The concept of Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) emphasises the comprehensive person-centred experience as essential to promoting living environments. SHAFE takes an interdisciplinary approach, conceptualising complete and multidisciplinary solutions for an inclusive society. From this approach, we promote participation, health, and well-being experiences by finding the best possible combinations of social, physical, and digital solutions in the community. This initiative emerged bottom-up in Europe from the dream and conviction that innovation can improve health equity, foster caring communities, and sustainable development. Smart, adaptable, and inclusive solutions can promote and support independence and autonomy throughout the lifespan, regardless of age, gender, disabilities, cultural differences, and personal choices, as well as promote happier and fairer living places.
Urban renewal and urban area development projects are by nature highly complex processes involving a multiplicity of professionals, stakeholders, and conflicting interests. Adding to this complexity are the formulated ambitions and societal challenges projects have to answer to. One of these ambitions emphasizes a more inclusive planning process, involving the inhabitants in all stages of the planning process. In terms of design, another challenge is to create environments on a human scale while building in high density such as with tall residential buildings. The metropolitan area of Amsterdam intends to have 100,000 new dwellings by 2025. Most of these dwellings have to be added within the existing urban fabric, planned on obsolete inner-city brownfield locations, at the waterfront, nearby highways whereas others are going to be built in deprived neighborhoods. The deprived neighborhoods are mainly located in the postwar areas of Amsterdam, on its northern, western, and south-eastern sides. The deprived neighborhood called the Bijlmermeer located on the south-eastern side of the city, for instance was the first high-rise development project in the Netherlands. It was designed as a single project with identical high-rise buildings in a hexagonal grid surrounded with large green spaces.These deprived, modernistic neighborhoods lack the classic housing block structures with a clear articulation of buildings and street spaces. They appear to be responsible for an ‘inhuman’ scale and demonstrate the lasting impact critical design flaws can have on the daily lives of inhabitants. Hence, the question is how to develop liveable environments where people feel fully supported by building architecture and streetscape configuration. To prevent new urban area developments that will again fail to incorporate human scale, scientific methods and user input are needed to inform the practice of planning and design, and their applied design solutions. Building on two research projects (one on participatory planning and the other on neuroarchitecture research), we explore how the newly emerging field of neuroarchitecture - and the eye-tracker in particular, might enhance urban area developments on a human scale.
Through the commodification of nature, the framing of the environment as a ‘natural resource’ or ‘ecosystem service’ has become increasingly prominent in international environmental governance. The economic capture approach is promoted by international organizations such as the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) through Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). This paper will inquire as to how forest protection is related to issues of social and ecological justice, exploring whether forest exploitation based on the top-down managerial model fosters an unequitable distribution of resources. Both top-down and community-based approaches to forest protection will be critically examined and a more inclusive ethical framework to forest protection will be offered. The findings of this examination indicate the need for a renewed focus on existing examples of good practice in addressing both social and ecological need, as well as the necessity to address the less comfortable problem of where compromise appears less possible. The conclusion argues for the need to consider ecological justice as an important aspect of more socially orientated environmental justice for forest protection. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0376892916000436 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
MULTIFILE
In the Netherlands, the theme of transitioning to circular food systems is high on the national agenda. The PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has stressed that commuting to circular food chains requires a radical transformation of the food chain where (a) natural resources must be effectively used and managed (soil, water, biodiversity, minerals), (b) there must be an optimum use of food by reducing (food) waste . . ., (c) less environmental pressure, and (d) an optimum use of residue streams. The PBL also recognizes that there should be room for tailored solutions and that it is important to establish a benchmark, to be aware of impacts in the production chain and the added value of products. In the line of circular food systems, an integrated nature-inclusive circular farming approach is needed in order to develop a feasible resource-efficient and sustainable business models that brings shared value into the food chain while invigorating the rural areas including those where agricultural vacancy is occurring. Agroforestry is an example of an integrated nature-inclusive circular farming. It is a multifunctional system that diversifies and adapts the production while reducing the carbon footprint and minimizing the management efforts and input costs; where trees, crops and/or livestock open business opportunities in the food value chains as well as in the waste stream chains. To exploit the opportunities that agroforestry as an integrated resource-efficient farming system adds to the advancement towards (a) valuable circular short food chains, (b) nature-based entrepreneurship (nature-inclusive agriculture), and (c) and additionally, the re-use of abandoned agricultural spaces in the Overijssel province, this project mobilizes the private sector, provincial decision makers, financers and knowledge institutes into developing insights over the feasible implementation of agroforestry systems that can bring economic profit while enhancing and maintaining ecosystem services.
