John E. Fernández

Resource Consumption of New Urban Construction in China

The volume of Chinas recent additions to its urban‐built environment is unprecedented. China now accounts for half of all new building area in the world. Increases in building stocks of all types have occurred during an extended period of accelerated growth of the national economy. This expansion promises to continue through 2030. As a result, the rapid conversion of land from low‐density agricultural and light manufacturing to new urban zones of high density and material‐intensive commercial and residential buildings has consumed enormous quantities of domestic and imported resources and has irreversibly altered the Chinese landscape. This article examines the consumption of material resources dedicated to Chinese building construction through a survey and analysis of the material intensity of three major building types. This provides a basis for outlining the emerging life‐cycle issues of recent additions to the built environment and of continued construction. With this as the starting point, the field of industrial ecology can work toward formulating strategies for a circular economy that include a resource‐efficient urban China.

Materials for aesthetic, energy-efficient, and self-diagnostic buildings

It has become desirable to reduce the nonrenewable content and energy footprint of the built environment and to develop “smart buildings” that allow for inexpensive monitoring and self-diagnostic capabilities. Latest-generation embedded sensors, self-healing composites, and nanoscale and responsive materials may augur a time when buildings can substantially adjust to changing environmental and functional demands. However, faced with the legal liability resulting from unknown lifetime performance, designers and engineers have had little incentive to incorporate new material technologies into building designs. As efficiency issues become more acute, the potential for improvement in performance from new materials, together with partnerships between the materials science community and those entrusted with the design and engineering of the built environment, may offer real breakthroughs for the future.

Urban versus conventional agriculture, taxonomy of resource profiles: a review

Urban agriculture appears to be a means to combat the environmental pressure of increasing urbanization and food demand. However, there is hitherto limited knowledge of the efficiency and scaling up of practices of urban farming. Here, we review the claims on urban agriculture’s comparative performance relative to conventional food production. Our main findings are as follows: (1) benefits, such as reduced embodied greenhouse gases, urban heat island reduction, and storm water mitigation, have strong support in current literature. (2) Other benefits such as food waste minimization and ecological footprint reduction require further exploration. (3) Urban agriculture benefits to both food supply chains and urban ecosystems vary considerably with system type. To facilitate the comparison of urban agriculture systems we propose a classification based on (1) conditioning of the growing space and (2) the level of integration with buildings. Lastly, we compare the predicted environmental performance of the four main types of urban agriculture that arise through the application of the taxonomy. The findings show how taxonomy can aid future research on the intersection of urban food production and the larger material and energy regimes of cities (the “urban metabolism”).

Dynamic modeling of Singapore's urban resource flows: Historical trends and sustainable scenario development

The process of urbanization is one that is inextricably linked with the consumption of material, energy, and water resources. Urban metabolism provides a framework for characterizing the magnitudes of these urban resource requirements by considering the extended analogy of the biological metabolic process. In this study we propose a System Dynamics approach for linking the stocks and flows of urban metabolism with the socioeconomic activities of cities. We also present initial results from its application to the island city-state of Singapore. In the long term, we intend this technique of dynamic urban metabolism to be both descriptive and predictive, the former to better understand different historical modes of urban resource consumption, and the latter to inform strategies for resource efficient urban development in an increasingly resource-scarce world.

Contributions of Local Farming to Urban Sustainability in the Northeast United States

Food consumption is an important contributor to a citys environmental impacts (carbon emissions, land occupation, water use, etc.) Urban farming (UF) has been advocated as a means to increase urban sustainability by reducing food-related transport and tapping into local resources. Taking Boston as an illustrative Northeast U.S. city, we developed a novel method to estimate sub-urban, food-borne carbon and land footprints using multiregion-input-output modeling and nutritional surveys. Computer simulations utilizing primary data explored UFs ability to reduce these footprints using select farming technologies, building on previous city-scale UF assessments which have hitherto been dependent on proxy data for UF. We found that UF generated meagre food-related carbon footprint reductions (1.1-2.9% of baseline 2211 kg CO2 equivalents/capita/annum) and land occupation increases (<1% of baseline 9000 m2 land occupation/capita/annum) under optimal production scenarios, informing future evidence-based urban design and policy crafting in the region. Notwithstanding UFs marginal environmental gains, UF could help Boston meet national nutritional guidelines for vegetable intake, generate an estimated

From Kaolin to Kevlar

160 million U.S. in revenue to growers and act as a pedagogical and community building tool, though these benefits would hinge on large-scale UF proliferation, likely undergirded by environmental remediation of marginal lands in the city.

