Conference Agenda

The urban sustainability assessment is the key to evaluate environmental, social and economic issues at various levels. This paper aims to devise and evaluate a set of sustainability indicators to assess the impacts of urban development on Indian hill settlements. New Tehri Township in Uttarakhand is taken as a case study for the analysis, that was planned to resettle the residents of settlements affected by Tehri dam. Qualitative content analysis (QCA) method have been employed in the study to select the sustainability indicators for proposing a sustainability framework and performing spatial analysis using a GIS-based tool. Previous scholarly literature has shown that a set of indicators are very useful for developing qualitative and quantitative variables of urban environments. The analysis has shown that topography, the climate of the place, appropriate urban layout, transportation and connectivity, extent of open spaces and adequate solar exposure play a major role in promoting sustainable development and ensuring a better quality of life in a hill settlement. Also, a conceptual sustainability assessment framework provides an indexing model to the planners and designers to be used as a decision support tool in curbing the negative consequences of development in environmentally sensitive hill areas.

Climate change is disrupting our planet’s natural cycles and the steep socio-economic growth together with rapid urbanisation are increasing the uncertainty of its effects. During the last decades, frequency and impact of flash floods and droughts in Mediterranean and Middle-East regions has substantially increased and will continue to rise due to these new variations. Buildings and local architecture in these areas must be adapted to avoid future damages. However, disaster prevention will not be truly effective until the ‘human factor’ is considered, based on actual evidence. Better research into how communities are affected by disasters and how they re-act with new architectural solutions is urgently needed.

In 2007, one Spanish town was tragically affected by the Girona River flash-floods and its population and buildings were severely disrupted. This case study was chosen as the main testing ground within this research, whose main aims were: a) to identify environmental retrofit strategies to increase resilience and adaptation to flooding, while improving comfort and living conditions; and, b) to present the proposed strategies to the affected local population. The project revealed insights in the increased level of acceptance and understanding of innovative solutions by local inhabitants when greater communication and participation is achieved.

This paper investigated the effectiveness of high solar reflectance paints in three building types—houses, medium rise residential buildings, and factories—in the tropical climate of Bangkok, Thailand. It was found that high reflective paint, when applied to the walls and/or roofs of buildings, could reduce electricity used in air conditioning systems up to 21.6-49.8% for a house, 7.6-15.8% for a medium rise residential building, and 7.6-61.7% for a factory. Results also showed that the total solar reflectance or TSR property had a higher impact on reducing energy demand than the thermal emittance property of the paints. When the heat resistance property of construction materials increases, the effectiveness of high reflective paint decreases.

Setting Zero Net Energy Performance goals for large building stocks such as University Campuses can have a great effect on mitigating climate change impact, especially in locations such as Hawai’i, where resources and energy are limited. This paper describes the content and the methods used to develop the Building Design and Performance Standards for the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM BDPS). They help achieve this goal and other building performance and energy use related State mandates while responding to the climate and environmental priorities of the region of Hawaii. The UHM BDPS are based on a location-specific set of sustainable goals extracted from current industry standard documents along with the results of extensive performance simulations. They address the project phases and teams involved, and include pre-design information to develop procurement documentation, design strategies and requirements for building performance, water conservation, and other principles of sustainable operational models. These Standards also address the building operation phase and describe the framework to provide real-time information to document the progress in achieving the ZNE and other progressive campus sustainability goals overtime, in addition to identifying operation and maintenance issues.