Current Issue

Urban systems for sustainability and health

Guest Editors: Jonathon Taylor (Tampere U) and Philippa Howden-Chapman (U of Otago)

Deadline for abstract submission: 30 July 2020

Cities are complex systems with interactions between various factors e.g.: urban density, ‘green’ infrastructure and open space, housing, transport, waste management, water and sanitation, air quality, health systems, and city governance. With an increasing majority of the global population now inhabiting urban areas, it is essential that cities reduce their environmental footprints and increase their resilience to environmental change whilst protecting and promoting planetary health.

This special issue seeks to explore how cities can address the multiple challenges of health and sustainability. This involves the development and implementation of evidence-informed solutions in a variety of different contexts (mature cities, rapidly expanding urban areas, shrinking cities, and informal settlements; Global North and Global South); political systems (high centralised, decentralised, autocratic, democratic) and scales (city, neighbourhood, street, building). Papers are sought on a variety of topics that model, track or evaluate the effectiveness and outcomes of different policies or practices, as well as the interaction between various systems.

Evidence is sought from different contexts from which we expect distinctions, complementarities and comparisons to be drawn for informing equitable development pathways for improving sustainability and public health in cities. In particular, we are interested in research that accelerates the implementation of large-scale ‘transformational’ changes that improve health and sustainability in low-, middle- and high-income settings, and across different socioeconomic and demographic groups.

Papers in this special issue address key urban topics including but not limited to:

• Systematic/scoping reviews of evidence on potential solutions for healthy sustainable urban development
• Methods for tracking progress towards city-specific sustainability and health goals, and/or studies that compare city development trajectories
• Modelling or evaluation of urban health and wellbeing, including: energy provision, transport infrastructure and operation, green and blue infrastructure, climate, air pollution, emissions, health systems, housing, water, sanitation, and waste management
• Behavioural science, systems thinking and participatory methods to inform and develop intervention strategies and/or understand processes for implementing change
• Public engagement and capacity building
• Studies into the use of research evidence on sustainability and health by decision-makers and other stakeholders in public policy
• Studies into the effectiveness of methods of dissemination, communication and engagement to help drive change
• How health systems identify and reduce risks of disease and epidemics in urban planning and infrastructure
• Policy analysis of health intentions / outcomes in the regulation of urban infrastructures
• Theories of change for sustainability and health

Timeline

Deadline for abstract submission: 30 July 2020
Full papers due: 30 January 2021
Referees’ comments: 09 April 2021
Final version due: 01 June 2021
Publication: August 2021

Download the full Call for Papers here.

Retrofitting at scale: accelerating capabilities for domestic building stocks

Guest Editors: Faye Wade (U of Edinburgh) and Henk Visscher (TU Delft)

Deadline for abstract submission: 13 July 2020

What are the capabilities and capacities for delivering retrofit at scale?

This special issue explores the accelerated delivery of domestic energy retrofitting at different scales – national, municipal, neighbourhood and individual sites. It will interrogate governance, economic / business, organisational, social and technical aspects and their interactions: existing planning capabilities; available building stock data and what more is needed; rural and urban retrofit strategies; the roles, capabilities and capacities of existing and new actors / enterprises in delivering retrofit (e.g. local authorities, urban planners, construction professionals, contractors and subcontractors); how can renovation elements be produced in an industrialised way to increase capacity and reduce costs; the economic, social, political, legislative, regulatory aspects of delivery models; what owners or inhabitants require; forms of user engagement; what future proofing is appropriate; what requirements and guarantees will ensure performance in use. There will be insights across different scales and geographical contexts as well as top-down vs bottom-up models. Distinctions & complementarities will be drawn for policies and delivery strategies for different scales, stakeholders, inhabitants and disciplines.

Papers in this special issue will address key questions and offer solutions in these areas:

