1,721,040 research outputs found
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Sustainable urban development to 2050: complex transitions in the built environment of cities
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Modelling residential retrofit: insights on the effect of regional characteristics for the Cardiff city region
No full textUsing Cardiff City Regions as a case study this work investigates the potential for cost effective energy and carbon saving measures at the city region scale, taking into account characteristics and constraints in each locality. Results indicate that compositional downscale using statistical information at the local authority level can provide useful insights about the retrofit needs and potential at this level. Assumptions regarding the residential fuel mix and future electricity supply have a considerable impact on determining the cost effectiveness of measures and the potential CO2 savings, especially for local authorities with a residential housing stock and fuel mix markedly different from the assumed average. Around a quarter of the CO2 saving target for the domestic sector (if applied uniformly at all sectors) can be achieved by the measures examined in this study but significant investment and swift action is needed to achieve this potential. The approach has sought to reconcile the need to incorporate regional characteristics in broad top-down scenario work, with the reality of data and resource scarcity which hampers the implementation of detailed bottom-up models at a large scale. Using elements from both top-down and bottom-up models may be the best approach to address the needs of users at the regional and local authority level
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Financing, managing and visioning the urban retrofit transition to 2050
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Retrofitting cities for tomorrow's world
No full textThe culmination of a four–year collaborative research project undertaken by leading UK universities, in partnership with city authorities, prominent architecture firms, and major international consultants, Retrofitting Cities for Tomorrow′s World explores the theoretical and practical aspects of the transition towards sustainability in the built environment that will occur in the years ahead. The emphasis throughout is on emerging systems innovations and bold new ways of imagining and re–imagining urban retrofitting, set within the context of futures–based thinking.
The concept of urban retrofitting has gained prominence within both the research and policy arenas in recent years. While cities are often viewed as a source of environmental stress and resource depletion they are also hubs of learning and innovation offering enormous potential for scaling up technological responses. But city–level action will require a major shift in thinking and a scaling up of positive responses to climate change and the associated threats of environmental and social degradation. Clearly the time has come for a more coordinated, planned, and strategic approach that will allow cities to transition to a sustainable future. This book summarizes many of the best new ideas currently in play on how to achieve those goals.
- Reviews the most promising ideas for how to approach planning and coordinating a more sustainable urban future by 2050 through retrofitting existing structures
- Explores how cities need to govern for urban retrofit and how future urban transitions and pathways can be managed, modeled and navigated
- Offers inter–disciplinary insights from international contributors from both the academic and professional spheres
- Develops a rigorous conceptual framework for analyzing existing challenges and fostering innovative ways of addressing those challenges
Retrofitting Cities for Tomorrow′s World is must–reading for academic researchers, including postgraduates insustainability, urban planning, environmental studies, economics, among other fields. It is also an important source of fresh ideas and inspiration for town planners, developers, policy advisors, and consultants working within the field of sustainability, energy, and the urban environment
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Conclusions and reflections: retrofitting cities for tomorrow’s world
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City‐regional futures in context: insights from the retrofit 2050 project
No full textResearch findings from the EPSRC funded Retrofit 2050 project, aim to advance and explore the theoretical and practical understandings that underpin a shift to sustainability of the UK's core city regions in 2050. Utilising a participatory backcasting and scenario building process at national and regional levels, the Retrofit 2050 project has sought to envisage what a sustainable urban environment could look like based upon the systemic urban retrofitting of an existing UK city‐region to 2050.
First, it is argued that the construction of normative sustainability oriented future scenarios and vision(s) of a desirable future(s), is fruitful in understanding and managing processes of transition and meeting the goals of environmental sustainability. Secondly, the regional level visioning process described here intends to reflect the observations that retrofitting, by its very nature, does not occur on a blank state and will rather occur in existing social, governance and physical structures.
Utilising the Retrofit City Futures, developed during the Retrofit 2050 project, as guiding visions it is argued that city regional futures need to be grounded in a rich understanding of the (economic, political, social and ecological) transformation processes that shape development at regional level. The research reflects on the example of the Cardiff city region and highlights how these transformation processes play out across the variegated (rural, post‐industrial and urban) geographies of the Cardiff city‐region shaping, influencing and rendering distinctive the visions and city futures of Cardiff
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