources are available.

scholarly journals Developing An Evaluation Protocol For The Toronto Public Library (TPL) System Through The Application Of A Building Performance Evaluation (BPE) Of A Branch Library To Inform Its Retrofit Strategy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Martin
Keyword(s):  
Performance Evaluation ◽  
Thermal Comfort ◽  
Water Consumption ◽  
User Satisfaction ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Performance Evaluations ◽  
Building Performance ◽  
Design Intent ◽  
Evaluation Protocol ◽  
Operational Costs

Buildings play a significant role in our economy and society. Substantial capital is invested in buildings, and they are the locales where a large portion (e.g., work, cultural, religious, social and personal activities) of our lives are conducted. Despite the significant monetary and temporal investments in buildings, building performance evaluations (BPEs) are not standard practice. From BPEs that have been conducted, important findings have been identified. Significant gaps frequently exist between the design intent of buildings and their measured performance (e.g., energy and water consumption) and user satisfaction (e.g., thermal comfort, lighting, noise). Environmental (e.g., resource consumption) and economic drivers (e.g., productivity, operational costs) are spurring the growth of BPEs. A BPE was conducted of the Weston Public Library (WPL) with the intent of informing a retrofit strategy and developing a protocol for conducting BPEs in the Toronto Public Library (TPL) system.

scholarly journals IMPACTS OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE ON OUTDOOR INSECURITY IN URBAN HOUSING COMPLEXES

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.H. Lakchan ◽  
◽  
S. Udalamaththa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Design Theory ◽  
Landscape Architecture ◽  
Environmental Design ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Landscape Character ◽  
Housing Complex

Housing is one of the most essential components of life, offering shelter, protection, and comfort, as well as a place to rest. When considering the Sri Lankan housing complexes Millennium city housing complex was highlighted mainly because of the crime incidents that happened inside the housing complex. This research is done to demonstrate and to investigate the application of landscape architecture for security on urban housing complexes based on Millennium city housing complex, using landscape character to reduce outdoor insecurity. Seven places in the millennium city housing complex premises were selected to apply the crime prevention through environmental design theory and to observe its effectiveness through structured interviews and by considering the police reports that were taken through Sri Lanka police Athurugiriya. Natural surveillance, Territorial reinforcement, Maintenance, Prospect, Refuge, and Escape factors are separately discussed in the analysis regarding the selected places. A sectional survey is done for further analysis. The outcome shows that the house settings and the landscape character affect the outdoor landscape safety of the residents. The study will be a source to better understand how landscape architecture can be applied for outdoor security in urban housing complexes.

scholarly journals The Context of Sustainable Development: Funding Society’s Nature and Forest Education through Promotional Forest Complexes in Poland in 2012–2016

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 4058
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Wartecka-Ważyńska ◽  
Anna Jęczmyk ◽  
Mikołaj Jalinik ◽  
Jan Sikora ◽  
Stanisław Łuniewski ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Educational Activity ◽  
Educational Facilities ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
External Resources ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
The Social ◽  
External Sources ◽  
Forest Education ◽  
Object Of Study

The aim of this article is to present the funding sources and scale of the expenditure for the educational activity provided by Promotional Forest Complexes (PFCs) in the context of sustainable development. Apart from a number of significant economic functions, the State Forests in Poland perform important social functions, including the function of nature and forest education. Economic functions bring profit, while social functions are not subject to such commercialization. The execution of the social functions of Poland’s forests is dealt with by special organizational units, called Promotional Forest Complexes (PFCs). PFCs have suitable educational facilities at their disposal, enabling them to perform their tasks (e.g., education sites, nature exhibition rooms, forest teaching shelters, educational trails). Running these facilities involves certain transaction costs, which are covered from the PFCs’ own resources. The educational activity is partly financed from external sources. This analysis indicates that we could observe a decrease in internal and external resources dedicated to the nature and forest education of the society. The authors carried out the secondary materials analysis concerning the object of study, as well as the analysis of scientific literature and statistical analysis.

