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Assessing the Role and Capacity of Water Management Organizations for Ensuring Delta Food Security in Bangladesh
Full text linkThe coastal zone, consisting of one-third country\u27s area, is the most climate-vulnerable region of Bangladesh. The country has invested significantly in coastal zone through the construction and rehabilitation of polders. Despite vast opportunities, land productivity in the polders is very low due to poor water governance and management. To improve in-polder water management, the responsibility of operation and maintenance of the polder water infrastructure has been transferred to Water Management Organizations (WMOs) since 2001. WMOs are currently voluntary organizations but are very important for micro-level agricultural water management. A study was conducted in 2017 and 2018 in a medium saline polder; with a major focus on organizational behaviour: hierarchy in decision-making, transparency, financial accountability, leadership, internal communication, and motivational incentives of the WMOs. The data were collected through a structured questionnaire from 192 respondents of randomly selected eight Water Management Groups (WMGs – the lowest tier of WMOs), out of 40 WMGs of the polder. The results revealed that the WMGs operations are not fully participatory in principle yet. Even the transparency, financial accountability, leadership, and internal communications within WMGs are not strong enough to take the organizational responsibility to address future challenges in food security of the climate-vulnerable polder communities. Improving drainage through efficient water management showed a yield gain of at least 1.5 t/ha in the wet season only. In addition, improved drainage fosters sustainable year-round cropping with high-yielding, high-value and nutrition-rich crops with 2 to 3 times higher productivity than the traditional cropping system. Therefore, investment in water governance particularly in improving drainage in the polders could be a major game-changer in sustaining the food security of the climate-vulnerable polder communities of Bangladesh. The study identified the knowledge gap as a significant concern that demands the need for capacity building of the WMOs
Inclusive Participation in Integrated Watershed Development Programmes: Insights from Bundelkhand, Central India: Lessons from Integrated Watershed Development Programs in Central India
Full text linkWatershed Development Programmes (WDP) in India primarily focus on improving ecological landscapes in semi-arid regions, despite policy guidelines that call attention to improving community-level participation. Local level hierarchies based on caste and gender inhibit equal participation for all in decision-making, access, and distribution of programme benefits. This paper presents evidence from drought-affected rural Bundelkhand, in Central India to critically examine how participation is practiced at the ground level. We find that systemic efforts are needed to make participation meaningful for all and to achieve the twin goals of social and environmental development through WDP
Reconfiguring Ground: Temporalities and Properties of Substance
Full text linkThis article explores the interplay between essential and accidental properties of substance as social and environmental interactions within the evolving urban landscape of Amsterdam’s Nieuw-West. Tracing these transformations from peat bog to polder, through the 1930s Extension Plan, its mid-20th-century construction, and its present-day form, the article examines how land construction and inhabitation shape environmental and human histories, written through geological, ecological, built, and social taskspaces. Each iteration of figure-ground reconfigures relationships, influencing the intersecting and symbiotic actions of taskspaces and urban/natural processes.
Drawing on Aristotle’s metaphysics, Ingold’s deep surface, and the temporality of landscape, this article examines how taskspaces—embodied actions of habitation (urbanization, wear, maintenance, adaptation) and environmental processes (weather, ecology, soil)—function as symbiotic relational forces affecting the climate, situating locally our planetary condition. These interactions reside within the dynamic tension between process and substance, where material formations and social structures emerge through time. It traces Nieuw-West’s foundations from reclamation and extraction to its hybrid formation as a garden city and modernist suburban structure, highlighting the ongoing tensions between social and ecological displacement. By grounding the epistemology of substance, the article reveals narratives of fragmentation—both ecological and social—embedded in urban development.
