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Degraded and restituted towns in Poland: Origins, development, problems : Miasta zdegradowane i restytuowane w Polsce. Geneza, rozwój, problemy
- 2015
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Editorial collection (other academic/artistic)abstract
- One of the less known problems in settlement geography is the issue of so-called degraded and restituted towns. This lack of reconnaissance, however, is perhaps less the result of the towns’ scarcity than their specificity of being ‘awarded’ or ‘deprived of’ an urban label by means of strictly socio-political actions. Degraded and restituted towns, hence, are spatial units made ‘urban’ or ‘rural’ instantaneously, irrespective of their de facto state along what is widely considered a gradual path of (de)urbanization. Instead, they become compartmentalized into two constructed spatial categories that have survived the onslaught of material transformations and philosophical repositioning through different whims of time. While ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ are conceptual binaries that certainly need to be treated with caution, their cultural salience may cause tangible consequences within national administrative systems that abide by a formalized rural-urban distinction. This issue becomes particularly important for settlements that clearly transcend any imagined rural-urban divide, i.e. those, whose material and immaterial characteristics seem counterfactual to their assigned category. It is also crucial in formal practices designed to avert such counterfactualities, but whose ran-domness of approach more creates confusion than helps straighten out a historical concoction. Both processes, nonetheless, lend ‘urbanity’ and ‘rurality’ a resonance of objectivity, justifying their use as guides for a host of developmental endeavors, despite subverting a much more intricate reality. Degraded and restituted towns are direct derivatives of this. Drawing on the above-mentioned irreconcilabilities, the aim of this book is to present and scrutinize degraded and restituted towns through the example of Poland, where these towns occupy a special niche. For one, Poland, due to its chequered and variegated history, is home to a conspicuously large number of degraded (831) and restituted (236) towns; for another, Poland’s relentlessness of formalizing ‘urbanity’ as a category of statistical, political and cultural guidance has a direct bearing on the lives of the towns’ residents. Realizing the intricacy of degraded and restituted towns in the face of commonplace ru-ral-urban ideations, the editors and the 17 contributing Authors of this book have made an effort to capture the towns’ complexity with special foci on their shrouded origins, developmental specificity and incurred problems. Owing to the involvement of researchers from different scientific disciplines and subdisciplines, the undertaken project has helped elucidate the problem from multiple perspectives: spatial, social, demographic, economic, environmental, historical, architectural, cultural, legal and philosophical. Allocated into 17 chapters, not only have the presented interpretations allowed for a first interdisciplinary synthesis on the topic, but they also helped outline some prospective directions for future research. Moreover, collecting materials of such diversity into an amalgamated whole has helped identify specific discourses that enwrap the concept of “urbanity” when seen through its oscillations within formal contexts, and to which degraded and restituted towns serve as expendable game pieces. By combining knowledge arrived at through ontologically and epistemologically different approaches, the incremental contribution of this book as a whole could be summarized in two attainments: a) extending theoretical frameworks used to study degraded and restituted towns in terms of definition, conceptualization and assessing predispositions for future de-velopment on account of their spatial, legal, socio-economic and historical charac-teristics; b) initiating an anticipated discussion on a number of important and current topics re-lated to the practices of degradation and restitution that have not received adequate attention, e.g., the urbanity-vs.-rurality paradox, the changeability of human settlement forms vs. the consequences of rigid spatial categorizations; the role of various actors in shaping the socio-economic reality under the guise of an ossified binary; or identifying spatio-conceptual conflicts as future challenges for local, regional and national policy.
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- Nielsen, Stig Anton, 1981
(author)
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Propositional architecture and the paradox of prediction
- 2015
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In: Archidoct Vol. 4. - 2309-0103. ; 4, s. 72-85
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- What if we could predict trends, rising phenomena and future necessity in our build environment? If we could trace behaviors and forecast the needs for the future? If we had a tool for proposing architecture, that was able to point out potentialities and suggest additions, subtractions and modifications.If Architects had a tool to predict future demands, modification of the build environment could meet the changing behaviors and emerging phenomena in society. Research on existing building stock is reviewed in a context where prediction on complex indeterminate environments is possible. And an entirely new type of architectural tool is proposed, an algorithm for prediction.The algorithm, capable of making prediction in unstructured environments, is presented, and basis and idea of the algorithm is described in detail. The discussion focus on possible applications for this new tool, and the paradox of prediction is debated. Finally, improvements to the computational system are proposed.
