You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book presents the results of a multi-annual project with sustainable Living Labs in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. Living Labs – as initiated by the authors – have proved to be very promising research, design, co-creation and communication facilities for the development and implementation of sustainable innovations in the home. The book provides an inspiring introduction to both the methodology and business modelling for the Living Lab facilities. Understanding daily living at home is key to designing products and services that support households in their transition to more sustainable lifestyles. This book not only explores new ways of gaining insights int...
Residential buildings have continuously improved in energy efficiency, partly as a consequence of the introduction of energy regulations in many countries. Although better thermal properties and systems efficiency have lowered energy consumption for space heating in recent decades, substantial differences in energy consumption in similar dwellings are still being observed. These differences in consumption are thought to be caused by differences in occupancy patterns, by quality of construction and by rebound effects.This research addresses the effect of energy performance regulations and occupant behaviour on energy consumption for space and water heating in dwellings built after the introduction of the energy performance regulations in the Netherlands. The results of this research show that improving the energy efficiency of buildings alone is not enough to decrease that energy consumption.
Construction will always be needed, and will always consume resources. In developing an approach for assessing sustainable building, the Three Step Strategy (in the Netherlands named Trias Ecologica) has proven to be useful. This title looks at this Strategy.
Consuming over 40% of total primary energy, the built environment is in the centre of worldwide strategies and measures towards a more sustainable future. To provide resilient solutions, a simple optimisation of individual technologies will not be sufficient. In contrast, whole system thinking reveals and exploits connections between parts. Each system interacts with others on different scales (materials, components, buildings, cities) and domains (ecology, economy and social). Whole-system designers optimize the performance of such systems by understanding interconnections and identifying synergies. The more complete the design integration, the better the result. In this book, the reader will find the proceedings of the 2016 Sustainable Built Environment (SBE) Regional Conference in Zurich. Papers have been written by academics and practitioners from all continents to bring forth the latest understanding on systems thinking in the built environment.
Architecture and the urban are connected to challenges around violence, security, race and ideology, spectacle and data. The first volume of this handbook extensively explored these oppressive roles. This second volume illustrates that escaping the corporatized and bureaucratized orders of power, techno-managerial and consumer-oriented capitalist economic models is more urgent and necessary than ever before. Herein lies the political role of architecture and urban space, including the ways through which they can be transformed and alternative political realities constituted. The volume explores the methods and spatial practices required to activate the political dimension and the possibility...
This volume contains the proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Sustainability in Energy and Buildings, SEB12, held in Stockholm, Sweden, and is organized by KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in partnership with KES International. The International Conference on Sustainability in Energy and Buildings focuses on a broad range of topics relating to sustainability in buildings but also encompassing energy sustainability more widely. Following the success of earlier events in the series, the 2012 conference includes the themes Sustainability, Energy, and Buildings and Information and Communication Technology, ICT. The SEB’12 proceedings include invited participation and paper submissions across a broad range of renewable energy and sustainability-related topics relevant to the main theme of Sustainability in Energy and Buildings. Applicable areas include technology for renewable energy and sustainability in the built environment, optimization and modeling techniques, information and communication technology usage, behavior and practice, including applications.
In the context of shifting regulatory approaches and changing provision structures in many Western rental housing systems, the notion of competition between social and private rental housing has received increasing attention from practitioners and academic researchers. This thesis explores and theorises the concept of inter-tenure competition in order to advance understanding of what it means in local and national market realities, as well as in business and political practices. Results indicate that competition in mixed markets is a complex matter, much of which is explained by the distinctive properties of social and private rental services. Inter-tenure competition is shown to be the interplay of structural and political conditions, individual and organisational business goals, and the perceptions and strategic decisions of both providers and consumers. The results suggest that the degree of competition relates to specific points in time and is mainly a question of which rental market segment one is looking at.
Residents know exactly what their neighbourhood is like. House-hunters, on the other hand, must find out for themselves about the intangible social quality of a neighbourhood. As a simple rule of thumb, neighbourhood reputation can offer them an assessment of neighbourhood quality. In this research, regression analyses are applied to test whether neighbourhood reputations are being used as a proxy measure for neighbourhood quality in residential mobility choices and establishing the price of homes. The empirical results go beyond answering this research question. What price, for instance, do residents place on liveability? Why does urban restructuring so often fail to change the social make-up of an area, despite a marked increase in owner-occupation? Why does gentrification appear to emerge spontaneously, while deliberate attempts to gentrify an area often fail? How does a neighbourhood acquire that ‘golden edge’? This book also provides the answers to the above policy-oriented questions.
The Meaning of Dwelling Features. Conceptual and Methodological Issues relates the research areas of housing preferences and the meaning of a dwelling with each other and with aspects of the means-end approach as applied in marketing research. It results in a conceptual and methodological framework for studying the meaning of preferences for dwelling features. These features are viewed as functional for achieving the goals and values that people pursue. The meaning of dwelling features lies in these functional relationships. The model presented in this study therefore relates preferences for the features of a dwelling to the meaning they have for people. These relationships are called meaning structures. Meaning structures are measured by a semi-structured interviewing technique, which is an adapted version of the laddering technique for measuring means-end chains, and network methods are used for the representation and analysis of these meaning structures.
"After twenty years of sustainable building policies, the issue of environmental impact of buildings and urban environments remains. Policy makers still have difficulties addressing the ambiguous, contested and dynamic goals encapsulated in the term 'sustainable development'. How to decide between using zinc or PVC gutters, when knowledge and valuation of environmental risks of both keep changing? How can we accommodate urban growth, now that compact cities turn out to be urban heat islands?" "Greening governance identifies how policy makers can deal with these contested questions. The book draws on policy network theories that consider stakeholder interaction, negotiation and learning as co...