Role of the Built Environment, Including Sustainable Cities

Author(s):  
Mark Gibbs ◽  
Gord Lovegrove ◽  
Lionel Lemay
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 68-77
Author(s):  
Thomas Panagopoulos ◽  
Madalina Sbarcea ◽  
Krzysztof Herman

The biophilic design promotes specific principles and patterns of nature-based solutions for health and well-being in the spaces we live and work. A growing body of literature advocates a more prominent role of nature in urban design and architecture, emphasizing the necessity of maintaining, enhancing, and restoring the beneficial experience of nature in the cities. Biophilia and nature-based solutions can improve the quality of built environment design and bring new opportunities to restore urban ecosystems and smart thinking for sustainable cities. The paper concludes that adopting biophilic principles in urban planning will lead to cities that can regenerate life and nurture end-users' health and well-being. Moreover, bring forward ways to transfer human nature ties' knowledge into restorative approaches to design the built environment.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.


Buildings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Ning Gu ◽  
Peiman Amini Behbahani

Computational creativity in built environment (BE) design has been a subject of research interest in the discipline. This paper presents a critical review of various ways computational creativity has been and can be defined and approached in BE design. The paper examines a comprehensive body of contemporary literature on the topics of creativity, computational creativity, and their assessment to identify levels of computational creativity. The paper then proceeds to a further review of the implications of these levels specifically in BE design. The paper identifies four areas in BE design where computational creativity is relevant. In two areas—synthesis (generation) and analysis—there is considerable literature on lower levels of computational creativity. However, in two other areas—interfacing and communication—even the definition of computational creativity is not as defined and clear for the discipline, and most works only consider the role of computers as a supporting tool or medium. These open up future research opportunities for the discipline.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3858
Author(s):  
Francesca Abastante ◽  
Isabella M. Lami ◽  
Marika Gaballo

This paper is built on the following research questions: (i) What are the direct/indirect relationships between Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11) and sustainability protocols? (ii) Could the sustainability protocols constitute a solution towards the achievement of SDG11? We underline that, on the one hand, the SDGs are guidelines to support the development of sustainable policies and thus address all elements that may affect them, and on the other hand, sustainability protocols are assessment tools to promote sustainability-conscious design while remaining focused on the built environment. In the Italian regulatory context, the paper highlights how this difference in terms of focus and scale means that they only overlap and mutually reinforce each other with regard to certain aspects, more related to energy and air pollution issues and less to the social aspects of sustainability. Even if there is not always a direct relationship between the evaluation criteria of the protocols and the indicators of SDG11, it is possible to conclude that the sustainability protocols can facilitate the achievement of the SDG11 targets, acting as a key for the implementation of sustainable cities and helping in structuring the process leading to sustainability in a broader framework.


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