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- Säwén, Toivo, 1993
(author)
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Early Stage Architectural Design Practice Perspectives on Life Cycle Building Performance Assessment
- 2023
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Architectural practitioners can avoid negative social and environmental impacts of new construction by making decisions supported by impact quantification during design processes. However, most software tools developed for such quantification see little use in practice, especially in early design stages when decisions have the greatest influence. To identify ways for software developers to overcome this situation, a thorough literature meta-review of previously performed tool reviews was combined with interviews applying a practice lens. The first key finding is that a possible explanation for the low tool uptake in practice could be a missing practice perspective in previous tool development efforts. In a literature meta-review of publications on life cycle building performance tools identifying previously applied perspectives, most previous tool reviews were found to support tool development and selection, while disregarding how tools can be integrated in existing practices and design processes. As a proposed solution, a framework for defining software requirements using a practice perspective was developed. The second key finding is that a practice perspective could be applied during software development by implementing qualitative methodologies. Nine architectural practitioners in Sweden, Norway and France were interviewed using the interview to the double, a projective technique in which the interviewee is asked to describe their next workday in detail so that their tasks can be assumed by an imagined body double. The design activities described by the respondents were sequenced into user narratives which could serve as starting points for participatory software development processes within the architectural practice. The outcomes - a proposed framework for practice-centric software requirements, and a proposed methodology for collecting these requirements using a practice lens - indicate a research direction toward software development efforts which aligns with design process, architectural practice, and tool user needs. In the next stage of the research this direction will be pursued through application of the developed methodologies in participatory development case studies in early-stage architectural design practice.
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- Ylva, Berglund, et al.
(author)
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Framsynt efterord
- 2013
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In: Mellanrum. Fem års seminarier om social hållbarhet och stadsutveckling i Göteborg.
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)
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- Dymitrow, Mirek, et al.
(author)
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Crossing dichotomies and breaking mental patterns: Green business development when all else fails?
- 2017
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In: 8th International Scientific Conference “Rural Development 2017: Bioeconomy Challenges”, 23–24 November, 2017 Kaunas, Lithuania.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Obtaining sustainable and inclusive societal organization is not merely a simple matter of ‘doing it’ by subscribing to some winning formula. Given that conceptual frameworks always guide our thoughts, judgments and actions (Latour, 2013; Harvey, 1996; Dennett, 1993), the ways in which we relate to concepts chosen to serve as guiding forces for future development will eventually determine its outcome. As scholarly evidence continuously suggests the concepts ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ are increasingly recognized as artificial barriers for conducting sound and integrated development endeavors in a globalized reality of interconnectedness. In line with the Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to eradicate poverty, shield the planet and safeguard prosperity for all, commitment to universal access to healthy food year round has become an important agenda point. This, however, has been exacerbated by binary thinking and separate ways of doing policy. This paper aims to share experiences from a unique project launched in the northern parts of Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city. While the area offers ample resources and immense opportunities for areal economies, it at the same time remains one of Gothenburg’s most segregated, with high levels of unemployment, ill health and crime. The uniqueness of the project lies not only in its way of abridging the rural-urban divide, but also by consciously deferring from the debilitating rhetoric of previous ‘immigrant policies’, and instead focusing on agricultural productivity, small-scale food producers and sustainable food strategies. Such exhortations to bridge between philosophical and material polarities, however, have not come without conceptual and practical challenges, something this paper aims to subsume and open up to debate.
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- Mangold, Mikael, 1982, et al.
(author)
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Building ownership, renovation investments, and energy performance - A study of multi-family dwellings in Gothenburg
- 2018
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In: Sustainability. - : MDPI AG. - 2071-1050. ; 10:5
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The European building stock was renewed at a rapid pace during the period 1950-1975. In many European countries, the building stock from this time needs to be renovated, and there are opportunities to introduce energy efficiency measures in the renovation process. Information availability and increasingly available analysis tools make it possible to assess the impact of policy and regulation. This article describes methods developed for analyzing investments in renovation and energy performance based on building ownership and inhabitant socio-economic information developed for Swedish authorities, to be used for the Swedish national renovations strategy in 2019. This was done by analyzing measured energy usage and renovation investments made during the last 30 years, coupled with building specific official information of buildings and resident area characteristics, for multi-family dwellings in Gothenburg (N = 6319). The statistical analyses show that more costly renovations lead to decreasing energy usage for heating, but buildings that have been renovated during the last decades have a higher energy usage when accounting for current heating system, ownership, and resident socio-economic background. It is appropriate to include an affordability aspect in larger renovation projects since economically disadvantaged groups are over-represented in buildings with poorer energy performance.
