Thesis and Research Data Repository Leeds Beckett University
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“You’ve just got to dress it up as something different”: The changing role of Local Government Sport Development
No full textThis thesis analyses how the role and remit of local government sport development has changed since the emergence of sport development as a service area under the Conservative administration of the 1980’s. The research is distinctive as it focuses explicitly on sport development services in local authorities, an under-researched area of public policy. The methodology utilised desktop research to identify changes to structural arrangements for sport development services across 75 local authorities in the North of England. This informed the development of a Typology of Local Government Sport Development which identified the different structural models used to these services. The implications of each model on sport development policy and practice are considered, acknowledging tensions in service delivery, and identifying key drivers of provision. In addition, six local authority case studies were undertaken representing different structural arrangements and delivery models.Analysis is underpinned by a theoretical framework which combines insights from discipline areas including political science, policy studies and organisational theory. The framework predominantly draws upon theories of new institutionalism to demonstrate that local government sport development policy and practice is shaped by a combination of macro institutional pressures and agentic influences within each authority. Sport development provision is identified as ‘decentred’ due to increasing agentification of services. Public health is identified as a key driver of provision, with sport development services being strategically ‘repositioned’ to reflect this. Shifts in national sport policy combined with ongoing impacts from austerity measures has led to the ‘invisibility’ of sport development in many authorities with services marginalised into other departments or renamed to better reflect synergies with the health agenda. Changing resource dependencies and asymmetrical power relations are acknowledged within the organisation field, affecting the position of local authorities in the wider sporting landscape.The thesis encourages readers to re-think sport development – it challenges traditional notions of local government sport development and highlights the changing professionalism of sport development practitioners.</p
A novel framework for carbon-neutral building design based on the integration of blockchain, building information modelling, and life cycle assessment
No full textLack of data security and interoperability remains the major obstacles to complex carbon-neutral building design processes among large number of architects and engineers. Blockchain is a distributed ledger and allows information transactions to be managed in a decentralised and secure way. Building information modelling (BIM) can centralise all data and information in the same three-dimensional model. Life cycle optimisation can minimise embodied and operating carbon emissions during the building’s whole life span. In this context, a novel framework for carbon-neutral building design is developed and designed based on the integration of blockchain, building information modelling, and life cycle optimisation. Blockchain is adopted to keep a record of any changes in architecture design, energy system design, and carbon footprint. BIM model is used to present the latest architecture design in a threedimensional model, along with the latest information regarding energy system design and carbon footprint. Life cycle assessment is conducted to evaluate the trade-off between embodied carbon and operating carbon emissions and select appropriate parameters for architecture and energy system design. Information regarding future weather and material properties is also provided in the database. The proposed framework is tested on a real project setting to design a low-carbon industrial building. It is expected that the proposed framework can assist in designing different types of carbon-neutral buildings and achieving the Net-Zero ambition. It will provide practitioners and researchers with constructive information for the integrated use of blockchain, BIM, and life cycle assessment while creating awareness in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries.</p
Circular economy in construction: a systematic literature review of the application of material passports
No full textThe construction sector is one of the most resource-intensive and polluting industries. According to the European Union (EU), the industry accounts for over 50% of virgin resources, contributes to 35% of total waste, and emits over 12% of greenhouse gases. Under these circumstances, there is an urge for the industry to transit from a linear economy model to a circular one, whereby materials and products can be recycled and reused. To support such a paradigm shift in the sector, the EU introduced Material Passports (MPs) in 2016, through which a digitalised database inventory of materials, components, and products to be used in a building can be built. Since then, researchers have attempted to develop different ways to implement and utilise MPs. However, a systematic review of how MPs have been used to facilitate the circular economy in construction is missing. To address this knowledge gap, this paper aims at conducting a systematic literature review to examine the extent to which the MPs have been used in a building life cycle using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA) approach. Findings indicate that existing applications have primarily focused on the design and decommissioning phases of the building lifecycle; however, the operational and maintenance phase has been given scarce attention. Findings also point out the digitalised potential of MPs with other Industry 4.0 tools.</p
