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Age-friendly Urban Living Environment and Quality of Public Space
Get PDFDue to the corona crisis and its consequences for the target group 65+, the term autonomy and self-determination in old age was assigned a further great meaning and is becoming extremely important. 43 percent of corona deaths in Austria are residents of retirement and nursing homes. Mental illnesses as a result, caused by isolation, such as restrictions on going out and visiting by others and the fear of dying alone. All of these are factors that drastically reduce the demand for the traditional nursing home as a residence for the 65+ target group. And still, we are right in the middle of the age shift due to demographic change, which increase the need for adaptation of the living environment. The over 65-year-old population in Europe is forecast to increase by an average of up to 55% by 2050.
Housing in connection with the urban environment is an essential factor to remain autonomous.Housing must not be considered in isolation, but in context. Here, not only one's own home plays an important role, but also public space and open space. This paper will use the research survey of 307 people of the 65+ target group living in Graz to investigate what conditions need to be met in order to create an age-friendly district where people 65+ can live autonomously. Questions were asked in the areas of digitalisation, social life, infrastructure and mobility, in relation to habit and relevance. 86% would not think of changing their residence, the idea of leaving one's own home to become dependent is not widely accepted. Here, the public space in the immediate vicinity of the housing situation is a decisive factor because it is a place of social interaction. A place where collective life is created. Loneliness in old age is often accompanied by the lack of accessibility to public spaces. How should public space be designed for the daily walk? What distances are manageable for daily errands? Living in connection with the external context, such as a barrier-free accessible green space, is important for over 95 percent of the target group. The daily route must be barrier-free and easily manageable. Infrastructure, mobility and public space play a major role here. Homes and their associated open spaces must have alternative concepts to strengthen connections and promote community. Using the survey results as a foundation for a senior-friendly city, this paper looks at factors for a better quality of life. In view of demographic change, urban development must go hand in hand with the requirements of public space. Based on the survey a principle recommendation for the transformation of public space are suggested. It means high-quality designed public spaces in combination with easily accessible, barrier-free mobility and infrastructure
ICT Usage to Improve Efficiency in the City of Johannesburg Public Transportation System
Get PDFInformation communication simplifies the way of living as everyone is updated with everything happening around them. With technology, information distribution becomes more efficient and convenient, and everyone could have access to the same information which on most occasions is accurate. Globally, developed countries have implemented different techniques in information dissemination for public transport through technology which today these technologies are adopted in public transport everywhere in the world including developing countries. South Africa is a developing country that has numureous public transportation systems for commuting and with the City of Johannesburg (COJ) having all forms of public transportation available in the country. Currently, the city has various forms of public transport including both formal and informal public transportation such as ride-share services (uber and taxify), Bus Rapid Transit system (BRT) known as Rea Vaya, High-Speed Trains (HST) known as Gautrain system and traditional public transport systems (mini-bus taxis, Putco Bus, metro rail). This paper seeks to identify whether the high usage of ICT could assist to integrate both formal and informal public transport systems through different dynamics to deliver sustainable and convinience public transportation systems. The study adopted a case study research design and a mixed method approach that facilitated the gathering and analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data from the public transport officials and commuters. Statistical, content and document analysis were used to glean more information. Preliminary results indicated that Innovative formal public transportation such as Gautrain system, Rea Vaya bus, uber and taxify deployed the usage of ICT which makes commuters to be informed with the whereabouts of the innovative public transportation, however, commuters still struggle with convinient movement in and around the city due to numerous factors. Consequently, informal public transport such as mini-buses (taxis) which transport 60% of commuters daily in and around the city does not have the usage of ICT in any form but can be efficient at certain times and can also be frastruating at some times as there is no form of communication. The implications of the study indicate that the city has the high availability of public transportation which is disjoint from each other affecting reliabilty and efficiency for commuting as there is lack of formal information communication within these different public transportation systems as all of them are interested in benefiting individually. The study recommends a development of an integrated online application which will provide information on both formal and informal public transpotation plartforms in the City of Johannesburg for commuters to be able to be informed of the availability of public transport in the City for Johannesburg 24hours for conviniency. Further, this app could assist commuters to identify the movement of the innovative formal public transport in-real time to create seamless travelling if necessary, for commuters. With efficient and integrated public transport system in the city will result in more usage of public transportation
Performance of Urban Agriculture in Tokyo: a Geospatial Perspective of the Food-Water-Energy Nexus
Get PDFUrban agriculture plays a role in modern food systems to reduce transportation energy, improve local production for local consumption, and so on. However, the demand for local food, the supply of farmland, and even the attitudes of farmers may vary with the process of urbanization as well as the urban structure of cities. This is significant particularly in Asian megacities such as Tokyo, where the built-up areas have mostly spread to suburbs along rail lines and expanded outward from train stations on topographic and historical fundamentals. Furthermore, urban agriculture in Tokyo is facing strong pressure from urban development, the aging of farmers, and depopulation. Few previous studies have discussed the performance of urban agriculture in a megalopolis like Tokyo based on detailed evidence.
