• Energy Research

With the rapid development of globalization, industrialization, urbanization, and informatization, numerous economic activities are aggregated in cities, resulting in uneven resources distribution between urban and rural areas. Additionally, the falling fertility rate has led to the existence of many abandoned education-related architectures in both areas. When an architectural space is non-operational, it delivers neither the fundamental spatial value nor contributes any interaction to its neighbors. This research conducts two educational architecture analyses with respect to their redesign programs in order to evaluate the relation between space and local community. Also, the spatial hierarchy, scale, and characteristics of locality are further investigated in the hope of gaining a deeper understanding of how different revitalization approaches might lead to diverse interaction patterns in the areas. This study shows that different spatial characteristics can affect how people perceive the public space and the way they interact with it. In addition, an effective redesign progress should enhance both space utilization and human-environmental interactions since it can not only promote regional development but also the overall environment sustainability. Thus, an abandoned architecture can be a potential element to invigorate the local community either economically or emotionally.

This article uses a fractal observation to help delineate the constraints placed by multiple city walls on the growth of historical East Asian cities. By applying advanced technologies from economic geography and fractal indices, a staged scaling process within urban dimension coherence can be applied to both indices. In this study, a discovery is proposed based on the urban organism concept that is capable of indicating a proportional intra-urban structure from a fundamental wall-bounded urban element (local specificity) to other greater walled spatial properties (global variables). This local specificity potentially performs approximate scaling regularities, and spatially denotes an average historical threshold of urban growth for its overall size, with similar scaling law constraints. This finding involves territorial, urban planning, and ancient architectural perspectives, providing a historical and local response to the expansion of contemporary cities. By employing growing fractal estimation, data processing enables the logarithmic city size to be obtained by measuring each wall’s specific features using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method. On the basis of two-dimensional allometric scaling patches, a spatial unfolding mechanism is utilized to reproduce these dynamic changes with city walls as a result of the human trajectories in time geography.

Environmental challenges like resource depletion, climate change, and biodiversity loss require human action. Environmental education influences individuals’ understanding and motivates responsible behavior, making it a real solution to address current problems. In this study, we examine the impact of situational environmental education and daily environmental education on tourists’ responsible environmental behavior by incorporating them as covariates into an integrated tourist behavior model. In total, 2381 valid questionnaires were obtained. The results showed that (1) daily environmental education mainly affects tourists’ responsible environmental behavior through attitude (0.467) and habits (0.634); (2) tourists’ responsible environmental behavior is mainly affected by situational environmental education through habits (0.534), subjective norms (0.504), and intention (0.614); and (3) personal factors, including attitudes toward environmental behavior, subjective norms, and perceptual behavior control, positively influence tourists’ responsible environmental behavioral intention and their responsible environmental behavior. This research will help to improve sustainability indicators and frameworks and to promote the adoption of sustainable tourism practices.

Solar energy has the advantages of being green, renewable, and energy-efficient. The use of solar energy in buildings can result in significant energy savings, and a great deal of practical and theoretical research has been conducted on solar buildings around the world. Southern Shaanxi belongs to a climate zone with hot summers and cold winters (HSCW). The mean room temperature is 4 °C, and it is lower than 2 °C at night, which greatly exceeds the thermal comfort range that the human body can bear. Aiming at a range of challenges including backward heating methods and low heating efficiency in southern Shaanxi, a fully passive thermal storage wall heating system (TSWHS) is proposed for traditional houses in the area. The specific method is to set up a thermal storage wall (TSW) outside the outer walls on the east, west, and south sides of the residential buildings. The wall is provided with an air exchange port, and there is no glass in the outer area of the doors and windows, which does not affect the normal application. The principle is that after the TSW receives solar radiation, the temperature of the internal HDPE (high-density polyethylene) and the air inside the cavity rises, which raises the interior temperature via the heat transfer and the air exchange port inside the TSW. The hot air inside the thermal wall achieves the purpose of heating. Lastly, through a comparison with the original heating system (OHS), it is confirmed that the TSWHS has certain practicability. According to an experimental simulation, the system can increase the indoor temperature by an average of 5.1 °C in winter and save about 1726.43 kWh of energy, accounting for 27.24% of the energy saving.