Potential Applications of Photovoltaic Technologies for Biomimetic Adaptive Solar Building Envelopes
No full textBuilding envelope as an interface between the outside and inside of the building serves more than its loadbearing function and has a pivotal role in regulating and saving energy. This role necessitates the adaptability of the building envelope to the surrounding environment like what natural organisms do in response to different stimuli in nature. Solar energy as one of the momentous renewable energy resources can be harvested and regulated following principles inspired by natural organisms’ strategies through the building envelope. Nowadays, photovoltaic technologies have advanced significantly and therefore could offer lots of possibilities for the design of biomimetic adaptive solar building envelopes (Bio-ASBEs). In this regard, this research’s focus lies in providing a comparative analysis between three PV technologies including crystalline silicon, perovskite, and organic solar cells in order to provide a context for their potential application for the design of Bio-ASBE</p
Learn, Unlearn and Relearn into a Sustainable Future: Sustainability Consciousness in Nigeria
No full textAfter years of speedy urbanization, population growth, and industrialization, Nigeria is now home to some of the world's environmental and natural resource problems (Dwivedi and Vajpeyi, 1995). Nigeria is faced with the twin goal of meeting socioeconomic development and ensuring environmental sustainability simultaneously. The development of a nation’s environmental policy is very much dependent on its economic level, politics, and the environmental knowledge of its citizens (Ikporukpo, 1983 & 2002). This paper emerges from an ongoing PhD research on the evaluation of environmental policies in Nigeria, the lived experiences of victims of environmental degradation in Nigeria and a better approach to the topic of sustainability consciousness within the Nigerian context. However, Nigeria has made some progress, and the overall record of accomplishment is mixed at best, and the reason for this is well known; bad governance, elevated levels of corruption, poor accountability, little or no checks and balances within the arms of government, written regulations being riddled with gaps and inconsistencies amongst policies (Goodland, 1992 & 1994). Also, environmental regulatory agencies lack funding and trained personnel, a duplication of targets and duties, public infrastructure needed to control certain environmental issues are yet to be built, difficulty to monitor small and informal firms within Nigeria, and most importantly, the political will to enforce and monitor regulations are often limited (Ikporukpo, 1983). The major research question is, “can the needs of the environment be made a priority for Nigeria with the ever-raising socio-economic issues?”. This research adopts an interpretivist phenomenological analysis approach, whereby in-depth semi-structured interviews of both actors and stakeholders of environmental degradation in Nigeria, policy makers, and decision makers in oil companies, would be used to explore and interpret these events.</p
Impact of green energy-proven technologies on the socio-economic and environmental performance of buildings- a systematic review
No full textCountries around the world are facing challenges of climate change as the conditions become more severe than normal. The onset of climate change means that green building technologies are now needed not only to reduce built environment contributions to climate change as mitigation but also required to help buildings adapt to projected climate changes as adaptation drives. Therefore, a systematic literature review was conducted on the impact of green energy-proven technologies on socioeconomic and environmental performance. A search of keywords was conducted on several databases such as Scopus and google scholar, resulting in a review of 166 journals and after screening 26 articles were retrieved and used for the study. The articles used fall between 2013 to 2023. Consequently, this Systematic Review of Literature (SRL) serves as a foundational framework for forthcoming research endeavors. It is important to note that this study does come with certain limitations. The findings are delimited by the taxonomy used, focusing on journals and book chapters published from 2013 to 2023 accessible through Scopus, Google Scholar, journal websites, and English-language papers. Such limitations might affect the count of articles pertaining to the aspects evaluated in this study. The synthesis of twenty-four reviewed articles, designated as J1-J22 and B1-B4, coalesces around a pivotal conclusion: for a building to embody sustainability, eco-conscious principles should guide the construction process while concurrently prioritizing efficiency and a resilient design. These results, however, uncover promising avenues for future research, such as investigating stakeholders' viewpoints on proven green energy technologies for sustainable buildings and delving into social issues associated with these technologies. The study will contribute to the existing body of knowledge of green technology, particularly in developing countries.</p
A Critical Literature Review of Existing Off-Site Construction Evaluation Tools
