Birgitte Hoffmann

Assessing the sustainability of small wastewater systems A context-oriented planning approach

Abstract The authors present a planning tool for comparing and assessing the sustainability of different wastewater systems. The core of the planning tool is an assessment method based on both technical and social elements. The point of departure is that no technique is inherently sustainable or ecological in itself, but that the sustainability of the total system of technologies for a particular settlement in a given location must be assessed in a holistic and transparent manner. A pilot case is used to demonstrate the structure and the results of the assessment method. The assessment method is still under development, and this paper discusses crucial points in the development of the method.

Urbanising facilities management: the challenges in a creative age

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the challenge of the creative economy for FM practice and research. It seeks to do so by comparing developments in FM with developments in the related discipline of urban planning.Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a comprehensive literature review as well as action research in relation to urban planning.Findings – The growth of the creative economy has meant a close connection between corporate and urban development. This means that FM, in order to facilitate creative environments, can find inspiration from trends in urban planning, and look at the urban context as a part of its facilities. However, including the urban context in FM, and studying it, comes with possibilities as well as challenges. FM needs what is called a thematic as well as epistemological “urbanisation” in order to recognise creative and social possibilities and needs.Research limitations/implications – Whereas the research is thoroughly founded in urban and social ...

Towards Adaptive Urban Water Management: Up-Scaling Local Projects

Increasingly, the need for adaptive urban water management approaches is advertised, but the transition towards such approaches in the urban water sector seems to be slow. The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth study of how an innovative approach has been adopted in practice by looking into how contextual knowledge from a local project has been up-scaled to more generic knowledge. Specifically, the paper outlines how two planners from a Danish municipality succeeded in developing a more innovative sewage plan on the basis of a local project with implementation of local handling of rainwater. This insight into the processes of learning aggregation of water practices points towards the important role that the dedicated work performed by local facilitators and intermediaries play in relation to a transition towards more adaptive urban water management.

Democratic design experiments in urban planning – navigational practices and compositionist design

Abstract In the field of urban planning, public participation and inclusion of citizens have been practised and researched for many years. However, a focus on co-creative urban planning practices seems to have gained more focus over the last decade and calls for new urban planning practices, which allow experimentation and imagination, and at the same time take its outset in the existing networks in the city (such as visions, strategies, regulations and practices) when planning for the future. In this article, we investigate how a compositionist design programme can be translated into the practices of urban planners. We find that the notion of ‘democratic design experiments’ in many ways meet the demands of the increasingly complex field of urban planning and set out to explore how such a design programme can be applied in practice. We suggest ‘navigational practice’ as a way of describing how urban planners deal with ‘drawing things together’ in urban space and introduce ‘sensitivity’, ‘staging’ and ‘mobilization’ as interconnected elements of this practice. We exemplify the significance of these navigational practices by analysing two democratic design experiments in the area of urban waste management in Copenhagen. The article concludes that compositionist design is a powerful contribution to the framing of urban planning projects and that navigational practice can be a productive way of operationalising democratic design experiments in the urban context.

Greenlandic water and sanitation—a context oriented analysis of system challenges towards local sustainable development

Today, as Greenland focuses on more economic and cultural autonomy, the continued development of societal infrastructure systems is vital. At the same time, pressure is put on the systems by a lack of financial resources and locally based professional competences as well as new market-based forms of organization. Against this background, the article discusses the challenges facing Greenland’s self-rule in relation to further develop the existing water and wastewater systems so that they can contribute to the sustainable development of Greenland. The article reviews the historical development of the water supply and wastewater system. This leads to an analysis of the sectorisation, which in recent decades has reorganized the Greenlandic infrastructures, and of how this process is influencing local sustainable development. The article discusses the socio-economic and human impacts and points to the need for developing the water and sanitation system to support not only hygiene and health, but also local sustainable development.

Greenlandic water and sanitation systems—identifying system constellation and challenges

A good water supply and wastewater management is essential for a local sustainable community development. This is emphasized in the new global goals of the UN Sustainable Development, where the sixth objective is to: “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” (United Nations 2015). This obviously raises the question of how this can be achieved considering the very different conditions and cultures around the globe. This article presents the Greenlandic context and elucidates the current Greenland water supply system and wastewater management system from a socio-technical approach, focusing on the geographic, climatic and cultural challenges. The article identifies a diverse set of system constellations in different parts of Greenland and concludes with a discussion of health and quality of life implications.

Culture in engineering education -CDIO as a frame for developing intercultural competences

As engineers today often work in intercultural projects and contexts, intercultural compe-tences must be part of the learning objectives in engineering educations. This is in line with the CDIO programme; however, the programme, as well as the teach-ing practises, undoubtedly needs to further develop approaches to cultural aspects in engineering education. Hence the key-question of this paper is how CDIO support the development of intercul-tural competences in engineering education, and the paper explores the implementation of CDIO in an explicitly intercultural engineering programme with focus on potentials and challenges of building close authentic interrelations and cases with the local context.