Maj-Britt Quitzau

Quantification of urban metabolism through coupling with the life cycle assessment framework: concept development and case study

Cities now consume resources and produce waste in amounts that are incommensurate with the populations they contain. Quantifying and benchmarking the environmental impacts of cities is essential if urbanization of the world’s growing population is to occur sustainably. Urban metabolism (UM) is a promising assessment form in that it provides the annual sum material and energy inputs, and the resultant emissions of the emergent infrastructural needs of a city’s sociotechnical subsystems. By fusing UM and life cycle assessment (UM‐LCA) this study advances the ability to quantify environmental impacts of cities by modeling pressures embedded in the flows upstream (entering) and downstream (leaving) of the actual urban systems studied, and by introducing an advanced suite of indicators. Applied to five global cities, the developed UM‐LCA model provided enhanced quantification of mass and energy flows through cities over earlier UM methods. The hybrid model approach also enabled the dominant sources of a city’s different environmental footprints to be identified, making UM‐LCA a novel and potentially powerful tool for policy makers in developing and monitoring urban development policies. Combining outputs with socioeconomic data hinted at how these forces influenced the footprints of the case cities, with wealthier ones more associated with personal consumption related impacts and poorer ones more affected by local burdens from archaic infrastructure.

Bathroom Transformation: From Hygiene to Well-Being?

ABSTRACT Western bathroom standards, which have long been dominated by ideas of hygiene, seem to be in the process of change. Whereas transformations of kitchens have been well studied, little attention has been directed towards the contemporary development of bathrooms. This article provides a case study of the transformation in design, use, and meaning of Danish bathrooms, drawing lines back in history but focusing mainly on current changes. The bathroom is seen as a complex arena where many different forces interact. The study applies the regime concept to organize the story and outlines the developments in physical frameworks, practices, and images. It is based on a combination of literature survey, review of magazine and media coverage, visits to exhibitions, and qualitative interviews. The article outlines changes in Danish bathrooms and analyzes how new trends appear in relation to actual bathroom renovations. In particular, the notion of well-being is highlighted as challenging existing hygiene ideas.

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.