The paper offers an analysis of empirical evidence on the equity impacts of operational Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems in the Global South. The focus is on vertical equity, i.e. whether BRT systems achieve progressive benefits for poorer segments of the population. Findings from Africa, Asia and Latin America all suggest that BRT does offer significant benefits to lowincome groups, in terms of travel time and cost savings, access enhancement, and safety and health benefits. However benefits are often skewed towards medium-income users and thus less progressive than they might be. Two primary reasons for this are insufficient spatial coverage, and inappropriate fare policies. While many features of BRT potentially allow it to deliver pro-poor outcomes, such outcomes only materialise if BRT implementers pay specific and sustained attention to equity. The paper identifies key issues that need to be addressed to steer BRT implementation towards more socially sustainable outcomes, critical amongst which is to improve integration with other transit, paratransit, and non-motorised transport services, and with the housing sector.

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We present the program Sustainable Design Engineering, where Science and Technology Studies theories are a core element among design and engineering approaches. Our main claim is that existing product centred and short-term oriented solution tools and knowledges are inadequate for system design in a sustainable transition perspective. To achieve this goal, design theory and practices need to be further improved to be able to tackle controversies and engage in proposing how to navigate conflicting matters of concern and partial systemic clashes with a long-term scope.

At present, climate change, pollution, and uncontrolled urbanism threaten not only natural ecosystems, but also the urban environment. Approaches to mitigate these challenges and able to provide an alternative for the use of the space are deemed to be multidisciplinary, combining architecture, vegetation integration, circular economy and information and communications technologies (ICT). University campuses are a key scenario to evaluate such solutions as their student and research community is intrinsically willing to support these experiences and provide a wide knowledge on the fields necessary for their design and implementation. However, the creation of areas combining usability and sustainability is commonly lacking a multidisciplinary approach combining all these different perspectives. Hence, the present work aims to overcome this limitation by the development of a novel integrated approach for campus spaces for co-working and leisure, namely a “Smart Tree”, where novel architecture, furniture design, flora integration, environmental sensoring and communications join together. To this end, a survey of the literature is provided, covering related approaches as well as general principles behind them. From this, the general requirements and constraints for the development of the Smart Tree area are identified, establishing the main interactions between the architecture, greening and ICT perspectives. Such requirements guide the proposed system design and implementation, whose impact on the environment is analyzed. Finally, the research challenges and lessons learned for their development are identified in order to support future works.