Brenda Vale

Indications from Sustainability Indicators

Sustainability Indicators are a measure to assess progress towards sustainable development, but how and why certain indicators are produced and used is often hard to understand. There is also a lack of common ground, so that different indicators cannot be directly compared. This paper explores the suitability of some existing sustainability indicators and measurement tools in this light. It suggests there is a need to develop simple local quantitative indicators in addition to the more commonly used qualitative indicators. A new method is outlined for the development of quantitative physical indicators as part of an integrated approach to a more sustainable urban environment.

Domestic energy sustainability of different urban residential patterns: a New Zealand approach

A quantitative study was undertaken to calculate the potential sustainability of five residential blocks in Auckland, New Zealand (NZ) of differing physical densities. The main study considered five attributes of sustainability: domestic energy, transportation, carbon sequestration, food, and waste. This paper presents the results and mathematical methodology developed for one key aspect, domestic energy. Using aerial photographs, Geographic Information System (GIS) and ecological footprint assessment techniques, domestic energy demand, generation and deficit were calculated. Research outcomes suggest that the classic New Zealand suburb with a density of 18 households per hectare might have the greatest potential to be more sustainable.

Metrics of Local Environmental Sustainability: A Case Study in Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract Environmental impacts, in addition to economic, social and cultural drivers, have significant implications in the evolution of more sustainable urban forms. This paper presents the results of calculating potential local environmental sustainability using ecological footprint techniques in terms of five main aspects—domestic energy; transportation; vegetation cover; food; waste—for five residential urban form case studies in Auckland, New Zealand. This quantitative study formulates a comprehensive methodology for measuring comparative sustainability performances and identifies important residential urban form descriptors. As measured in this research, low-density urban forms may have more potential to be sustainable compared with other compact urban forms which may require a change of behavioural patterns for the residents.

The Buddhist approach to education: an alternative approach for sustainable education

This article is based on research undertaken as part of a study of sustainable school design in Thailand. Since school design solutions are inevitably affected by educational theory and practice, in the search for appropriate building solutions, it has been necessary to review Thai educational theories and practices that relate to the sustainability approach. Recently, there have been several attempts at the international level to respond to sustainability concepts and practices in both educational and architectural fields. These have included changes to the physical building through the introduction of techniques like passive solar cooling, and curriculum changes such as the use of native plants in the school grounds for science teaching. In Thailand, sustainable practices in both fields appear to be in their infancy. This article aims to explore one current Thai educational practice that presents the possibility of responding to sustainability concepts via culturally sensitive education. The practice is based on the three Buddhist principles of learning: sila sikkha (moral conduct); samadhi sikka (mind training); and panna sikkha (wisdom development). In this holistic approach, the principles are practised simultaneously and can be applied to many dimensions, including personal, family, school and communal levels, to cultivate responsive sustainable living practices for the learners. Because the majority of Thai people are Buddhists, this approach may be an alternative way of developing sustainable education in Thailand. It also presents a way to apply local knowledge to promote sustainable ways of living in particular contexts. This may be the first step in the development of sustainable school design in Thailand and could become an integrated part of the countrys sustainable systems.

Time-use in different rooms of selected New Zealand houses and the influence of plan layout

House interiors are affected by outdoor and indoor pollutants although levels of exposure differ with room type. The times people spend in rooms also differ, and hence their potential level of exposure, which is the focus of this article. Additionally, time spent in a kitchen during cooking, which is the main source of indoor particulates for non-smoking households, could affect indoor air quality in other rooms, especially where the kitchen is part of an open plan arrangement. This study investigated the time people spend in all rooms including kitchens and open plan kitchen/dining/living in New Zealand houses. On average, New Zealanders spend 54% of time at home indoors in usual bedrooms and 29%–36% in a living room, dining room, and kitchen (or combination of these). People in open plan houses spend less time in living areas than those in cellular plan houses, but effectively more time in the ‘kitchen’. Given time spent in a combined living room/dining/kitchen, combined living room/kitchen or combined dining room/kitchen is effectively time spent in a kitchen, people spend respectively 3.23, 1.36 and 0.53 h/day more in the kitchen compared to those having a separate kitchen, which could increase their chance of exposure to kitchen pollutants.