No full textDespite the benefits of off-site construction as a more sustainable alternative to traditional construction, its use in the Republic of Ireland remains limited, with its performance a critical talking point that requires further analysis. This reinforces the need for evaluation tools in the form of methodologies, frameworks, models, and rating systems, to improve off-site construction’s overall performance. This research aims to review such tools in the literature as a function of their country of origin, publication year, the specific off-site construction method they evaluate, their assessment mechanism, scope and applicability. The review shows that most of these tools were developed outside of Ireland, reinforcing the need for tools that are specific to the needs of off-site construction in the country. The most common evaluation tool developed was methodologies, with 44% of the reviewed tools using this assessment mechanism. Several tools targeted specific off-site construction methods such as modular construction, off-site construction waste disposal, and off-site manufacturing. This literature review is needed to highlight the strengths and limitations of existing tools in order to promote their use within the industry. It also provides a way forward for researchers looking to develop new tools that address the limitations of existing ones. A theoretical framework identifying factors behind the development of OSC evaluation tools as well as their potential implications is proposed.</p
Comparative Analysis of Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint of Apache, Nginx, and Lighttpd Web Servers
No full textThe increased demand and diversity of web applications has brought a significant increase in the energy consumption and carbon footprint of web servers. However, no that many results have been published that study the web server energy consumption and identify which one is the most environmentally friendly. As a result, this study aims to compare the energy consumption and carbon footprint of three popular web servers, including Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd. To get insights into the energy consumption aspect multiple experiments are conducted to see how much energy web servers consume on different workloads. The research results demonstrated that Nginx and Lighttpd are the webservers that consume the less amount of energy compared to Apache. The reason of this result can be attributed to their asynchronous event-driven approach to handle a large number of simultaneous connections which allows Nginx and Lighttpd to use less resource and handle more requests with less overhead compared to the other web servers resulting to lower energy consumption and carbon footprint.</p
Comparative Energy Consumption Analysis of Video Streaming at Different Speeds on Different Internet Browsers
No full textThe use of Internet has boomed in the last decade, nowadays almost everyone owns a smart device that is connected to the Internet. This increase in the online network usage has led to a rise in energy consumption in the ICT sector. Both the end/edge devices and the backbone Internet infrastructure (switches, routers, servers, etc.) need to be constantly powered with a considerable amount of energy. Though, the production of electrical energy proves to be still a very harmful process for the environment, greenhouse gas emissions are discharged in the atmosphere at astonishingly high rates. A reduction in the energy consumption is what we are striving to achieve in the present. Therefore, it is essential to keep track of how much energy ICT applications and programmes use in order to foresee future modelling and device research possibilities. Video steaming started to represent a high percentage in the Internet usage in the last years. This is due to the rise in popularity of consuming digital entertainment over the traditional broadcasting. This research work tries to get some insights into the power consumption of different Internet browsers while videos are streamed at different speeds. To compare, a typical user environment was developed in order to analyse the proposed scenarios.</p
England’s heritage in the post-truth era: emotion, affect and the appropriation of the past in social and political discourse
No full textThis thesis builds on critical heritage research into the emotions of heritage. Where existing studies show that a visit to a heritage site can be an affective experience, this thesis asks whether the affective practices exhibited at heritage sites can be linked to social and political discourse in England. With this discourse increasingly dominated by emotional truth – what has come to be termed post-truth – it argues that the heritage industry must understand the impact it has on the world beyond its gates.
To analyse this impact, a large-scale data collection exercise was undertaken using the review aggregate site Tripadvisor. This generated 28,000 data points from twenty-eight heritage sites of different kinds. The thesis uses a quantitative and qualitative analysis of this data to scaffold a wide theoretical discussion on perceptions of the past in England.
This exploration establishes a theory I term ‘the living past’: a conjuncture of the past and present established through personal emotional connections to the past. The thesis then develops the emotional living past to demonstrate how it has given rise to homogenous national pasts in the form of ‘the imagined past’, ‘the equitable past’, ‘the dissonant past’ and ‘the consumable past’. These emotionally held, nationally developed pasts marry with the social and political discourse we find in England’s post-truth debates.
This thesis offers a new way of collecting and working with data in heritage studies. By developing theories on the living past and the aforementioned national pasts, it also contributes to critical heritage understandings of emotions within the heritage environment. Most importantly, it demonstrates the link between England’s heritage industry and post-truth social and political discourses – before suggesting ways to break this connection.</p