Journal: Sustainable Cities and Society

Abbreviation

Publisher

Elsevier

Journal Volumes

ISSN

2210-6707

Description

Filters

2012 - 2019162020 - 202639
Reset filters

Search Results

Publications 1 - 10 of 55
  • Modelling pavement watering effects on urban heat mitigation with a fast urban climate model
    Item type: Journal Article
    Chen, Jixuan; Bach, Peter M.; Leitão, João P. (2025)
    Sustainable Cities and Society
    Pavement watering is considered as a possible solution to mitigate urban heat and adapt urban environments to climate change. Yet, modelling tools to support the planning of such practices, especially at larger scales, are scarce. This study presents the integration of pavement watering dynamics into an existing urban climate model. The proposed new model was evaluated against measurements as well as modelling data with a good agreement. We then tested our integrated approach with different input information to ensure the robustness and reliability of its results, showing that a reduction of 15 °C in surface temperature and up to 2 °C in air temperature can be induced by wetting impervious pavements. Results also provide some first insights into possible best practices for pavement watering and surface and air temperatures reduction. Finally, a city-scale simulation demonstrated the potential impact of scaling up the pavement watering simulation process. The proposed model opens up new opportunities for further understanding of the cooling impact and water demand of pavement watering practices, offering new approaches to smart planning of heat mitigation measures for more liveable cities.
  • River rehabilitation as an opportunity for ecological landscape design
    Item type: Journal Article
    Grêt-Regamey, Adrienne; Weibel, Bettina; Vollmer, Derek; et al. (2016)
    Sustainable Cities and Society
  • The synthesis of environmental and socio-cultural information in the ecological design of urban riverine landscapes
    Item type: Journal Article
    Prescott, Michaela F.; Ninsalam, Yazid (2016)
    Sustainable Cities and Society
  • A multi-stakeholder engagement framework for material-building-city synergy through circular transformation
    Item type: Journal Article
    Bostancı, Hafize Büşra; Tanyer, Ali Murat; Habert, Guillaume (2024)
    Sustainable Cities and Society
    Scholars, industrial stakeholders, and governmental institutions are developing the circular economy paradigm. However, the emergence of multiple perspectives has challenged its implementation. As the industry that is the biggest contributor to the negative impacts on the environment, the construction industry stakeholders are paving the way for more sustainable as well as circular and regenerative construction by considering all actors in the system. Yet, the construction industry has a complex supply chain that requires clear strategies and stakeholder engagement across materials, buildings, and cities for efficient flows in the supply chain. Nonetheless, there is a need for improvement in the engagement of construction stakeholders for circular transformation. Therefore, this study aims to develop a multi-stakeholder engagement framework through circular transformation to guide the decision-makers for circular city governance. It has identified critical success factors by considering the construction stakeholders. The framework includes strategies at the micro (material), meso (building), and macro (city) scales to strengthen the material-building-city synergy. It's a significant step toward advancing circular city governance by bridging the gap between theoretical understanding and practical implementation and establishing a robust engagement for material-building-city synergy. The study employs a systematic literature review to extract strategies and natural language processing to analyze the strategies by topic modeling and defines critical success factors for multi-stakeholder engagement at multiscale. The outcome introduces the REVERT framework, bridging resource, envisagement, validation, entity, regulation, and technology, to facilitate a seamless transition by material-building-city synergy advancing circular city governance.
  • Global warming likely compromises the annual performance of zero-energy buildings while the urban heat island effect exacerbates the impact
    Item type: Journal Article
    Zhao, Yiman; Ding, Xiaotian; Fan, Yifan; et al. (2025)
    Sustainable Cities and Society
    Despite the significant impact of global warming and the urban heat island (UHI) effect on building energy demand, their combined effects are often overlooked, leading to inaccuracies in future energy performance evaluations of Zero-Energy Buildings (ZEBs). This study focused on an operational ZEB located in Virginia, USA, and investigated the impacts of global warming and UHI effect, using the Vatic Weather File Generator (VWFG) and Urban Weather Generator (UWG) models. Then, the influence of combined effect on the future energy demand is evaluated by Design Builder. Moreover, extreme climates are considered to assess the energy systems’ resilience. Results show that total energy demand for space heating and cooling is predicted to increase by 24% and 38% under the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios from 2021 to 2100, driven by global warming and the UHI effect. For extreme climates under the RCP4.5 scenario, peak cooling and heating demands are expected to be 33% and 66% higher than the 80-year average, while rising to 39% and 71% under the RCP8.5 scenario, respectively. Furthermore, current climate-based designs are unlikely to enable renewable energy generation to meet zero-energy requirements by 2100. This framework is therefore essential for enhancing the accuracy and reliability of energy system design for ZEBs.
