• Energy Research
• GB close
• BE close
• Sustainability close

Embodying circular economy transition as a sustainable city concept, circularity in cities is increasingly the subject of policy innovations, urban strategies, and research & development agendas. It seems evident that a circular city should include more than the sum or multiplication of urban circular economies. Nevertheless, prevailing discourses remain till today business focused, and how circular economy creates economic, social, and environmental resilience in cities has yet to be explored. This paper conceptualizes the notion of urban circularity. It introduces an analytical framework sorting existing circularity concepts that are based on design and planning characteristics. Adopting comparative case study research on four contemporary forward-looking spatial representations of ‘circular’ places, this paper articulates their circularity interpretation. Demonstrating how diverging sustainability framings and political positions are embedded within the studied spatial representations, this paper aims to bring clarity in contemporary circular city approaches for policymakers as well as for spatial practitioners. The paper concludes with an agenda for multi-perspective and multi-dimensional circular city design, which is anchored in place specific and multi-scalar transition relations. It suggests urban landscape design as a disciplinary field to act as a pivot in transdisciplinary circularity design and research.

Silt pollution generated during major highway construction projects can prove detrimental to the water environment and the aquatic species that depend on it. Construction activities can leave many kilometers of exposed soil susceptible to erosion from surface water runoff, which can result in silt pollution and degradation of ecologically sensitive watercourses if appropriate mitigation is not in place. In Scotland, assurances need to be provided during scheme development to demonstrate that there is sufficient space to accommodate temporary drainage. In response, a methodological framework has been developed that can be applied before construction commences to estimate the required capacity of settlement ponds including runoff and soil loss volume estimation, which are estimated using the Rational Method and Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE). The application of the framework as a case-study has demonstrated the potential applicability of the approach and highlighted where further refinements can be made to increase the robustness for future applications by improving the accuracy of input parameters to address site-specific conditions. Furthermore, it demonstrates how adopting erosion control measures can reduce the land required to accommodate temporary settlement ponds.

Urban and rural areas are the cradles of human development and civilization as all practical progress and feasible products have emerged from these places. Having a clear understanding of the sustainability of these areas, especially the progress of research in this field, is highly important. This study undertakes a comprehensive scientometric analysis to visualize and quantitatively measure the outcome of the scientific enterprise to construct sustainable urban and rural areas. The scientific productivity of recorded publications, their impacts, and their importance were systematically measured in diverse aspects by virtue of ten distinctive techniques. A critical assessment of the respected criteria for sustainable urban and rural areas is presented in order to further clarify its boundaries with other related topics, as well as providing a clear benchmark for future studies. After screening the search results between 1900 and 2018 on the Web of Science database, 7397 publications explicitly related to sustainable urban and rural areas were extracted and analyzed by the CiteSpace software via the relevant bibliometric indicators. The results of this study shed light on the trends and patterns, consisting of kernel research areas, countries, journals, institutions, and how these entities have been concatenated, inside the bibliographic records around sustainable urban and rural areas. The findings facilitate in identifying the barriers and weakness in the current sustainable urban and rural areas research, and consequently help in identifying auspicious directions for prospective investigations.

Climate change is expected to expose the locked-in overheating risk concerning bioclimatic buildings adapted to a specific past climate state. The study aims to find energy-efficient building designs which are most resilient to overheating and increased cooling energy demands that will result from ongoing climate change. Therefore, a comprehensive parametric study of various passive building design measures was implemented, simulating the energy use of each combination for a temperate climate of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The approach to overheating vulnerability assessment was devised and applied using the increase in cooling energy demand as a performance indicator. The results showed that a B1 heating energy efficiency class according to the Slovenian Energy Performance Certificate classification was the highest attainable using the selected passive design parameters, while the energy demand for heating is projected to decrease over time. In contrast, the energy use for cooling is in general projected to increase. Furthermore, it was found that, in building models with higher heating energy use, low overheating vulnerability is easier to achieve. However, in models with high heating energy efficiency, very high overheating vulnerability is not expected. Accordingly, buildings should be designed for current heating energy efficiency and low vulnerability to future overheating. The paper shows a novel approach to bioclimatic building design with global warming adaptation integrated into the design process. It delivers recommendations for the energy-efficient, robust bioclimatic design of residential buildings in the Central European context, which are intended to guide designers and policymakers towards a resilient and sustainable built environment.

Sustainable interdisciplinarity focuses on human–nature relations and a multitude of contemporary overlapping research between society and the environment. A variety of disciplines have played a large part in better understanding sustainable development since its high-profile emergence approximately a quarter century ago. At present, the forefront of sustainability research is an array of methods, techniques, and growing knowledge-base that considers past, present, and future pathways. Specific multi-disciplinary concentrations within the scope of societal changes, urban landscape transformations, international environmental comparative studies as well as key theories and dynamics relating to sustainable performance are explored. Specializations in complex sustainability issues address international governance arrangements, rules, and organizations—both public and private—within the scope of four themes: sustainability, human geography, environment, and interdisciplinary societal studies. This book contains eleven thoroughly refereed contributions concerning pressing issues that interlink sustainable interdisciplinarity with the presented themes in respect of the human–nature interface.

The implementation of the relevant management system makes the road-parking behavior standardized, while increasing the difficulty of temporary parking of operational vehicles such as taxis. Therefore, in order to improve the relevant management measures and promote the sustainable development of the taxi industry, it is necessary to survey the demand for taxi parking and study the layout of taxi stops. To process the GPS data of the taxis, and to extract the loading and unloading positions of the passengers from the spatial trajectory data, big data analysis technology is used. Compared with the data obtained using traditional survey means, the spatial trajectory data reflects the situation of the whole system, which can make the analysis more accurate. K-means cluster analysis was used to determine community demand. Finally, the immune optimization model was used to determine the optimal taxi stand location. The problem of taxi stand location at the level of urban network from two dimensions of quantity and spatial distribution is solved in this paper. The location of 10 taxi stands can not only meet the parking needs of regional taxis, but also reasonably allocate urban resources and promote sustainable development. This study also has a certain reference value for relevant management departments.

Advances within the Sustainability Business Models (SBMs) literature from the perspective of boundary-spanning business models have received limited attention. Further, discourse within the SBMs literature exploring collaborative practices adopts the perspective that collaborative forums are always a ‘force for good’. This paper reviews important theories and relevant literature and calls into question the dearth of research examining business models for sustainability and focuses on the role that power, and power relations, play in the shaping and steering of value creation. In advancing research on sustainable operations, we assess the implications of ignoring uneven power, and draw attention to the affects and consequences of this omission in the study of SBMs. By embracing an alternative, deliberative democracy perspective, we challenge the sub-literature on collaborative multi-actor business models. In taking an inquisitive and critical stance on omnipresent power dynamics, we shine a light on the consequences of uneven power across multi-actor structures by augmenting research with practical insights from selected vignettes. Our proposed concept of a democratic business model for sustainability offers a new strand of theoretical development and a fresh perspective on the sustainability and business models literature.