2,243 research outputs found
Introduction: drawing lessons from international policy-transfer initiatives in regional and urban development and spatial planning
No full textThe collection of papers in this issue brings new insights to the processes of international policy transfer and learning in the fields of regional and urban development policy, regional innovation and transit-oriented development. It explores, through the perspective of different disciplines, the motivations of actors, tangible and non-tangible outputs, the role of factors affecting the process, and the spillover effects of such process. The contributions bring new insights into what represents success and failure in policy transfer and provide valuable lessons for policy-makers facing the challenges of a fast-changing global context.Spatial Planning and Strateg
Four Clusters o fThought on Flood Resilience and Climate Adaptation: The state of the art and new directions for spatial planning
No full textThe need to respond to increasing flood risk, climate change, and rapid urban development has shaped innovative policies and practices of spatial planning in many countries over recent decades. As an instrumental–technical intervention, planning is mainly used to improve the physical environment (through concepts such as regulating waterproof facades of architecture, setting buffering zones, and designing green-blue corridors). However, the implementation of the proposed physical interventions is often challenging and necessitates assistance from practices such as climate assessment, policy disciplines, civil societies, and economic resources. These extensive perspectives have spawned many new research domains in the realm of spatial planning. This chapter provides a review of the recent developments in flood resilience, risk management, and climate adaptation; based on this, it positions planning research and practice within these works of literature. Four clusters of thought are identified, mainly in the European and American scholarship of the last two decades. They are environmental concerns, disaster management concerns, socio-economic concerns, and institutional concerns. Current planning research concentrates on disaster management in the underlying belief that planning is functionally efficient. The attention to environmental concerns, socio-economic concerns, and institutional concerns of planning research remains insufficient but has been growing. This, in turn, enlarges the scope of planning research and indicates future directions for study. These new concerns relate to spatial planning’s ability to operate effectively in a multi-sectoral setting, despite limited resources and in the face of uncertain risk.Spatial Planning and Strateg
Teaching, Learning & Researching Spatial Planning
No full textThis book is composed of a general introduction followed by 18 chapters written by teachers and researchers from TU Delft, as well as frequent collaborators, each describing an issue or tool used in Spatial Planning, as it is taught and researched at our university. The book aims to give readers around the world an introduction to how spatial planning is conceived at TU Delft. Spatial planning is a highly idiosyncratic discipline and is conceived differently around the world. In most places, spatial planning is part of an architectural approach to the city, in which design exists almost autonomously, while in other places it is part of a political-economical approach to the city. What distinguishes Delft is the bridge we have managed to build between design and politics, and the way we understand space as foundational for the understanding of socio-economic processes. This is anchored on a Dutch tradition of city-making in which issues of “maakbaarheid” (roughly translated by “feasibility”), a guiding concept in Dutch society, which was built upon an exceedingly difficult territory to plan, design and manage. Spatial planning in the Netherlands is hence a combination of planning, design and management that is unique. Simultaneously, spatial planning as a discipline in the Netherlands is rather forward-thinking and uniquely equipped to deal with the great societal challenges of our time (climate change, pandemics, growing inequality, etc) and may be useful for students and teachers elsewhere seeking to learn from other traditions. Each chapter addresses issues that we see as central to the way of teaching and researching spatial planning
Vision and strategy making: Teaching spatial planning in design education on a situated learning environment
No full textThis chapter introduces the pedagogical approach of guiding vision and strategy making in university design studios. This is a unique way of teaching spatial planning in design education, bridging research, planning, and design. It will use one of the master’s courses at the Urbanism Department of TU Delft as an example: the regional design studio ‘Spatial Strategies for the Global Metropolis’. This approach is based on the tradition of planning schools with design education – using the design studio as a key method for teaching. This tradition has made spatial planning in design education different from other planning schools that focus on policies or social/environmental sciences. The approach being introduced is not only evidence-based/scientific but also explorative at the same time, prone to search for the more plausible and desirable future scenarios. It is in line with the role of regional design in practice, in the context of collaborative planning. To teach such practice-related skills, an authentic assignment from and the interaction with the ‘real world’ are needed, namely a situated learning environment, which mimics the actual situation and collaborative efforts of spatial planning. Spatial vision and development strategy are both tools of spatial planning in practice, meant to frame and steer the development towards a more sustainable future, with the involvement of stakeholders. In design education, they are also seen as design products students could and should work on to understand the roles of these tools in spatial planning and how to use them to develop regional design proposals.Spatial Planning and Strateg
Currency Crises in Emerging Markets - Selected Comparative Studies