The aim of this study was to clarify the relationship of food, water and energy in Tokyo through input-output analysis ofresource use and vegetable production. We created a database of water and energy resource inputsfor greenhouses, fertilizers, and pesticides, etc., for farming and vegetable production. We quantitatively calculated the input-output efficiency of energy and water resources per unit of food production in the Tokyo metropolitan area and visualized regional characteristics by hierarchical cluster analysis.
We found that Tokyo produced 75,566t of vegetables per year, or an average of about 5.5kg per capita for its 13.8 million population, with 426.1TJ of energy consumed,especially in greenhouses and manufacturing compost, and 8.7 ML of water, especially in manufacturing phosphorus fertilizer. With cluster analysis identified four types of urban agriculture in terms of environmental load: “lowenvironmental load,”“medium environmentalload,”“highwaterload,” and “highenergyload.” In summary, the closer to the CBD, the more intensive the agriculture type in the sense of environmentally burden, due to the impacts of urbanization; the central part of the Tama area, with more open space for agriculture, shows moderate consumption of energy and water; and the farmlands in western Tama far from the CBD are less intensive and often cultivated with low environmental load.
These findings suggest that the conservation and promotion of urban agriculture in Tokyo should consider geospatial characteristics. As land prices rise, could become more intensive, meanwhile, with a possible transition from “low environmentalload” to “mediumenvironmental load” and from “mediumenvironmental load” to “high water load” or “high energy load” to environment. This is a challenge for urban policymakers to manage the synergistic effects and conflicts in agriculture-inclusive urban development
Post-Earthquake Quality of Life: Assessing the Bam Recovery Process
Get PDFThis paper examines the recovery process of the Bam (earthquake hits on December 26, 2003) on the survivors’ quality of life after 17 years. Our purpose is to explore the main root causes of the success or failure of the Bam recovery process. The results of this research could be effective in the success of the future disaster recovery process. For this reason, a self-report questionnaire designed to collect data on socio-demographic attributes, quality of life, and earthquake effects and its recovery rate from Bam’s citizens’ point of view. Cross-sectional data were collected during the summer of 2020 in Bam city by the snowball sampling method. The total sample comprised 150 of 164 (91.4% response rate) citizens who lived in Bam at least one year before the earthquake (and until now). Three analysis methods were applied, first descriptive statistics, second a statistical test (one-sample t-test), and third Ishikawa diagram. The results show that the Bam recovery process was not successful and Bam recovered only 54% in quality of life dimensions. The research hypothesis (H0: The recovery process of Bam city has improved citizens’ quality of life) has been rejected based on the findings. Finally, in the last part of the analysis, eight main causes have been determined for the Bam recovery’s failure in increasing the quality of life. Although failure causes are in both management and physical dimensions, it seems that the physical causes are also rooted in the management system of Bam city
Sustainable Smart City – the Path of Vienna
Get PDFUrban development faces numerous challenges in the 21st century and a central task is the sustainable and liveable design of the city. Can the concept of a Smart City be a tool to making cities more liveable and sustainable? To find out, we chose a biographical method to analyse the steps towards a successful Smart City and to better understand the structures behind it. We combine the innovation biography method with a process model from sustainability governance research, namely Steurer's sustainability governance model and apply them to Vienna’s Smart City, especially the preparation of the Vienna Smart City framework strategy (Steurer & Trattnigg, 2010). On the one hand, this article shows that a transfer of the innovation biography method to urban research can generate deeper insights on urban development processes in general. On the other hand, the approach chosen can show that Vienna integrates the sustainable urban design into the process of Smart City design. So the smart and sustainable city design, often called for in theoretical contributions, is practised in Vienna. Due to its reconstructive character, the biographical method has revealed that it is possible to govern sustainability by using Smart City as an umbrella strategy, as long as one manages it in an integrated and holistic way, recognises trends and is able to acquire and use research funds effectively and efficiently.