Critiquing the ongoing urban densification that extends Nieuw-West’s early commodification and imposed efficiencies, the article instead advocates for a dynamic approach—one that reconnects built and natural environments through collective social practices. By reimagining social contracts as continuums of care and ownership, it highlights the terrestrial, strengthening relationships that reactivate collective environmental imagination, bridging ecological and social disconnections, and enhancing both resilience and agency
Influence of Wood Density on Backwater Rise due to Wood Accumulations
Full text linkThe presence of wood accumulations in rivers can trigger the blockage of natural or artificial hydraulic infrastructures, especially in Amazonian rivers, causing backwater effects or variations in geomorphology. One of the factors affecting the backwater rise is the arrangement of logs in the accumulations, which depends on their buoyancy and can alter the compactness of the accumulation. In turn, the buoyancy of the wood depends on its density, which can take values from 250 kg/m3 to values greater than 1000 kg/m3, depending on the tree species, the state of decomposition and the moisture content.This research article summarizes the results of the study of the effect of wood density on backwater rise and shape of wood accumulation based on simulations in an experimental flume at variable flow rates and bed slopes. The backwater rise was generated by using a rack and to simulate the logs, artificial logs with different densities were used.The results of the reproducibility tests showed a mean relative standard error of 3.74% in the measurements of the relative backwater rise. The main findings indicate that the backwater effect increases with the density of wood logs, in that sense, a variation in the equation for the estimation of backwater rise is proposed (Schalko et al., 2019a) including density as a variable. On the other hand, it was observed that the compactness of the wood accumulations increased with the density of the wood logs, i.e., the accumulations were longer and with lower height when they were composed of lighter logs and vice versa
A Geospatial Approach to Modeling Airspace Risk Factors
Full text linkThe airspace environment is a system that is expected to continue increasing in complexity with the projected growth of air traffic volumes and the introduction of new types of air vehicles and operations such as uncrewed aircraft. This increase in complexity brings a need for investigating and developing new models of airspace environments as a means of better understanding and managing their constituent parts. This paper presents a methodology for creating a geospatial model of complex airspace environments which can be used to study any geospatially distributed entity that is part of these systems. The methodology leverages Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS), a Geographic Information Systems framework often utilized in the fields of geography and urban planning. The usefulness of the model is demonstrated using two case studies investigating the risk factors associated with weather and mid-air collisions in an airspace region of interest. Since such a model needs to be able to work for any type of air vehicle and airspace region in a fully three-dimensional model capable of performing time-varying analysis in a computationally efficient manner, a rudimentary geospatial airspace risk model was also developed which satisfies these requirements. Weather radar data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and air traffic data from the OpenSky Network were collected and integrated in the geospatial model and the geospatial airspace risk model was used to calculate the risk of collisions for geospatially distributed points in the airspace for four scenarios of increasing airspace complexity. The results from these four scenarios demonstrate that the proposed methodology can be used to study the risk associated with spatially distributed risk factors for different points in the airspace for any type of air vehicle and airspace region of interest in a fully three-dimensional model that can perform time-varying analysis in a computationally efficient manner.
Reconfiguring the Soft Operation Field: Architecture of Collective Metabolisms
Full text linkThe evolution of architecture calls for a redefinition of materialism, urging a departure from deterministic systems towards non-linear causality and systems far from equilibrium. This entails recognising the dissolution of human-inhuman boundaries and advocating for tactile and sensory bodies that initiate metabolic changes by penetrating environments. Isabelle Stengers critiques the tendency to frame thought within pre-existing planes, labelling it as stupidity, and advocates for an architecture that proliferates rather than condemns.
