153 research outputs found
Van idee tot M-Idea :de ontwikkeling van een strategie voor de commercialisatie van de M-Idea methode
No full textFrom Wastescapes Towards Regenerative Territories. A Structural Approach for Achieving Circularity
No full textIn this chapter, the understanding of circularity goes beyond material resource management, deepening the spatial implications of a more circular management and use of wastescapes, investigated at the urban and metropolitan scale. Besides the health (care) related challenges presented by the current outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, additional ones related to our living environment have been—and will continue to be—an urgent call for academic researchers, designers and policymakers to find (eco)innovative solutions and strategies for enhancing the quality of life of all and the availability of more and more safe public (open) spaces and facilities to sustain this. In this situation, the spaces most at risk of urban and peri-urban areas could be found in the unresolved places which are defined as wastescapes, since they are in general still poorly used and valued. Building on the European H2020 research project REPAiR, the definition of wastescapes, provided in this study, builds upon work for two main cases: the metropolitan areas of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and Naples (Italy). Wastescapes are discarded territories, however, they can also be understood as opportunities to realize regenerative concepts and support strategies related to environmental, spatial and social challenges of the territories and their surroundings. Core is then to improve the socio-ecological values of such territories. Wastescapes are different case by case, being affected by site-specific challenges and characterized by high complexity. The research presented in this chapter shows that the route towards a Circular Economy requires the consideration of wastescapes as ‘spatial resources’ important to be included in strategies of transition. It represents a fundamental step to overcome problems related to both resource (and land) scarcity, land use in general and spatial fragmentation, while providing opportunities to include through eco-innovative services other values than just the monetary ones to society. The spatial regeneration of wastescapes in the built environment involves a re-thinking of the structure of these areas in a larger (metropolitan) context. Within such metropolitan settings, in particular peri-urban territories, also referred to as the areas in-between urban and rural landscapes, are most affected and characterized by this problem of wastescapes.Environmental Technology and Desig
Dimensions of Circularity for Healthy Metabolisms and Spaces
No full textIn this first chapter of the Book “Regenerative Territories. Dimensions of Circularity for Healthy Metabolisms”, the relation between circularity and space is explored. The main focus is the development over time, and in particular the way how spatial planning and strategies respond to new unpredictable urgencies and opportunities related with territorial metabolisms. In relation to space and time, 5 grand rules are explored as necessary to implement the transition towards Circularity: (1) The Circular Economy paradigm shift requires a socio-ecological perspective and looking beyond boundaries; (2) Circular Economy is based on systems thinking and territorial metabolism; (3) a Circular Economy calls for a renewed approach to the public domain and stakeholder involvement; (4) amplifying the definition of Circular Economy with the inclusion of wastescapes; and (5) Planning the Circular Economy as an open collaborative system. The paradigm shift of contemporary planning towards circularity is aimed to facilitate the capacity of cities to be adaptive and flexible to the speeding up of the biggest changes in the present-day society. Therefore, the relation between the various spatial scales is strictly interlinked to the time scales, as well as to the metabolic processes and Life Cycles of Territories. In this perspective, the “existing city” is a non-negotiable common heritage, the result of a “selective accumulation” of material and immaterial traces produced by the slow and progressive anthropic work in the territory. Contemporary spatial planning looks beyond boundaries. This concerns both the physical boundaries between areas or countries, both the boundaries of the various scale levels of solutions, of the interrelated networks, of the public space and, particularly, of their reciprocity. It induces the scrutinization of the underlying social needs and the finding of instruments that allow the spatial planning and renewed infrastructure to fit the changing social objectives such as sustainability and liveability. The territory of the Circular Economy is the city, as a complex and multidimensional organism. However, the most problematic field for experimenting with “circular planning” is the peri-urban territory consisting of urbanized areas, crossed by differentiated phenomena of settlement expansion beyond the limits of the countryside, which identifies rural and open space, traditionally coinciding with the limits of the city. A circular planning for the regeneration of the peri-urban identifies the waste spaces, the decay of the territory, the obsolescence and end of life of buildings, functions and urban parts now inadequate, namely wasted landscapes (wastescapes). The latter are both the result of metabolic transformations of the territory and generator of prospects and potential for rebalancing the material welfare of the city.Environmental Technology and Desig
