Arjan van Timmeren

Climate Integrated Design and Closing Cycles

Composite measures of sustainability provide useful insights into the environmental impacts associated with human activities but, in themselves, are not the solutions for abandoning traditional paradigms. Sustainable spatial planning and development must be able to conduct the spatial consequences of changes. Therefore, it is necessary to look beyond boundaries: not only physical boundaries (between areas or countries), but especially boundaries of the various scale levels of solutions, the interrelated networks (energy, water, waste/nutrients), the public space and, particularly, their mutuality. It induces an exploration of the ‘urban metabolism’ with underlying social needs and the finding of solutions that allow the urban areas and infrastructure to fit the changing objectives, especially sustainability. This chapter promotes sustainable management of the environment and its resources through a renewed focus on existing, mostly ignored resources and local ‘quality-cascading’, together with niche planning to improve knowledge of the interactions between natural resources, human activities and environmental impact. Especially, the introduction of solutions on an intermediate scale-level of the neighbourhood or urban district offer opportunities. With respect to this, several recent innovative projects will be explained.

Introducing Spatial Variability to the Impact Significance Assessment

The concept of Circular Economy has gained momentum during the last decade. Yet unsustainable circular systems can also create unintended social, economic and environmental damage. Sustainability is highly dependent on a system’s geographical context, such as location of resources, cultural acceptance, economic, environmental and transport geography. While in some cases an impact of the proposed change may be considered equally significant under all circumstances (e.g. increase of carbon emissions as a main contributor to the global climate change), many impacts may change both their direction and the extent of significance dependent on their context (e.g. land consumption may be positively evaluated if applied to abandoned territories or negatively if a forest needs to be sacrificed). The geographical context, (i.e. its sensitivity, vulnerability or potential) is commonly assessed by Spatial Decision Support Systems. However, currently those systems typically do not perform an actual impact assessment as impact characteristics stay constant regardless of location. Likewise, relevant Impact Assessment methods, although gradually becoming more spatial, assume their context as invariable. As a consequence, impact significance so far is also a spatially unvarying concept. However, current technological developments allow to rapidly record, analyse and visualise spatial data. This article introduces the concept of spatially varying impact significance assessment, by reviewing its current definitions in literature, and analysing to what extent the concept is applied in existing assessment methods. It concludes with a formulation of spatially varying impact significance assessment for innovation in the field of impact assessment.

Local determinants of household gas and electricity consumption in Randstad region, Netherlands: application of geographically weighted regression

The previous studies on household energy consumption (HEC) are based on an implicit assumption: the impact of geographic determinants on HEC is uniform across a given region, and such impacts could be unveiled regardless of geographic location of households in question. Consequently, these studies have searched for global determinants which explain HEC of all areas. This study aim at examining validity of this assumption in Randstad region by putting forward a question regarding households’ gas and electricity consumption: are the determinants global, stationary across all the areas of the region, or local, varying from one location to another? By application of geographically weighted regression, impact of socioeconomic, housing, land cover and morphological indicators on HEC is studied. It is established that the determinants of HEC are local. This result led to second question: what are the main determinants of gas and electricity consumption in different neighborhoods of Randstad? The results show that variety of factors could be the most effective determinant of gas consumption in different neighborhoods: building age, household size and inhabitants’ age, inhabitants’ income and private housing tenure, building compactness. Whereas, in case of electricity consumption the picture is more deterministic: in most of the neighborhoods the most effective factors are inhabitants’ income and private tenure.

Social-Ecological-Technical systems in urban planning for a circular economy: an opportunity for horizontal integration

ABSTRACT The Circular Economy (CE) is receiving interest worldwide as a way to overcome the currently dominating linear and wasteful production and consumption models of our society. Currently the implementation of CE thinking into practice is still in an early stage. As the main hubs of consumption and to a more limited extent also, production, metropolitan areas often are seen as crucial to achieving a successful transition towards a CE, and therefore it is necessary to find ways to integrate a CE based approach into urban planning practice. In this paper literature dealing with the concept of the CE is reviewed within an urban planning framework to examine how well integrated it is in the built environment, both vertically and horizontally, in ideas prevalent in CE literature. The paper aims to contribute to the understanding of how the concept of CE can be integrated into urban planning practice with a view to enabling urban planners to integrate CE into their work to further accelerate the implementation of CE in metropolitan areas. In this paper a framework is presented for understanding opportunities for the integration of CE into urban planning.

Towards Sustainable Living

The availability of technologies in our living environment offers a new approach to the study of the interaction between people and the built environment in the context of living labs. The living lab scenario can be viewed as a concertino of action as it unfolds, drawing on available material, cognitive, affective and social resources. Five phases of the translation of cognition into ‘ecological rationality’ can be distinguished: control, adaptation, learning, improvement (evolution/innovation), change with feedback. The overall challenge facing society today is to achieve and maintain a suitable quality of life, while reducing to a sustainable level the environmental burden to which our activities give rise.