No full textThis volume presents seven comparative studies of currency crises, which happened in the decade of 1990s in Latin America, South East Asia and in transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former USSR. All the studies were prepared under the research project no. OI44/H02/99/17 on "Analysis of Currency Crises in Countries of Asia, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe: Lessons for Poland and Other Transition Countries", carried out by CASE and financed by the Committee for Scientific Research (KBN) in the years 1999-2001. They will be subjects of public presentation and discussion during the seminar in Warsaw organized by CASE on June 28, 2001, under the same research project. This is a continuation of two other issues of CASE Reports containing eleven countries' monographs related to currency crises episodes in these three regions and a couple of other comparative studies published in the CASE Studies and Analyzes series. Three first studies in this volume deal with broad issue of current account, exchange rate and international reserves of a central bank. Marcin Sasin discusses the importance of the real exchange rate overvaluation and the current account deficit, which are usually considered as the main causes of currency crises. While generally confirming the importance of the first factor, author shows that question of sustainability of current account deficit has a very individual country characteristic. The next analysis of Malgorzata Jakubiak concerns the choice of exchange rate regimes from the point of view of both avoiding and efficient managing currency crises. Author compares advantages and disadvantages of the fixed versus floating exchange rate regimes from the point of view of credibility of monetary policies, preventing currency crisis and coping with its consequences. She demonstrates, basing on an empirical analysis, that the most costly are changes of exchange rate regimes (usually abandoning the peg) under the pressure of speculative attack. Mateusz Szczurek provides the additional insight to this discussion estimating the size of optimal international liquidity taking into consideration potential costs of the crisis, on the one hand, and costs of maintaining the international reserves, on the other. The next study concerns interrelations between banking and currency crises basing on extensive review of an economic literature. Marcin Sasin analyzes the institutional and structural sources of instability of the banking sector in emerging markets. One of them is the direct and indirect vulnerability of banks in relation to sudden interest rate and exchange rate changes. On the other hand, collapse of the some big banks must lead to credibility crisis of a domestic currency. Lukasz Rawdanowicz addresses another hot issue in the economic debates of the last decade, i.e. contagion effect of a crisis in one country on the macroeconomic stability of its close and more distant neighbors. He analyzes the impact of the Russian 1998 crisis on the situation of CIS countries taking into consideration both trade and financial channels. Monika Blaszkiewicz and Wojciech Paczynski try to assess the economic and social consequences of currency crises in the last decade. The main question discussed by them is to what extent crisis plays a role of self-correcting mechanism of previously unsustainable policies. Finally, Rafal Antczak, Malgorzata Markiewicz and Artur Radziwill analyze the role of the IMF in preventing the currency crises in five selected CIS countries - Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, identifying the main sources of Fund's failures.financial crises, currency crises, IMF, financial systems, exchange rate regime, transition economies
First Biennial African School on Fundamental Physics and its Applications
No full textDiscussion Session - Accelerator System Design (Part II)
Tutors: C. Darve, J. Weisend II, Ph. Lebrun, A. Dabrowski, U. Raich
Video Conference with the CERN Control Center. Experts in the field of Accelerator science will be available to answer the students questions.
This session will link the CCC and SA (using Codec VC)
Focus stacking photogrammetry for micro-scale roughness reconstruction: A methodological study
No full textIn close-range applications, it is unclear whether optical photogrammetry is capable of accurately reconstructing submillimetre-scale roughness. This paper presents a study of fine-scale rock fracture roughness measurements with a careful assessment of the error. The workflow combines the techniques of structure from motion with focus stacking, using consumer-grade equipment and free or affordable software. The approach is tested firstly with synthetic data to check the influence of the number and position of cameras, object texture and image processing using focus stacking. Secondly, the optimised workflow is used to measure a natural shale rock fracture surface. To estimate the accuracy, the results were compared with a high-precision reference dataset provided by white-light interferometry. The standard deviation of error in the method is 6·5 μm, and is related with morphological structures with wavelengths below 150 μm and amplitudes smaller than 10 μm.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Applied Geophysics and Petrophysic
The Dialogue of the City: Implementing a productive Citizen Participation Method for Urban Node Development, in Delft the Netherlands
No full textParticipatory processes have become unexceptional in Dutch planning. Due to the communicative turn in urban planning, collaborative planning moved up on the local and national government agenda: in 2021 the new environmental act will come into place, which firmly encourages participation in an early stage of the process. Within those participatory processes, face-to-face contact is currently indisputably the most used method. Practitioners believe that increasing the moments of contact is the best strategy to quickly reach consensus, even though only half of the participating citizens say that it indeed contributes to mutual trust and understanding. And although citizen participation is not something new in the Netherlands, its effectiveness leaves much to be desired. Despite the increase of attention for citizen engagement, the actual interaction between citizen and urban planner has not been studied extensively. Why and how to arrange a productive interaction with citizens is not clearly stated in literature nor known from practice. This leaves spatial planners with a large uncertainty on how to employ dialogue in daily practice. Therefore, the central question in this double degree thesis revolves around the face-to-face