The knowledge gained from the new method for urban and Smart City research is twofold. Firstly, the transfer of the method previously developed in the human sciences and subsequently for organisations, institutions and products and services also works in urban research. Second, the innovation biography provides in-depth insights into the process towards the Smart City and the stakeholders involved. The use of the biographical method highlights the relevance of good governance in terms of interdisciplinary cooperation on the one hand and high political commitment on the other through the micro-level perspective and is also sensitive enough to highlight the importance of an appropriate narrative in and for the process towards the Smart City
The Role of Zoning in Cross-Border Industrial Land Transition: Lessons from Tokyo Metropolitan Area
Get PDFTokyo Metropolitan Area (TMA) is one of the most developed urban regions in the world. It consists of about 200 municipalities across Tokyo prefecture and the adjacent prefectures of Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba in the Kanto Plain. The region has witnessed drastic socio-economic transformation during the last half century. As the growth of TMA and deepening of globalization, secondary industrial sectors in the inner city have kept decreasing while moving to the metropolitan suburbs and the suburban municipalities have benefited from inflow of industries for local jobs and revenue. Meanwhile, the cross-border industrial development has caused massive land use change, however some of the constructions were unplanned in terms of zoning. So, the questions arise on how it could happen in a developed country like Japan which has a mature land use planning system, what were the driving forces under the surface, and what was the impact has caused in the sense of sustainable development.
As a common policy instrument in urbanisation and land use management, zoning plays a key role in regulating the socio-environmental impact of land use change, especially cross-border industrial land transition. However, implementation and the effects of zoning may extensively depend on supply and demand in land market as well as from stakeholders’ collaboration. It is also difficult to manage a zoning system at different scales initiated for different policy goals. Hence, this study aims to investigate the industrial land transition and the adequacy of industrial land location in the suburb of TMA by using temporal-spatial analysis of industrial and demographic statistics to clarify the gaps and driving forces between zoning and land use
Typologien räumlicher Auswirkungen der Digitalisierung
Get PDFIm urbanen Zeitalter, in dem bereits die Hälfte der Weltbevölkerung in Städten lebt, aber auch vor dem Hintergrund der Klimakrise ist die Gestaltung der digitalen, räumlichen Transformation der Städte von besonderer Bedeutung. So stellt das Konzept der Smart City im Zuge der Digitalisierung einen Wendepunkt der Entwicklung und Weiterentwicklung, bzw. Transformation von Städten dar. Dies ist von besonderer Bedeutung, da sich die Digitalisierung mit immer kürzeren Innovationszyklen und ihren vielschichtigen Folgen rapide ausdehnt und weitreichende, teilweise unerwartete Veränderungen verursacht. Die stadtrelevanten Disziplinen – wie Städtebau, Stadtplanung, Landschaftsarchitektur oder Raumplanung – sind mit neuen Schwierigkeiten konfrontiert, die räumlichen Auswirkungen auf unterschiedliche Raumkategorien zu erfassen und zu planen, obwohl die Folgen kaum abgesehen werden können.
Das Smart-City-Konzept, mit den entsprechenden technologischen Systemen der Informationsverarbeitung, wird zunehmend, global eingesetzt (Roland Berger 2019), um den aktuellen urbanen Herausforderungen, wie Klimakrise, urbane Hitzinseln, Abfallgewältigung, Versiegelung oder Zersiedelung um nur einige zu nennen, zu begegnen. Doch durch Individualisierung in der Netzwerkgesellschaft und durch die massive Ausweitung der Nutzung digitaler Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (IKTs) in allen Lebens- und Arbeitsbereichen entstehen vermehrt sichtbare Transformationsdynamiken in Folge der Digitalisierung, die sich im Raum abbilden und diesen wesentlich verändern. (Soike et al. 2019, Radulova-Stahmer 2019, Engelke et al. 2019) Globale IKT-Unternehmen bieten zunehmend digitale Lösungen für die Städte der Zukunft, ohne dabei stadt-räumliche Konsequenzen zu berücksichtigen. Dabei sind die räumlichen Auswirkungen digitaler Technologien schon heute zu beobachten. Es gilt die räumlichen Risiken zu vermeiden und gleichzeitig die Chancen der Digitalsierung für den Stadtraum zu nutzen.