Materials and buildings

This chapter looks at the energy-related environmental effects of materials in use through a lifecycle analysis of different ways of constructing a hypothetical small building. By calculating everything on the same basis and comparing the results, the size of the building emerges as more critical than the materials of which it is made. Also made clear is that real decisions about choice of materials using a lifecycle approach cannot be made until the form and size of the building are fixed. The chapter ends with simple principles for choosing materials for sustainable buildings.

How house size impacts type, combination and size of rooms: a floor plan study of New Zealand houses

ABSTRACT Several sources indicate a recent increase in the average floor area of New Zealand houses, making these often much larger than their older counterparts, and a similar pattern can be seen in other developed countries. While building and living in large houses seem to have become accepted, the features of these large houses have been less investigated. In addition, there is limited knowledge of how the increase in houses size has affected the size and configuration of the internal spaces. Building larger houses also equates to using more natural resources, but to investigate this further, more detail on the layout of these houses is needed. To this end, floor plans of 287 New Zealand houses of varying ages were analysed using Auto Cad 2015–2016. Internal spaces were categorised and average floor areas of all types were calculated for each house size. The results were further analysed in SPSS using analysis of variance one-way and independent sample t-tests. These results were checked against those of a survey of 286 households. Both sets of results showed that as houses increased in size, so did the floor areas of similar room types. The investigation also revealed that larger houses have more multiple rooms of the same function, sanitary spaces, specialised rooms and living rooms. Additionally, the average floor area allocated to bedrooms in an 8-room house is 133% more than that of a 4-room house, whereas the comparable figures for sanitary and circulation spaces are 185% and 364%, respectively, meaning more of the additional floor area of large houses is going into spaces that may be seldom used and into circulation areas. These results should be considered against a background of falling household size, which is important when it comes to considering how efficiently resources are used in different sized houses.

Footprinting Urban Form and Behaviour in New Zealand

Abstract The research project described in this article, which starts in October 2009, is based on the hypothesis that current New Zealand lifestyles are unsupportable in the long term because they are based upon increasingly scarce finite resources. The research will answer the following questions: What is the resource impact of the current lifestyles of New Zealanders? What lifestyles would be possible in New Zealand assuming a fair share of the worlds resources? What would be the effects of such lifestyles on existing rural and suburban communities? The research project is designed to provide knowledge on how to lower the “ecological footprints” that make up human living patterns, in order to guide policies and practices for robust future settlement development. It will deliver a detailed understanding of the environmental impact of current New Zealand life-styles, as well as a theoretical ideal scale and type of both built environment and behaviour for a community with an ecological footprint that is much nearer to the available global footprint than the current New Zealand footprint. This theoretical ideal will be measured against real New Zealand rural and suburban communities to discover what needs to be changed. The outcome will be a set of footprinting tools for use by local authorities and communities to help guide their future development decisions.

Simulation of High Thermal Mass Passive Solar Buildings

Thermal characteristics of a high thermal mass, passive solar, zero-heating house located in Hockerton, UK were investigated using building thermal energy simulation software SUNREL and EnergyPlus. Simulation results from both programs show that the accuracy of the predicted zone air temperatures depends on solar losses and inter-zone solar transfers in various thermal zones. SUNREL does not explicitly calculate losses and transfer between zones. As such, predicted air temperatures of the zones largely depend on user-defined solar transfer and loss fractions. EnergyPlus determines losses and inter-zone solar transfers based on the optical properties of external fenestration and transparent surfaces between zones. Depending on the massiveness of the building, annual simulations have to be carried out for a period longer than a year using the same weather data to eliminate the error associated with the thermal accumulation in the mass during the initial period of the simulation.

Modelling of Thermal Characteristics of Insulated Mass in Zero-heating Passive Solar Houses: Part 2—Simulation Results

Abstract Results of indoor air temperature swings in zero-heating, passive solar houses with thermally massive walls using frequency domain techniques are presented in this paper. Theoretical analyses pertinent to the study were presented in Part 1 of the paper. The diurnal and annual indoor temperature swings predicted by the other computational methods (finite difference in SUNREL and time series in EnergyPlus) for a simple test house compare reasonably well with the results obtained by frequency domain techniques. Although there is an optimum mass (corresponding to minimum air temperature swing) for a given material for diurnal cycles, the annual swing is inversely proportional to the amount of thermal mass. The results further suggest that the degree of annual swing is also dependent on the level of insulation associated with the mass. The effect of the insulation on daily fluctuations is however insignificant.