Current Issue

Alternatives to air conditioning: policies, design, technologies, behaviours

Guest Editors:
Brian Ford (Nottingham U), Dean Mumovic (UCL), Rajan Rawal (CEPT University)

Deadline for abstract submission: 12 APRIL 2021

Full details downloadable here

This special issue explores alternative approaches to providing thermal comfort and ventilation in different climatic zones across the world at the scales of building, neighbourhood and city. It considers the implications of these alternatives across a range of issues: health, wellbeing, air quality and heat stress; technical / design solutions; social expectations and practices; climate change; policy and regulation; supply chain and procurement; education and training. It includes a range of disciplines: geography, sociology, anthropology, behavioural sciences, architecture, engineering, public health, economics, energy and environmental assessment.

In urbanised areas, there is an opportunity to break the current dependency on air conditioning. The design of cities, neighbourhoods and buildings can ensure ventilation and thermal comfort by climate friendly means. Retrofit opportunities for the existing building stock can make existing buildings comfortable without increasing energy demand. The design of new buildings and their environs can reduce or eliminate the need for air conditioning.

Equally important are the responses of the many different actors that promote or inhibit adoption - policy makers, clients, construction professions and the supply chain (development and procurement). Key questions include:

• What constitutes a national cooling action plan?
• How resilient should buildings and cities be to a warmer world?
• How resilient to heat should buildings be if energy supply is disrupted?
• What role do professionals and the supply chain have in implementing change?

Topics include:

• Urban design issues - planning (building height, configuration, materials, external shading, over-shadowing, urban heat island, vegetation and open spaces, etc), effects on ventilation and cooling.
• Neighbourhood design - particularly microclimates (scale, shading, air movement, open space, trees and vegetation, urban ‘oases’).
• Building design – spatial configurations of buildings to help achieve comfort, the performance and outcomes of new build and retrofit across a range of building types and technologies (see below), their design integration aspects, their impact on building morphologies, occupant agency (see below) and feedback. Reduction of loads e.g. shading, buffer zones, orientation, optimal window opening sizes, etc), advanced natural ventilation, wind tower systems, etc. Building materials and techniques.
• Social behaviours & inhabitant agency - how people actually inhabit buildings and cities. Patterns of occupation and practices inside and outside buildings include seasonal and diurnal adaptation which impact the need for cooling (e.g. the traditional siesta), communication of appropriate information on how to operate the building.
• Cooling technologies and their application - examination different technologies (performance, economics, whole life impacts, etc) and their integration: natural ventilation, evaporative cooling, radiant cooling, night time cooling , ice cooling, ground water cooling, thermal mass and cooling, negawatt cooling.
• Demographics - analysis increasing demand for air conditioning due to affluence, disparities within countries of a/c unit ownership, people adversely affected / made vulnerable now or in future climate scenarios.
• Economics - macro analysis of different thermal comfort scenarios (capital and operating costs vs societal costs e.g. health, environmental, social impacts).
• Policy, regulation & standards - what shifts & incentives are needed at individual building, neighbourhood and city scales to encourage buildings without mechanical systems, to create appropriate internal temperature targets, to protect the “commons” (e.g. eliminate waste heat from a/c), to provide planning for appropriate shading, ventilation, green infrastructure at neighbourhood & city scales.
• Public health - comparison of mechanical vs non-mechanical ventilation: airborne infectious transmission rates, air movement patterns in rooms and buildings, CO2 concentration & air pollutants, the physiology of adaptive comfort, the influence of neighbourhood microclimate and the incidence/transmission of infectious disease.
• Energy use and environment impacts – impacts of a/c on energy demand, peak energy and GHG emissions.
• Public attitudes – the anthropology of cooling, the current and changing expectations for cooling: thermal pleasure, cooling desire, air conditioning and ‘development’, public attitudes to cooling in warm places.
• Market transformation – analysis of current and alternative development & procurement models. Standard models reward developers for creating a/c buildings. What new models are needed for rewarding low energy alternatives, e.g cooling as a service (CAAS)? The business case for alternative approaches.
• Education & training - What are the roles of individual teachers / staff in leading change? What resistance and difficulties do they meet? How can educators overcome these barriers?
• Certification - are different / alternative processes of certification required for alternative cooling systems? Do professionals and vocational workers need different / additional / alternative qualifications to show they have appropriate skills?

Timeline

Deadline for abstract submission: 12 April 2021
Full papers due: 01 September 2021
Referees' comments: 01 December 2021
Final version due: 01 February 2022
Publication: April 2022
Note: papers are published as soon as they are accepted and therefore some papers will progress faster and appear in advance of the whole issue.

MORE INFORMATION
Submission details and further information:
https://www.buildingsandcities.org/calls-for-papers/alternatives-air-conditioning.html

We are pleased to announce that B&C has been formally approved for inclusion in The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The journal has been awarded DOAJ's 'SEAL OF APPROVAL' that is given to only 10% of eligible publications.

DOAJ is a long-standing mark of journal quality. Inclusion is only open to journals with high quality editorial process and transparency, complexity of peer review, easy and freely available articles in open access publishing mode.

All peer-reviewed content in Buildings & Cities will be indexed in the DOAJ. This means B&C is Plan S compliant.

Buildings & Cities was awarded the DOAJ Seal of Approval for demonstrating best practice in open access publishing.

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.