Wenn verschiedene Technologien im Quartier eingesetzt werden, dann unterscheiden sich die Stadträume in ihrer Wahrnehmung, Flächenverteilung, Nutzung, Dimensionierung aber auch in ihrer physischen Gestalt von konventionellen Quartiersräume ohne den Einsatz digitaler Technologien. Es wird folgenden Fragen nachgegangen: Wie verändert Digitalisierung den physischen Stadtraum? Auf welche Art und Weise wirken Technologien auf den Stadtraum? Welche Muster der räumlichen Raumwirksamkeit von Technologien lassen sich erkennen und welche Typologien können gebildet werden
CITYFOOD - Upscaled Urban Aquaponics and the Food-Water-Energy Nexus
Get PDFTo address the most pressing global problems of sustainable development, the UN formulated 17 goals in 2015 (UN, 2015). The current review shows that while progress has been made, efforts need to be significantly increased to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) (UN, 2020) and therefore a “Decade of Action” was proclaimed to fulfil the 2030 Agenda (UN, 2021). This call by the United Nations was taken up by the German Federal Government through the revision of its sustainability strategy, which now contains six transformation areas, including the circular economy as well as sustainable agricultural and food systems (BReg, 2021).
One food production technology that belongs to these two transformation areas is aquaponics, the coupled production of fish and plants (Naegel, 1977; Baganz et al., 2021a). Given the rising importance of urban agriculture (Lohrberg et al., 2015), the project CITYFOOD posed the question of whether and to what extent it makes sense to bring aquaponics into cities (Baganz et al., 2020; Proksch & Baganz, 2020) The urban Food-Water-Energy (FWE) Nexus describes the interlinkages and interdependencies between food, water and energy in coupled systems in an urban context, whereas all three sectors have also strong impacts on climate, environment and land use (Lehmann, 2018). Within the FWE-Nexus concept, we applied a food-centric approach to reduce the complexity of the connections between these three resource sectors, taking Berlin as a case study.
Food. The starting point is Berlin’s demand: with a population of about 3.75 million in 2020, approximately 21 kilotonnes (kt) of freshwater fish and fish products, 108 kt of fresh tomatoes and tomato products, and 27 kt of lettuce are needed per year to cover the demand, including the non-marketable portion, e.g. waste from fish processing. To estimate the environmental footprint, we used the results of a work conducted as part of the CITYFOOD project, which modelled aquaponic facilities with a greenhouse size of 5000 m² and year-round vegetable production for a life cycle assessment (LCA) (Körner et al., 2021). The gross area for the entire facility of about 6000 m² results from increasing the sum of the aquaculture and greenhouse net areas by 10%.
Different combinations of fish (tilapia, catfish) and plants (tomato, lettuce) were studied, resulting in four variants of aquaponic facilities that differ considerably in production parameters, e.g. fish stocking density. To enforce the aquaponic principle for the total demand of the city and balance the fish production with the vegetable production so that there is no excess production or unnecessary effluent on either side, the following proportion of preselected aquaponic combinations have been calculated: Catfish/Tomato 56%, Catfish/Lettuce 13%, Tilapia/Tomato 31%, and Tilapia/Lettuce 0%. This makes it possible to achieve the required annual yield with 370 facilities on a total area of 224 hectares (Baganz et al., 2021b).
Water. A key feature of aquaponics is the dual use of water, which is used first to raise the fish and then to irrigate and – at least in part – for plant nutrition (Kloas et al., 2015). Compared to the water footprint of the German market mix for fresh tomatoes and lettuce (LCA impact category water consumption), aquaponic production of both vegetables for Berlin would save about 2.0 billion cubic metres of water. In terms of the LCA impact category of water scarcity, about 1.4 billion cubic metres of water would be saved, especially as a significant proportion of the tomatoes consumed in Berlin are produced in the Spanish region of Almeria, where the rapid development of greenhouse agriculture has affected the availability of groundwater resources (Castro et al., 2019).