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- Brusselaers, Nicolas, 1993-
(author)
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The impact of off-site construction transport on air quality
- 2023
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Book (peer-reviewed)abstract
- While transport is inevitable in our economy and daily lives, it also engenders negative effects on the society and environment. The effects of air pollution are responsible for more than 364,200 premature deaths in Europe each year. Most urban areas still exceed the NOx and PM WHO air quality guidelines, of which a large share of pollutants is attributable to freight transport. The construction sector forms no exception, as it intrinsically strongly relies on off-site logistics activities, i.e. transports to and from sites. Although construction works lead to an urban economic uptake on the long-haul, the environmental nuisances from construction logistic (CL) activities during the works have so far been overlooked. This thesis focuses on the air quality impact of off-site construction transport, covering four main parts. First, as there is a lack of knowledge within cities on how to set construction transport demands and how to involve actors in these processes, a stakeholder framework is presented. Next, I identify the available and required transport data (and digitization possibilities) to assess the sector’s environmental impact, such as On-Board Units. Secondly, impact assessments were conducted across various construction supply chain implementations, on single-site, city-wide and national level. Hence, a methodological approach to derive construction-related vehicles from Heavy-Goods Vehicle (HGV) traffic based on algorithmic and geospatial analyses is proposed. Results indicate that construction transport represents 26.40% of total HGV traffic in the Brussels-Capital Region (BCR), generating €45,631.85 of external costs per workday, and 17.58% in Belgium (or €1.45mio per day). Subsequently, the framework was deployed to assess the transport performance of the multimodal Brussels Construction Consolidation Centre. The use of this setup can mitigate external costs by up to 59% compared to business-as-usual operations, most notably on congestion and climate change costs. However, improvements are necessary to tackle local emissions, attributable to less performant -yet ubiquitous- vessel engines. Air pollution damage costs also remain high on city level analyses, with CL inflicting €55,123.07 per month (or €2,505.59 per workday) in the BCR. A fortiori, with the growing concern on urban air quality, this raises the question of where, when and by whom the most exposure costs are inflicted. So far, the geo-temporal link between the emitting freight vehicle and its receptor densities was considered static. The third part introduces a dynamic impact-pathway approach, highlighting that PM & NO2 source impacts engender €61.604 of health costs in the BCR each day. Large differences were found on the local level compared to the traditional static approach, indicating that the proposed dynamic methodology should be used for micro-scale analyses (on link, building or neighborhood level). Striking is that vulnerable population segments such as toddlers, school children and elderly, who are more sensible to the effects of air pollution, incur 60.28% of the total health costs, although these segments represent only a quarter of the BCR population. Moreover, a strong overlap was found between the receptor’s presence (in particular children) and peak freight traffic movements. The fourth part investigates the exposure effects when off-site construction transport flows are spatiotemporally rerouted around air pollution hotspots. Although an increase in emissions is observed due to higher travelled distances and slower driving speeds, results show that the inflicted health costs can be mitigated up to 25.53%. Conclusively, this study suggests to decouple policies from absolute transport emissions and focus on the actual health impact, considering the spatiotemporal relationship of both emissions and receptors. Although tailoring a one-size-fits-all construction logistic plan can initially prove to be difficult due to the unique character of each construction site’s supply chain, the conducted studies also show that this individual complexity can be overcome by overall better integrated urban transport planning, and can ultimately lead to significant sustainability benefits.
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- Rempling, Rasmus, 1976, et al.
(author)
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Performance requirements for Swedish transport infrastructure - A pre-study of challenges and possibilities
- 2022
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In recent years, significant worldwide research has been conducted regarding the performance assessment of bridges and the concept of performance indicator has been introduced However, there are still significant discrepancies in how these indicators are obtained and used. Simultaneously, it is desirable to achieve processes and methods that are direct, i.e. that measured values are directly compared with projected values over time. This project concerns methods for verification of technical performance requirements. The feasibility study brought together interdisciplinary researchers, consultants, and entrepreneurs to gather knowledge, anchor the research agenda, and implement performance requirements. The project concludes that there is a need for a “Holistic multi-parameter verification/validation system” that relies on the knowledge gained in structural health monitoring research.
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