Differences in stakeholders' perceptions, lack of commitment, unused knowledge, and interfering, ineffective, measures are just some of the problems encountered in sustainable urban development projects. Collaborative decisionmaking approaches tackle these problems by creating a shared understanding of the problems faced and of ways to address them. The authors explore how the combined application of two techniques, a decision-support tool and a simulation game, can support decisionmaking for sustainable urban development. The techniques are applied in decisionmaking for real and in fictional sustainable urban renewal projects. Benefits and challenges of this combined approach are discussed based on experiences in seven applications. The main finding is that the use of the decision-support tool combined with the simulation - gaming procedure can support agenda setting and help create a shared understanding of problems and potential solutions in the field of sustainable urban renewal.
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Cities are constantly in transition. Spatial production worldwide is generated by governments, business, developers, informal settlers, et cetera; sometimes cities expand, but increasingly there is a process of reurbanisation of existing urban patterns contronted with deterioration, dysfunctionality, or obsolescence. In many situations, funding, power and technology determine how the course of urbanisation. Communities, groups and individuals with limited access to funding, power and technology need empowerment to exercise their right to shape and improve their own evironment, while respecting health, equity and ecology. The research centre for Smart Urban Redesign (SURD) at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences seeks to work on this empowerment for communities. This study presents SURD’s approach to neighbourhood revitalisation.
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Post-war urban neighbourhoods in industrialised countries have been shown to negatively affect the lifestyles of their residents due to their design. This study aims at developing an empirical procedure to select locations to be redesigned and the determinants of health at stake in these locations, with involvement of residents’ perspectives as core issue. We addressed a post-war neighbourhood in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands. We collected data from three perspectives: spatial analyses by urban designers, interviews with experts in local health and social care (n = 11) and online questionnaires filled in by residents (n = 99). These data provided input for the selection of locations to be redesigned by a multidisciplinary team (n = 16). The procedure yielded the following types of locations (and determinants): An area adjacent to a central shopping mall (social interaction, traffic safety, physical activity), a park (experiencing green, physical activity, social safety, social interaction) and a block of low-rise row houses around a public square (social safety, social interaction, traffic safety). We developed an empirical procedure for the selection of locations and determinants to be addressed, with addressing residents’ perspectives. This procedure is potentially applicable to similar neighbourhoods internationally.
MULTIFILE
Worldwide, coral reefs are rapidly declining due to increased sea water temperatures and other environmental stresses (Figure 1). To counter the extinction of major coral reef building species on the island of Bonaire, the non-profit organization Reef Renewal Foundation Bonaire is restoring degraded reef sites using corals that are grown in local nurseries. In these nurseries, corals are propagated on artificial trees using fragmentation. After 6-8 months of growth in the nursery, the corals are transplanted to degraded reef sites around the island. Over the years more than 21.000 corals have been outplanted to reef restoration sites in this way. These corals show high survivorship under natural reef conditions but remain under threat by environmental disturbances, such as increased water temperatures, diseases, and competition with macroalgae. A promising intervention to increase reef persistence and resilience is to manipulate the coral-associated microbiome. At present, the composition of the microbiome in nursery-reared and outplanted corals on Bonaire is unknown. The aim of the current project is to identify and isolate naturally occurring beneficial bacteria that may stimulate the resilience of these corals. Our key objectives are: 1) to assess the presence of functionally beneficial bacteria in corals in nursery and restoration sites on Bonaire using metagenomic screening. 2) to design culture strategies to isolate these functionally beneficial bacteria. In the future, a selection of these beneficial bacteria can be applied to the corals to increase their resilience against environmental disturbances.
Over the last couple of years there is a growing interest in the role of the bicycle in Western urban transport systems as an alternative to car use. Cycling not only has positive environmental impacts, but also positive health effects through increased physical activity. From the observation of the Urban Intelligence team that cycling data and information was limited, we have started the development of cycleprint. Cycleprint stands for Cycle Policy Renewal and INnovation by means of tracking Technology with the objective to enable more customer friendly cycle policy.The initial objective of Cycleprint was to translate GPS data into policy relevant insights to enable customer friendly cycle policy. The online toolkit what Cycleprint has become, answers the questions about:-route choice-speeds-delays at intersections -intensities Because of the success of Cycleprint in the Netherlands the range of features is still under development. As a result of the development of Cycleprint the Dutch organized the fietstelweek. In addition to Cycleprint the Urban Intelligence team developed the cyclescan to explore the effects of cycle network enhancement. The project is developed in direct collaboration with the Provincie Noord-Brabant and Metropoolregio Eindhoven to fulfill the ambition to become cycling region of the Netherlands in 2020.