• Translating national and city level goals into clear targets for retrofit of the domestic building stock
• The governance and regulation of retrofit: enabling legislation, changes to existing legislation / regulation, enforcement, incentives, aspects of ownership and tenure
• Planning and coordination perspectives: what new roles for planners, building control and assessment professions in identifying and cataloguing stock, facilitating and monitoring progress?
• Policy analysis of municipal actions / programmes on building retrofits and their intended outcomes
• Top-down vs bottom-up approaches; incentives for participating in mass retrofit programmes
• The inclusion of embodied energy / carbon in the total calculation
• Training, skills and certification of schemes for construction professionals and individual projects
• What capabilities and capacities do firms (SMEs and micro-enterprises) require to undertake retrofit?
• Supply chains for retrofit: coordination and management of domestic retrofit at scale
• Logistics and construction management: the potential for reducing unit cost of retrofit and increasing quality
• The business case (e.g. financial model) for retrofit and new business models for both private and public sectors
• Contractual: performance-related outcomes, consumer protection, service-related pricing, performance guarantees
• Mass vs individual retrofit for housing: technologies for retrofit at scale (e.g. Energiesprong, off-site, incremental, etc)
• Public engagement/ persuasion: allocation of responsibility; appropriate forms of engagement and empowerment; provision of reliable, independent information for tenants and homeowners
• Energy behaviours: how retrofit affects demand; load shifting; new definitions of thermal adequacy, space shrinkage
• Coordinating demand reduction with changing energy supply: reducing peak demand, increasing flexibility, and ‘fair usage’
• The development of appropriate standards and retrofit processes for the particular contexts of developing countries

Timeline

Deadline for abstract submission: 13 July 2020
Full papers due: 11 January 2021
Referees’ comments: 22 March 2021
Final version due: 10 May 2021
Publication: July 2021

Download the full Call for Papers here.

Urban densification

Guest editor: Jacques Teller
University of Liège, Belgium
E-mail: Jacques.Teller@uliege.be

The expansion of built-up urban areas progressively often leads to a loss of agricultural land and green spaces. It tends to increase distance travelled by car and contributes to habitat fragmentation.Accordingly, a number of cities and regions have adopted planning policies dedicated to fostering urban densification, through in-fill development and urban consolidation, in order to prevent a further expansion/sprawl of urban areas and the concomitant artificialization of open/green spaces. Other cities have an ad hoc or laissez faire approach to planning, respond to specific proposed projects on an individual basis or lack enforcement.

This special issue investigates the specific challenges, impacts and fragilities that urban densification creates in many cities and the different scales where these can be found.

The process of densification can typically be observed through two variables, i.e. through the increase of population and jobs or through the increase of built floor area within a defined area.  There is a need for a better understanding of the complex relations between densification and expansion processes across different spatio- temporal scales. Densification may indeed be measured across a very wide spectrum of temporal units,from the hourly concentration of pedestrians in given public spaces to the long-term consolidation of low-density areas.

For either Global North cities or Global South cities, topics for the special issue may include (but are not limited to):

• Description, measurement and indicators of density and densification
• The influence of rate of change (densification) over time (spatio- temporal scales)
• Cross-scalar approaches to densification: city, neighbourhood, street / block, individual site
• Planning policies / practices impacting on building level decisions and vice versa
• Spatial justice (rights to commons) and demographic impacts
• UN Habitat III and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) influences on densification
• Implications for climate action – particularly net-zero carbon cities and neighbourhoods
• Urban planning and design approaches and processes
• Liveability, mental health and wellbeing: evidence, impacts and outcomes
• Economic, social, environmental, morphological evidence: impacts and outcomes of densification
• Financial impacts of densification on housing and workplaces (affordability)
• Fragilities and unintended consequences of densification
• Densification impacts on urban microclimates, sun and wind patterns, urban heat islands
• Actual densification processes (where and how does it really occur)
• Efforts to prevent or limit densification
• What are indicators for density ranges of different neighbourhoods and cities (sprawl, compact, high rise)

Download the full call for papers here.

Timeline

Deadline for abstract submission: 02 March 2020
Full papers due: 01 September 2020
Referees' comments: 15 December 2020
Revised papers due: 01 February 2021
Publication: April 2021

Carbon metrics for buildings and cities: Assessing and controlling GHG-emissions across different scales

Guest Editor: Thomas Lützkendorf
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.
Email: thomas.luetzkendorf@kit.edu

The built environment’s types and ranges of contributions to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and thus to climate change are well known. There is acceptance of the need to drastically reduce GHG emissions and that the built environment must have a significant role. The focus of this special issue is to go substantially beyond the calculation of embodied and lifetime energy / CO2, to explore the appropriate units of assessment and their scalability for each country’s or region’s built environment in relation to the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the more recent commitment to limiting global warming to 1.5 C or less.

Download the full call for papers here.

Timeline

Deadline for abstract submission: 26 September 2019
Full papers due: 06 January 2020
Referees' comments: 09 March 2020
Final version due: 30 March 2020
Publication: June 2020