Thorsten Schuetze

Towards Development of a Label for Zero Emission Buildings: A Tool to Evaluate Potential Zero Emission Buildings

There are many concepts and labels developed with the aim to promote sustainable building. However, most of these address mainly energy aspects and do not consider the entire environmental impact of a building construction. In contrast, the concept of Zero Emission Buildings (ZEB) integrates energy and material (biomass, water) flows, resulting in buildings, which do not produce harmful emissions and on the contrary produce energy, water and resources. It envisions maximum decentralization of a building implying closed resource cycles and hence no environmental impact during its operational use. However, the concept of ZEB lacks a general framework under which potential buildings can be easily assessed. Consequently, the ZEB Assessment Tool was developed in order to easily evaluate potential ZEBs regarding their environmental performance. The ZEB Assessment Tool was developed by considering specific decision parameters and appointing an appropriate characteristic to them. These decision parameters were (i) Pre-Assessment, (ii) System boundary, (iii) Quantification of environmental impact, (iv) Database, (v) Quantification of qualitative aspects, and (vi) Calculation of target value. The evaluation of several case studies from Switzerland with the ZEB Assessment Method showed that the tool is well adapted to the requirements of OPEN ACCESS the ZEB Concept. Firstly, it requires a small amount of input data, which enables a simple primary assessment of a specific building. Secondly, it has the advantage that it evaluates a wide range of factors regarding the building’s environmental performance. These are energy, water, biomass and a set of qualitative aspects. Furthermore, it takes into account various environmental impacts and can be applied for buildings with different type of use and in different countries of location.

Decentral Water Supply and Sanitation

The notion of inverse infrastructures – that is, bottom-up, user-driven, self-organizing networks – gives us a fresh perspective on the omnipresent infrastructure systems that support our economy and structure our way of living. This fascinating book considers the emergence of inverse infrastructures as a new phenomenon that will have a vast impact on consumers, industry and policy. Using a wide range of theories, from institutional economics to complex adaptive systems, it explores the mechanisms and incentives for the rise of these alternatives to large-scale infrastructures and points to their potential disruptive effect on conventional markets and governance models.

Conclusions and Solutions

In this chapter, conclusions are drawn from the content discussed in this book. Approaching urban areas as ecosystems made it possible to address a variety of topics that influence the well-being of our built environment and its users and occupants without losing sight of the interconnectedness between these topics. Especially, the urban metabolism metaphor is useful for understanding, identifying and measuring inefficiencies and quality loss within urban areas and for tracing opportunities to improve the metabolism. This includes proposals for the introduction of closed-loop recycling economies, of which some examples are presented and discussed in this chapter. These examples show that integrated ecosystem approaches, which are based on the specific basic conditions of a city’s location, show great promise for the sustainable (re-)construction of urban areas.

Primary Exploration of the Research Framework of Integrated Water Resource Management and Spatial Planning

This paper proposed a research framework to contribute to understanding how integrated policy and implementation approaches, based on the concept of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) can create more positive relationships between water management and urban development. The research includes the interaction of technical measures and public policy responses, water management, spatial planning, economic development, agriculture and other sector policies.