ReciproCities: A dynamic equilibrium
No full textThis booklet is as an expansion of the ideas and concepts presented by Arjan van Timmeren in his inaugural speech to the Delft University of Technology on April 17th 2013. The speech in its original format (Dutch) can be found on the bottom margin of the page highlighted in blue. While the English text should be considered complimentary to the original speech, it contains significantly more data and figures and follows a markedly different pace.Architecture and The Built EnvironmentUrbanis
Beyond wastescapes: Towards circular landscapes. addressing the spatial dimension of circularity through the regeneration of wastescapes
No full textWastescapes are the result of unsustainable linear growth processes and their spatial consequences within the context of urban metabolic flows and related infrastructure. They represent the operational infrastructure for waste management and include Drosscapes, generating complex relations with the servicing and surrounding territory. In particular, the peri-urban areas are spatially affected by these processes. This often leads to ineffective use and/or abandonment because they are currently impossible to use, demanding impactful (and often expensive) regeneration and revalorization to make them usable again. Being part of the urban metabolic process, wastescapes are in a continuous state of dynamic equilibrium. They can be considered crucial areas from a metropolitan perspective because they have the potential to become innovative spatial contexts or resources in a Circular Economy (CE), which aims to overcome the crises of both resource scarcity and spatial fragmentation. However, common and shared definitions of wastescapes are still missing at the European policy level, as only classical categories of material waste are generally mentioned. Wastescapes can be considered as 'potentiality contexts' where developing, testing, and implementing Eco-Innovative Solutions (EIS) can be done. By doing so, wastescapes can help start transitions towards a CE. This can be achieved by using Peri-urban Living Labs (PULL), which have the potential to be the virtual and physical environments in which experimenting the collaborative co-creation process for developing EIS can be done. Doing so will allow for the improvement of waste management and for the revalorization of wastescapes in collaboration with all potential stakeholders.Environmental Technology and Desig
Brill and Open Access
No full textAn online conversation with two representatives of Brill, a publisher that is particularly strong in the Humanities and Social Sciences. A 340-year-old publishing house, Brill still primarily sells books and journals in a traditional manner, i.e. as hardcopies and online fulltexts behind a paywall. Currently, Brill has a total output of around 1,400 academic books per year. Just over 10% of these titles are published in Open Access thanks to authors (or their institutions) paying a Book Processing Charge (BPC). Among its 300+ peer-reviewed journals, approx. 10% are published according to the Diamond Open Access model, meaning that some sort of sponsorship allows Brill to offer its services with no author- or reader-facing charges. In the discussion, Open Research Officer Stephanie Veldman explains the economic mechanisms and strategic thinking behind Brill’s work in the field of open access. Publishing director for History, Social Sciences and Biology Arjan van Dijk highlights the author’s and editor’s perspectives, using the successful Journal of Jesuit Studies (launched in 2013) as a concrete example. Both Veldman and van Dijk see it as an important part of their mission to increase the proportion of books and journals that are published in open access.
First published online: June 7, 2023
Game-theoretic models of water allocation in transboundary river basins
No full textOnderzoeksvragen zijn hoe samenwerking in waterverdeling kan worden verbeterd, en hoe internationale verdragen zo kunnen worden ontworpen dat ze niet worden verbroken. Onderliggende onderwerpen zijn de aanwezigheid van betwiste eigendomsrechten op water en het ontwerp van aantrekkelijke verdeelregels voor rivierwater. Het doel van dit proefschrift is het analyseren van waterverdeling in grensoverschrijdende rivieren met behulp van speltheoretische modellen. Dit type modellen is geschikt voor het analyseren van strategische interactie tussen landen die een rivier delen, in hun beslissingen omtrent watergebruik
Automatic Segmentation of Ships in Digital Images: A Deep Learning Approach