interaction between urban planners and citizens. It researches the gap between the ideal but rather theoretical concept of dialogue with citizens and the unruly reality of practice. It focuses on how the urban planner should manage the dilemmas of dialogue and how he/she could facilitate this interaction in an effective way, in order to let the process contribute to something constructive. Dialogical principles were taken as starting point and experts were consulted about dialogue in participation’s functioning in practice. The generic framework which results from this, is applied in the case of the redevelopment of Delft Campus station. That is done by developing a game for the interaction between citizens and planner, which served as input for the spatial design which followed. By developing and reflecting on these three different products - the general framework, the game and the spatial design - the thesis provides practitioners with an advice how to deal with the complex conversations which they have to deal with today.This master thesis is a joint graduation project of MSc Architecture, Urbanism and the Building Sciences (Urbanism track) and MSc Science Education and Communication (Science Communication track), both at the Delft University of Technology.Applied Sciences | Science Education and CommunicationArchitecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences | Urbanis
'Doing more with less' or 'doing less with less'? Assessing EU cohesion policy's financial instruments for urban development
No full textIn the context of a severe economic crisis and austerity, new ideas were put forward to reform cohesion policy to enhance its effectiveness and the return on investment. Among them, financial engineering instruments, such as JESSICA, expected to offer a means to ‘do more with less’ in this difficult budgetary context. In the case of such instruments, EU funds are not offered as grants co-financing investment projects, but rather are used to provide repayable assistance to projects, a form of support. Such revolving funds approach is in stark contrast with the grant-based assistance typically offered as part of EU cohesion policy and was expected to increase the sustainability and effectiveness of interventions. But does it fulfil those expectations? This paper examines JESSICA through the conceptual lens of policy instruments literature. It verifies whether JESSICA is actually fit for its purpose of supporting sustainable urban development. It also gauges the impacts of instrument on the behaviour of the actors involved in its implementation at the sub-national level. The findings indicate that JESSICA is a flawed and overly complex instrument that instead of doing ‘more with less’ only allows for achieving ‘less with less’. However, it still exerts a positive influence on the sub-national authorities involved by promoting cross-sectoral interactions and facilitating learning. It also promotes a change in the approach to EU cohesion policy and public investment more generally, putting more emphasis on economic viability of investment.UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen
Precision luminosity measurement at hadron colliders
No full textThis thesis links two realms of particle accelerator dynamics and precision particle physics.
The achievement of precise luminosity measurement at hadron colliders is enabled with dedicated luminometers.
For the Run 3 period, the luminometer upgrade was planned for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The intricacies of the process of preparation, installation, and commissioning of the upgraded Fast Beam Conditions Monitor (BCM1F-\utca) are described in this thesis.
Its design was optimized based on analysis of the performance of the Run 2 version of BCM1F with the main changes being the utilization of silicon sensors and real-time and dead-time free pulse shape analysis in the back-end electronics.
The BCM1F-utca optimization and resulting performance are studied in detail.
The most common and most precise way of obtaining the absolute calibration of the luminosity at the hadron colliders is the van der Meer (vdM) method. However, it requires careful consideration and correction for the accelerator-related systematic effects.
While numerous particle accelerator effects have previously been studied in detail, their direct impact on the precision luminosity calibration was neglected for a long time.
Notably, the historically disregarded beam-beam interaction is now recognized as a significant factor.
The first correction models overestimated the optical effect induced by the beam-beam-interaction by half. This prompted an extended effort to recognize and quantify different ingredients of the beam-beam-related systematic uncertainty on the luminosity calibration. The development of the new correction model has started, originally aiming to parametrize the beam-beam effects on luminosity in the simplest case of a single interaction point. The main objective was to provide per-bunch corrections based on its properties.
This study aimed to extend the correction model with a further level of complexity - multi-collision effects. The investigation into additional contributions to the systematic uncertainty arising from beam-beam interaction is presented, considering the crossing-angles in the vdM scans as well as the sensitivity to the phase advances between the collision points.
The multi-particle simulation studies are complemented with a dedicated beam-beam experiment at the LHC that was designed to provide the first statistically significant measurement of the beam-beam effects on luminosity. The beam-beam effects were studied depending on the strength of the interaction, as a function of separation steps when scanning the beams, as well as depending on the number of collisions.
The detailed detector studies led to a minimized integration systematic uncertainty on the BCM1F-\utca measured integrated luminosity in 2022.
The absolute luminosity scale calibration of this data set with the vdM method was performed, and the beam-beam effects were among the largest calibration corrections.
The corresponding overall systematic uncertainty was estimated, profiting from the detailed studies on the beam-beam interaction effects.
This work culminates in an unprecedented precision of the CMS preliminary luminosity calibration, with a projection towards achieving the ultimate precision below 1%.LPHE-L
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