With this article, we propose to explore architecture’s singular conditions through the concept of trans-scalability, akin to transitioning from micro-subatomic to macro scales. We look at what enables transitions between scales, agents, fields and the realms of theory and practice. Additionally, we scrutinise how spatial construction practices, influenced by non-cartographic scale considerations and engaged with micro-subatomic dimensions, can impact contemporary architectural practices. To illustrate this, we present an alternative approach to transscalability through the work of Rachel Armstrong. With this new material reading, our aim is to view architecture as an interface between the world’s multiplicities and to explore how an architectural practice more attuned to the intersecting dynamics of various fluxes can be realised. With this approach, we aim to contribute to perceiving the world through its unstable and temporary material dimensions, thereby resisting stupidity
Where Lies the Problem? On the Determination of Belief, Political-Libidinal Proletarianisation and Alter-Automation
Full text linkThe article addresses the relationality of automation and the political-libidinal literacy of citizens. After contextualising the problem of reactive subjectivity in the Global Northwest of a perpetuating Enlightenment dialectics, the role of technology in the political-libidinal mereology is revaluated. Drawing from Bernard Stiegler’s notion of tertial retention and Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic theory, the milieu is reconstituted as a plane of transversal desire production and collective anticipation. In times of intensifying multiscalar automation, a lacking attunement to surroundings and responsibility, and general proletarianisation, the article argues for the localisation and sense-ablisation of problems to produce didactic environments for trans-individuative politics. Drawing from an ethics of care as a relational mode of thinking-acting, acts of maintenance are investigated in their potential to modulate the increasing imbalance of investment and passivity in urban subjects to foster de-proletarianisation. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, processes of un-doing and re-doing are argued to deterritorialise and schizophrenise over-concretised automatons, opening up material conditions to participatory, creative appropriation and repair (collectively referred to as ‘alter automation‘) to reintroduce critical reflection and political negotiation into our milieus
Transmodality, or What it Means to Have Intelligence
Full text linkFootprint 36 features eight contributions that each in their own way examines how the discipline of architecture may contribute to resisting stupidity and relearning how to think by moving beyond disaffected apocalyptic forms of reasoning, imagining and creating. In the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction, we propose to reframe the concept of stupidity as the inability to discern between the singular (remarkable) and the ordinary (trivial), and not to confuse it with a failure to offer the ‘right’ solution (optimisation). Following Henri Bergson’s understanding of problematisation, the concept of stupidity that we collectively examine is thus understood as the incapacity to properly determine a problem. Its near synonym ‘idiocy’ by definition prevents us from seeing beyond our narrow interests and ready-made solutions, thereby blocking environmental awareness and the possibility of trans-individuation, that is, of living and transforming collectively
Beyond technical barriers: enhancing onboard safety through human-machine interaction management in ammonia-powered ships
Full text linkAs the maritime industry advances towards decarbonization, ammonia is emerging as a promising alternative fuel. However, its use introduces significant safety risks to operating personnel arising from tasks inside ship compartments, such as engine or fuel preparation rooms. Given the acute toxicity of ammonia and the effects of space confinement, reducing the personnel risks to conventional levels through technical mitigation alone poses a considerable challenge. The reliance on mitigation of leak consequences, as emphasized in current regulations for ammonia, raises ethical concerns as well. The present work seeks to explore a broader perspective on onboard safety by examining both the direct and indirect factors influencing personnel risk during interactions with hazardous processes. By analyzing the role of human-machine interactions (HMI) in ship operations, the study offers insights into how HMI management can significantly reduce accident probabilities. Our discussion underscores HMI management as a pivotal strategy for mitigating ammonia-related risks, a contrast to the approaches used for conventional, non-toxic marine fuels. This paper proposes a framework for implementing an effective HMI management strategy, highlighting the benefits and complexities involved.
One sentence summary: This study highlights the need for risk reduction in toxic spaces, explains why increasing ventilation and/or adding more detectors is not an effective solution, and proposes an alternative strategy
Is air/high-speed rail integration the panacea to curb the impact of aviation on climate change? The case of Frankfurt Airport
Full text linkThis paper revisits the concept of air/high-speed rail (HSR) integration in the specific case of congested airports, in which airport slots for (super) short-haul flights are freed by replacing them with high-speed trains. Freed slots are then likely allocated to longer flights, which leads to an increase in GHG emissions induced by flights from/to the airport into question. Such an unexpected effect is investigated through the case of Frankfurt Airport, where the HSR infrastructure was designed to connect smoothly with the airport. The ex post investigation isolates the time window during which airport capacity is stable. It confirms the increase in aviation climate impact. This illustrates that air/HSR integration is not always a relevant solution to curb the impact of aviation on climate change