Energy. The LCA has shown that the energetic disadvantages of greenhouse production in Berlin, especially in winter, compared to southern European cultivation areas can be compensated by e.g. thermal coupling of rooftop aquaponics with the waste heat of a supermarket’s cooling system. But even then, the energy savings from upscaled urban aquaponics are not particularly high.
Conclusion. It could be shown that aquaponics can make a relevant contribution to sustainability in Berlin. An essential prerequisite for this year-round scenario is building integration for thermal coupling needed in the cool season and the heating demand can be significantly reduced by the application of low-energy greenhouses. We identified significant aquaponic variables which influence the three sectors of the FWE nexus directly or via causal chains and which thus are useful for a designer or operator of an AP to control its environmental impacts. We further discussed the impacts of production-location, dietary shifts, and trade-offs on the FWE nexus
Planungsbezogene Stadtklimatologie: Werkzeuge und Maßnahmen auf unterschiedlichen räumlichen und zeitlichen Skalen
Get PDFIn Österreich macht sich die Klimakrise von Jahr zu Jahr stärker bemerkbar. Auch bei starken Klima-schutzmaßnahmen sind deren Auswirkungen bereits spürbar und unvermeidbar (APCC, 2014). Vor allem das gehäufte Auftreten von heißen Tagen und Hitzewellen stellt für die Bevölkerung nicht mehr nur eine reine Komfortfrage, sondern mitunter ein ernstzunehmendes Gesundheitsrisiko dar (Hutter et al., 2017; Haas et al., 2014). Eine strukturelle Anpassung an die bereits stattfindenden Folgen des Klimawandels als komplementäre Maßnahme zu konsequenten Klimaschutzmaßnahmen (Marx, 2017) ist demnach dringend.
Um Lebensqualität, Wohlbefinden und Gesundheit von Menschen in Städten auch zukünftig zu sichern, müssen Stadtentwicklungsprozesse schon heute im Einklang mit stadtklimatologischen Faktoren gestaltet und Maßnahmen zur Reduktion der thermischen Belastungen und der Erhöhung des Sommerkomforts getroffen werden. Instrumente, die dazu beitragen, die Ausprägungen klimatischer und klimaökologischer Faktoren im urbanen Raum zu erfassen, um sie im nächsten Schritt durch planerische Maßnahmen gezielt positiv zu beeinflussen, spielen demnach eine große Rolle in der klimasensiblen Stadtplanung und in der Anpassung an den Klimawandel. Dabei gilt es je nach Planungsebene – von der gesamtstädtischen Ebene über die Quartiersebene bis hin zu einzelnen Plätzen, Straßenzügen oder Bauplätzen – unterschiedliche stadtklimatische Phänomene und Fragestellungen zu berücksichtigen. Methoden, Werkzeuge, Anpassungsstrategien und konkrete Maßnahmen variieren demnach abhängig von der Skalenebene.
Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, Einblicke und praktische Erfahrungsberichte zur Zusammenarbeit mit Städten und Gemeinden sowie dem interdisziplinären Austausch mit den Fachbereichen Stadtplanung, Landschaftsplanung, Architektur etc. in der Gestaltung klimaresilienter Städte zu geben. Dabei wird auf die jeweiligen stadtklimatologschen Informationsgrundlagen und Werkzeuge und die Entwicklung von Maßnahmen und Strategien auf unterschiedlichen räumlichen und zeitlichen Skalen eingegangen
The Effect of the Pandemic of the Use of Public Spaces in Hungary
Get PDFThe first wave of the coronavirus epidemic in Hungary held in 2020 from March until April. During this period the restrictions not only to the shops opening hours came into force but also for the use of public spaces. The most settlements in Hungary had closed their public spaces and parks from the local population, thus preventing the mass spread of the epidemic. However the experiences have showed that most people against the restrictions has used in the same way actively the local public spaces as before. Therefore the research presents how the people has used the public spaces before and after the coronaviros epidemic in Hungary. And when will they use them again and how often after the pass of the epidemic. Besides that what they expect from the public spaces after the pass of the coronavirus epidemic