Sorting Through Performance Evaluations: The Influence of Performance Evaluation Reform on Teacher Attrition and Mobility

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 2339-2377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis A. Rodriguez ◽  
Walker A. Swain ◽  
Matthew G. Springer
Keyword(s):  
Performance Evaluation ◽  
Teacher Attrition ◽  
Effective Teachers ◽  
Evaluation System ◽  
Race To The Top ◽  
Performance Evaluations ◽  
American Education ◽  
Mobility Patterns ◽  
Low Performing Schools ◽  
School Settings

The federal Race to the Top initiative signified a shift in American education policy whereby accountability efforts moved from the school to the teacher level. Using administrative data from Tennessee, we explore whether evaluation reforms differentially influenced mobility patterns for teachers of varying effectiveness. We find that the rollout of a statewide evaluation system, even without punitive consequences, was associated with increased turnover; however, there was comparably greater retention of more effective teachers, with larger differences in turnover between highly and minimally effective teachers confined to urban districts and low-performing schools. These results imply that states and districts can increase exit rates of low-performing instructors in the absence of automatic dismissals, which is a pattern that our analyses suggest may not generalize beyond urban school settings.

scholarly journals DEVELOPMENT OF AN ENGINEERING CLASS PROJECT INCORPORATING A PERSONAL VISION OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT TEACHING

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariane Pinsonnault ◽  
Stéphanie Muller ◽  
Annie Levasseur ◽  
Réjean Samson
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Teaching Assistants ◽  
Environmental Design ◽  
Life Cycle Thinking ◽  
Multidisciplinary Teams ◽  
Engineering Programs ◽  
Class Project ◽  
Development Of Attitudes ◽  
A Company

The decade 2005-2014 has been set by UNESCO as the United Nations decade of Education forSustainable Development (SD) [1]. As graduate studentsof this decade, our vision of SD teaching targets inengineering concerns the development of attitudes to assess projects and related impacts in a systemic way, the development of transversal skills, and the collaboration between experts from different fields to facilitate sustainable decisions. These assumptions can be linked tothe qualities required by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board [2].What kind of student exercises relies on all these assumptions? As teaching assistants (TA) in the class Environmental Design and Life Cycle Thinking (GCH2220-Polytechnique Montreal), we propose a possible answer. The main goals of this class are to familiarize students with the concepts of environmental design and life cycle thinking, as well as with different existing tools to apply these concepts. As TAs, we are in charge of a project that aims at providing students an opportunity to acquire practical aspects.The subject of the project presented is the environmental redesign of coated paper production, andits main objectives are: to improve teamwork skills, todevelop critical thinking when analyzing the results of an environmental assessment, and to develop skills to convince people within a company to adopt environmental solutions. In order to achieve these goals, the project was built on four main steps and students are evaluated through two reports and a poster presentation. Teams of four students were formed in order to mix students with different backgrounds (types of engineering programs, amount of credits completed) and obtain multidisciplinary teams. The project, the way it is presented in class, and its relevance for the students as future engineers are assessed through a survey in order to improve the exercise for the following classes.

scholarly journals Landscape renewal of urban public space under the concept of sustainable development: a case study of Guilin city

2019 ◽  
Vol 118 ◽  
pp. 03009
Author(s):  
Fang Zhao ◽  
Yanni Lai ◽  
Qin Du ◽  
Xuefang Xie ◽  
Qiutong Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Landscape Architecture ◽  
Pollution Reduction ◽  
Space Problem ◽  
Urban Public Space ◽  
The Public ◽  
Theoretical Support

With the theory of “sustainable development” as the theoretical support, the public space landscape of Guilin City is taken as the research object, and from the perspective of landscape architecture, the public space landscape and the non-sustainability issues are deeply analyzed.Guilin city has been deeply investigated and studied.According to various types of public space landscape, five problems are concluded:landscape space problem, landscape energy consumption problem, landscape greening and planting problem, landscape rainwater resources digestion and utilization problem and landscape pollution reduction and noise reduction problem.The smooth solution of these five problems can promote the improvement of the urban environment and create sustainable urban public space.

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