Following the commodification reform of residential properties in China, multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) have emerged as the most prevalent housing type owing to their high economic value and convenient infrastructure. In recent years, there has been an increasing concern regarding the potential negative impacts of MURBs on residents. To address this issue, in this study, a survey was conducted among 552 purchasers, and methods such as expert questionnaires, factor analysis, Kano two-dimensional quality, and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) were employed to evaluate the significance of 19 factors related to the quality of MURBs’ unit spatial layouts. An index model summarizing their utility was developed. The research findings indicated that spatial function held the greatest influence, followed by indoor environment, with spatial organization ranking last. Moreover, we analyzed the influence of preferences on satisfaction and the variations in preferences based on sociodemographic factors. The results aim to assist real estate developers and purchasers in evaluating the quality of housing spatial layouts, ultimately enhancing the overall quality and comfort of MURBs.

Abstract Relying on passive climate-responsive strategies, traditional dwellings can effectively control the indoor thermo-hygrometric and daylighting conditions by taking advantage of some favorable climatic elements like wind, solar radiation, etc. Furthermore, the building's elements and spaces can be regulated to make the indoor microclimate reach the comfort limits thanks to these passive strategies. In this paper, the Thousand Pillars Dwelling (TPD) is taken as a research objective to explore its climate adaptation strategies and effectiveness for the local climate in the view of passive elements (PEs) and passive spaces (PSs). By the methodologies of literature reviews, field investigations and software simulations, the buffer effect (BE) created by PEs (composed of doors, windows, walls etc.) and PSs (composed of patios, corridors etc.) contributing to the improvement of indoor comfort level (ICL) is researched qualitatively. An additional study on in-situ measurements of air temperature, relative humidity, air velocity and illuminance in diverse parts of TPD was carried out to research their effectiveness of climate adaptation quantitatively. This study shows that BEs are effective at mitigating the impact of outdoor climate on internal spaces, which is helpful for the extension of indoor comfort time (EICT) by 3472 h per year. The research results of passive strategies are summarized from the study case of TPD and its effectiveness of climate adaptation can provide some methods and implications to create more comfortable indoor environments for rural residences.

Location-based social media allows people to communicate and share information on a popular landmark. With millions of data records generated, it provides new knowledge about a city. The identification of land use intends to uncover accurate positions for future urban development planning. The purpose of this research is to investigate the use of social networking check-in data as a source of information to characterize dynamic urban land use. The data from this study were obtained from the social media application i.e., Twitter. Three kinds of data that are prioritized in this research are check-ins (specific location), timestamps, and a user’s status text or post activities. In this study, we propose a grid-based aggregation method to divide the urban area. Two different approaches are compared—rank and clustering methods to group the place’s activities. Then we utilize time distribution frequency to attain the land-use function. In this case, Makassar City, Indonesia, has been selected as the case study. An analysis shows that the check-in activity and the method we proposed can be used to group the actual land-use types.

Providing reliable public water service is a big challenge in Indonesia, especially for small cities, due to various constraints such as budget, regulation, and technical problems. Besides, people’s preferences play a significant role in domestic water utilization. This research particularly aims to identify factors influencing public preferences for domestic water use in Kota Metro, Lampung Province, Indonesia to find the reason why public water service is less preferable in this city. We did a household survey and performed a multinomial logistic regression and multiple correspondence analysis to investigate the preferable domestic water source and influential factors determining the choice. We found that accessibility and water quality are the two strongest motives in choosing domestic water use. Our analysis also shows that the respondent’s choice is influenced by his or her income, family size, and proximity to the pipe network. Subsequently, we synthesized our empirical findings and the existing situation of the domestic water fulfillment in Kota Metro to suggest an improvement proposal inspired by the circular economy concepts. We recommend a mixture of a pipe water service and community-based water management to improve the current domestic water fulfillment.