No full textKnowledge on adversaries during military missions at sea heavily influences decision making, making identification of unknown vessels an important task. Identification of surrounding vessels based on visual data offers an alternative to AIS information (Automatic Identification System), the current standard in vessel identification, which can be spoofed. One visual approach employs human expertise and manually identifies vessels guided by a ship catalog. In order to minimize or potentially eliminate human error and performance limitations, there is strong interest in developing an automated vessel classification pipeline. One such pipeline is currently being developed at TNO, capable of classifying over 500 separate classes. A crucial part of the classification pipeline is retrieving an accurate contour of a vessel from a digital image. To address this important challenge, this thesis proposes an advanced deep learning pipeline to automatically segment the vessel image into background (e.g. sky and sea) and the object of interest (a vessel). Deep learning models based on Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNs) have achieved high performance on the task of semantic segmentation. Several networks such as CRF-RNN, PSPNet, DeepLab and Mask R-CNN are employed to determine a baseline performance. We will focus on identifying the cause of poor or failing segmentations and aim to construct a robust network capable of handling these challenges. By sampling disturbances, caused by ship distance and camera noise, augmented data sets are built to tune networks to input from on-site images. Additionally, experiments are done to evaluate the influence of different levels of disturbances. Previous approaches implementing the CRF-RNN network achieved top 1 and top 5 classification accuracies of 31.1% and 44.0% respectively. Employing the DeepLab network, trained to convergence on artificial noise augmented data, we report top 1 and top 5 accuracy of 68.9% and 88.8% respectively. Additionally, implementing an ensemble of classifiers, performance is increased to 73.0% and 91.7% for top 1 and top 5 accuracy respectively. This best result is comparable to the classification results with human annotated ship silhouettes. The human performance accuracy is 73.4% on top 1, and 91.3% on top 5 classification performance. Finally, we show that training on a collection of different levels of image disturbances results in a network that is robust against increasing disturbance in images, while retaining performance on clean images.Mechanical Engineering | Systems and Contro
Morphological response to Lake Bardawil adaptations: Assessment of inlet stability for multiple system interventions
No full textBardawil Lagoon is a tidal lagoon situated at the northern coast of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. It’s two artificial inlets, Boughaz 1 in the West and Boughaz 2 in the East, provide a connection to the Mediterranean Sea. They enable the water bodies to interact and support fish migration. Currently, regular maintenance dredging works are necessary to keep the two inlets open.The objective of this thesis is to analyse the effect of interventions applied to the two inlets on the lagoon-sea interaction, with the goal of transforming the present, unstable inlet system towards a stable tidal inlet lagoon by adapting one or both of the present inlets. This study is conducted on three system phases, being Phase 0, Phase 1 and Phase 2. Phase 0 consists of the initial situation without any interventions; Phase 1 contains the effect of adaptations to the Boughaz 1 inlet, and Phase 2 includes adaptations to Boughaz 2 in addition to the changes made in Phase 1. The new design in Phase 1 and Phase 2 consists of a deeper inlet cross-sectional area, the dredging of an approach channel, the addition of a nourishment, and the removal of the present breakwaters. Design elements are processed using a 2D-H Delft3D Flexible Mesh model and analysed under tide-only conditions with and without a prevailing wind climate added. Evaporation effects are included after the model calculations are made. The results are mainly assessed are the interaction with the Mediterranean Sea, the sediment transport character, and the inlet stability according to the Escoffier curve. Moreover, an analysis is made on the flushing of the lagoon and the effect of a prevailing wind pattern on the system. It is clear from both literature and the initial model results of Phase 0 that Bardawil Lagoon currently does not function as a morphologically stable tidal inlet system, as sedimentation occurs in both inlets. The water exchange between the Mediterranean Sea and Bardawil Lagoon is restricted by the inlets, which is indicated by the difference in tidal elevation on both sides of the inlet. Both inlets are positioned near the unstable equilibrium point on the Escoffier curve, indicating possible closure of the inlets in the future. Hence, interventions are required to establish a morphologically stable lagoon inlet system. By applying the proposed designs in Phase 1 and Phase 2, the limitations on the incoming tide shift from the inlets to the inner basin induces friction, thus removing the inlets as limiting factor. Moreover, taking into account both the prevailing winds and high evaporation effects, the total system is classified as having a sediment exporting character after Phase 2. High evaporation rates have a significant importing effect on the sediment transport character of the inlets. However, after Phase 2, these effects are reduced by a factor 3-5 compared to Phase 0, depending on the wind. The new cross-sectional area design also results in both inlets being positioned near the stable equilibrium point on the Escoffier curve after Phase 2, which is supported by the sensitivity analysis. Hence, it is concluded that the proposed adaptations achieve the goal of developing Bardawil Lagoon into a morphologically stable inlet system. The study provides good insight into the effect of system interventions on the morphodynamic stability of the inlets as well as the flow dominance regarding those inlets. It is recommended to construct a validated morphological 3D model which can provide insight in the long term response of the system to those adaptations
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