Evaluation of the Visually Impaired Experience of the Sound Environment in Urban Spaces

Visually impaired people have unique perceptions of and usage requirements for various urban spaces. Therefore, understanding these perceptions can help create reasonable layouts and construct urban infrastructure. This study recruited 26 visually impaired volunteers to evaluate 24 sound environments regarding clarity, comfort, safety, vitality, and depression. This data was collected in seven different types of urban spaces. An independent sample non-parametric test was used to determine the significance of the differences between environmental evaluation results for each evaluation dimension and to summarize the compositions of sound and space elements in the positive and negative influence spaces. The results suggested that visually impaired people (1) feel comfort, safety, and clarity in parks, residential communities, and shopping streets; (2) have negative perceptions of vegetable markets, bus stops, hospitals, and urban departments; (3) feel anxious when traffic sounds, horn sounds, manhole cover sounds, and construction sounds occur; and (4) prefer spaces away from traffic, with fewer and slower vehicles, with a suitable space scale, and moderate crowd density. These results provide a reference for the future design of activity venues (i.e., residential communities, vegetable markets, bus stops, parks, shopping streets, hospitals, and urban functional departments) and the planning of accessibility systems for visually impaired urban residents.

Why People Settle in Shrinking Communities: A Unified Framework of Psychological, Environmental, and Cognitive Factors

The interpretation of settlement behavior in shrinking areas can provide insights into sustainability strategies in shrinking communities. However, the choice to settle in areas undergoing shrinkage is hard to interpret when considering residents as rational decisionmakers. To attain a deeper understanding of this decision-making process, a framework of residential decision making (RDM) considering a subjective environmental evaluation dimension, psychological dimension, and cognitive dimension is proposed. This process was further validated by conducting a questionnaire survey in Japanese communities. The results of the structural equation modeling reveal that the RDM framework proposed is applicable to RDM in shrinking communities. By considering geographical differences, we further found that residents in suburban communities tend to consider overall satisfaction with their location when deciding whether to stay, whereas residents in mountainous communities value emotional satisfaction factors such as place attachment when considering continuous residence. Different residential preferences contributing to the formation of RDM factors were also revealed between communities. The results of this study imply that sustainable development strategies to assist shrinking communities should be tailored to their geographical characteristics. Further, a regional design that can enrich residential experiences and neighborhood communication is important for promoting population settlement.

Environmental and Energetic Evaluation of Refuse-Derived Fuel Gasification for Electricity Generation

In this work, an energetic and environmental evaluation of the electricity generation process through refuse-derived fuel (RDF) gasification coupled to a gas microturbine (GM) was performed. Two scenarios are considered with different gasification agents in RDF gasification modeling: air and air enriched with oxygen. A thermodynamic chemical equilibrium approach was used to analyze the gasification parameters. The results of RDF gasification indicate a maximum value of syngas low heating value (LHV) equal to 8.0 MJ/Nm3, obtained for an equivalence ratio of 0.3. The use of these syngas in the gas microturbine produces 79.6 kW of electrical power. For the environmental evaluation of gasification and electricity generation systems, the Life Cycle Assessment methodology was employed. The calculated environmental impacts indicate that the emission of contaminants from fossil fuel combustion (in the stage of transport by heavy load vehicles) and that the electricity consumption for equipment operation (in the stage of municipal solid waste pretreatment) contributes to environmental pollution. On the other hand, electricity generation through GM presented lower environmental impact for all analyzed categories, suggesting that the electricity generation from gas obtained from gasification could be a viable option for thermochemical conversion of RDF and its subsequent energetic use.

Retrieving the Soil Moisture in Bare Farmland Areas Using a Modified Dubois Model

Soil moisture is an important parameter for global soil moisture transport, environmental evaluation, and precision agricultural research. The accurate retrieval of soil moisture in farmland areas using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) depends on the accurate description of surface and SAR parameters. In these parameters, surface roughness and incidence angle are the key factors that affect the accuracy of the soil moisture retrieval model. This article proposes a modified Dubois model to retrieve soil moisture suitable for the bare surface of farmland area. The model eliminates the incidence angle parameters and uses polarization parameters to depict the surface roughness parameters in the Dubois model. To eliminate the incidence angle, the backscattering coefficients gamma0, which eliminates the effect of the incidence angles, are used to replace the sigma0. Under rain and no rain condition, the trend of backscattering coefficients (VH and VV) and cross-polarization ratio (VH-VV) of different soil texture with the soil moisture are compared. Then, the polarization parameter based on VH backscattering coefficients is used to describe surface roughness. The model is evaluated with time-series soil moisture observation data in situ of the study area. The results indicate that the modified model can retrieve soil moisture with high accuracy, and the total RMSE can reach 0.064 cm3cm−3 while the Dubois model is 0.124 cm3cm−3. Under rain and no rain condition, the retrieval accuracy of the modified model is 0.066 cm3cm−3 and 0.063 cm3cm−3. The retrieval accuracy is 0.060 cm3cm−3 and 0.067 cm3cm−3 under high and low incidence angles conditions, respectively. These results indicate that the modified Dubois model can retrieve soil moisture with high accuracy under different conditions.

The use of blue-Green infrastructure as a multifunctional approach to watersheds with socio-environmental vulnerability

This article investigates how to make the implementation of blue-green infrastructure (BGI) more attractive to solve urban problems in densely occupied watersheds that lack flood control and environmental quality protection infrastructure. Considering the obstacles related to implementing multifunctional solutions in developing countries, measuring its co-benefits (in addition to flood control) may influence greater public and political acceptance. Thus, the paper uses a multifunctional design approach using the urban open space system and combining the blue-green and gray infrastructure. A hydrodynamic model was used to support flood mapping. This approach also increases the land value and the environmental quality of the urban spaces. Two quantitative aspects support this evaluation. The first one represents the land value increase as a positive effect, while the second one assesses the environmental quality of the urban space using the Environmental Quality Assessment Index (EQAI). The results obtained from the urban and environmental evaluation proved that blue and green corridors could promote multiple co-benefits for consolidated urban areas. The increased environmental quality and land value were only possible due to the combined use of BGI and gray infrastructure since BGI can add benefits that the gray infrastructure is not capable of providing.