The fast urbanization rate together with increasing global population and consumption is challenging the long-term sustainability of our social systems and supporting ecosystems on earth. The signs of instability can be seen in environmental degradation, e.g., climate change and loss of biodiversity. Also, the increasing use of materials and energy creates competition and international conflicts. The success of international agreements to handle the global problems has been limited. This is because deeply entrenched economic and political interests are involved. Political leaders are locked up to promises of economic growth and increasing welfare. Through globalization, resources and products are transported long distances and it is becoming hard to distinguish between local and global effects. This makes people feel that the overall situation is so complicated, so they cannot affect it. Bringing things closer to people will create more awareness and can create enormous opportunities for new ideas and business to solve the existing problems. The United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals are focused on reducing poverty in the world. China has succeeded in reducing poverty on a massive scale through fast economic growth but to the price of increased use of virgin resources and environmental degradation. It seems more and more urgent to develop support models for urban development on a local scale focusing on urban metabolism. As sustainable development involves many normative decisions, participatory planning and cross-sectoral planning will be needed to ensure that conflicts between goals can be resolved. The Swedish Green Building Council has, together with more than one thousand actors, developed a recent model for the support of sustainable urban planning called CITYLAB. This has been used in a case study in the city of Changzhou in China. The case study reveals several barriers in Chinese planning when it comes to implementing more of horizontal planning practices.
PurposeThe purpose of this paper we present a case study where the Swedish planning support system Citylab is applied to a Chinese case in Changzhou's Tianning District.Design/methodology/approachChina's planning system is a vertical system based on policy development on the national level, policies which are to be implemented on local level. There is a gap between the ambitious central policies and the implementations on local levels. China is now exporting its planning model to other developing countries which makes it urgent to show examples of other strategies including more horizontal planning involving the public. The planning system in Sweden is based on a much more horizontal process. Therefore, the authors try to learn from Sweden's vertical planning system in the urban development environment of China.FindingsA key message for policy makers in China is that systems like Citylab can play an important role in developing practical and scalable examples of more sustainable city districts. The paper concludes that a barrier for local sustainability planning in China is still lack of effective communication between local actors including the public.Originality/valueThe authors exemplified Changzhou Tianning District's practical exploration, thus proving the adapted Citylab method's practical operability. Based on the common problems faced by eco-city development in developing countries, the method framework of Citylab is applicable to other developing countries, with strong room for deduction and development.
Building atrium design is crucial to maintaining a sustainable built environment and providing thermal comfort to occupants. This study proposes a parametric framework to optimize the atrium’s geometry for environmental performance and thermal comfort improvement. It integrates the parametric design, performance simulation, and multi-objective optimization in the Rhino and Grasshopper platform to realize automatic optimization. The atrium’s well index, shape ratio, volume ratio, position index, and inner interface window-to-wall ratio were set as optimized factors. For the optimization objectives, useful daylight illuminance (UDI), energy use intensity (EUI), and the discomfort time percentage (DTP) were chosen as metrics for the measurement of daylighting, energy use efficiency, and thermal comfort, respectively. Moreover, a geometry mapping method is developed; it can turn atrium shape into rectangular profiles. Thus, the framework can apply to general buildings. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, an atrium optimization case study is conducted for a villa in Poland. According to the optimization results, the performance of the compared three objectives are improved by 43.20%, 15.52%, and 3.89%, respectively. The running time for the optimization is about 36 s per solution, which greatly reduce the human and time cost compared to the traditional working method.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.