Alternative Urban Technology for Future Low-Carbon Cities: A Demonstration Project Review and Discussion

Abstract Inventing architectural form has always been a dynamic process located at the intersection of immaterialized concept and material construction. Negotiating this relationship requires knowledge of the behavior of materials—their expressive and qualitative attributes and mechanical and physical properties. Knowledge of this kind is used by the designer to assess diverse materials for specific applications. And, while the contemporary designer has access to an increasing number of materials, many are recent inventions themselves, thus precluding an intimate knowledge of their behavior or use in buildings. This paper outlines methods for acquiring and organizing useful information about a wide range of traditional and nontraditional materials with potential for intriguing use in architecture. It identifies the use of multiobjective optimization and material indices as a powerful method for material selection and demonstrates a computational tool that facilitates critical comparisons of new materials. The comparisons are the link between the potential of new materials and contemporary building systems. The work of a graduate research seminar conducted in the Department of Architecture at MIT is given as an example of its application.

Applying Axiomatic Design to Prefabricated Building Design in the Housing Industry: A Case Study Analysis

This is the century of the city. Climate change, fossil fuel depletion, rapid urbanization and the continued escalation of energy consumption are accelerating the critical and global need for resource efficiency toward a future of low-carbon cities. To that end, new waves of development in novel urban technologies may play an important role in sustaining the growth of existing cities as well as empowering the sustainable planning and design of new townships. First, this chapter highlights renewable energy–based alternative urban technologies (AUTs) that may aid in the significant reduction of urban carbon emissions, and then proposes a general classification system of technological systems and discusses AUT future trends. The review part of this chapter seeks to establish state of the art of AUTs that target three primary urban systems: the built environment , transportation and energy.

Disaster debris management and recovery for housing stock in San Francisco, CA

Since housing market demands customized performance-effective buildings at affordable costs, prefabrication combined with mass customization is worthy for satisfying these requirements, but demands robustness and flexibility of design solutions with respect to the architect’s viewpoint. Crucial decisions that affect these aspects are made during the conceptual design phase, but in this stage suitable tools are not widely available. Since Axiomatic Design approach (AD) has been able to support designers’ decision-making process for the development of product concepts that would have the best chance to provide the specified requirements as well as for the analysis of ideas with respect to their capability to satisfy these requirements, AD is applied to the examination of contemporary well-appreciated prefabricated houses in order to identify crucial design decisions that have affected robustness and flexibility in their conceptual design. Subsequently, strategies adopted by their architects during the design generation are reviewed, and by comparison, similarities between AD and the architects’ approaches are identified. These results prove that AD can be effectively applied to prefabricated building design in the housing industry with the goal of proving effective designs in terms of robustness and flexibility from the architect’s viewpoint and therefore satisfying the current housing market demand.

Standardized analysis of urban form

In the wake of the next large-scale earthquake in the city of San Francisco, an expected 85,000 households are expected to become uninhabitable and beyond repair, leaving thousands of residents with immediate needs for shelter. Coupled with an overwhelming 6.8 million tons of debris generated, destroyed lifelines and affected livelihoods, recovery planning becomes critical for immediate response and long-term sustainable development of San Francisco. Learning from recent disasters in Haiti, New Zealand and Japan, this research addresses pertinent recovery issues by investigating the effects of a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in San Francisco, particularly the implications on the citys residential housing stock and impacts on the construction and demolition waste stream.