  • Developing river rehabilitation scenarios by integrating landscape and hydrodynamic modeling for the Ciliwung River in Jakarta, Indonesia
    Item type: Journal Article
    Lin, Ervine; Shaad, Kashif; Girot, Christophe (2016)
    Sustainable Cities and Society
  • Estimating the building based energy consumption as an anthropogenic contribution to urban heat islands
    Item type: Journal Article
    Böhme, Peter; Berger, Matthias; Massier, Tobias (2015)
    Sustainable Cities and Society
    Today the implication of buildings’ electricity demand on the outdoor climate around buildings is not fully understood. For tropical cities like Singapore, where air-conditioning is required throughout the year and high rise buildings irregularly alternate with lower buildings, the distribution of this so called anthropogenic heat emissions in time and space is determining the local and overall contribution to the urban heat island (UHI). In the absence of detailed measurements calculating the local consumption can be challenging. We present a methodology which combines a top-down disaggregation of sectoral electricity consumption with a bottom-up geographic information system (GIS) derived building database for obtaining anthropogenic heat emission maps with high spatial resolution. The database has been validated through control samples. Using the example of Singapore we can show that heat emissions are more inhomogeneous and higher in magnitude than previously estimated. Our method can now be employed to generate better UHI models by identifying areas with significant anthropogenic heat emissions.
  • Impact of evaporative cooling due to wetting of urban materials on local thermal comfort in a street canyon
    Item type: Journal Article
    Kubilay, Aytaç; Derome, Dominique; Carmeliet, Jan (2019)
    Sustainable Cities and Society
  • Participatory resilience: Surviving, recovering and improving together
    Item type: Journal Article
    Mahajan, Sachit; Hausladen, Carina I.; Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo, Javier; et al. (2022)
    Sustainable Cities and Society
    In the context of urbanization and a growing population, cities and citizens are becoming more exposed and vulnerable to social and environmental changes, ranging from natural disasters like earthquakes and floods to uncertainties caused by issues related to climate change and complex social dynamics or even pandemics. There have been many debates about implementing resilience thinking that allow cities and communities to prepare for possible stresses and shocks. Although there are sets of frameworks aimed at building inclusive resilience strategies fostering participation and engagement, there is limited resilience-related literature on how to conceptualize participation. Through an extensive review of various kinds of publications on resilience, policy documents, and case studies, which emphasize the concepts of participation, coordination, and co-creation, this review explores and investigates how citizen participation is discussed and applied in the context of participatory resilience. We conclude that participatory approaches possess a great potential to enhance multistakeholder cooperation, social innovation, and capacity building for resilience. Realization of the potential of participatory resilience will remain limited, however, unless participation strategies and frameworks are made more transparent, inclusive, and context-sensitive.
  • Energy futures of representative Swiss communities under the influence of urban development, building retrofit, and climate change
    Item type: Journal Article
    Oraiopoulos, Argyris; Hsieh, Shashan; Schlueter, Arno (2023)
    Sustainable Cities and Society
    Reducing energy demand in buildings is an integral part of many climate change mitigation strategies. Yet, the prospected development of communities is often overlooked when estimating future energy demand. Here, we investigate the future energy demand in representative Swiss communities, considering climate change projections, building retrofit and urban development. Following a scenario-based approach we model urban, suburban and rural community archetypes under changing boundary conditions and different time scales using the City Energy Analyst an open-source computational framework. The results demonstrate that the future energy demand of Swiss communities is highly dependant on their development trajectories regarding population growth, occupant density and building use-types. For the urban archetype, the most significant result is the increase of annual space cooling which by 2060 could be comparable to space heating. For the sub-urban, increases in energy demand due to urban development were observed despite retrofit measures, whereas the rural archetype displays high space heating demand across all scenarios. Consequently, predictions for future energy demand at the community scale without considering urban development trajectories are likely to be incomplete. The results demonstrate the relevance of increasing the modelling scale from national to community scale to support decision making on different levels of governance.
Publications 1 - 10 of 55