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Beyond the urgency of rethinking XX-century urbanization characterized by endless structural expansion strategy, we need to engage urban systems by means of emerging concepts of adaptability and systemic transitions due to climate change effects. Emission reduction and spatial compactness, reuse and recycle, flexibility and complex balances have a profound impact on the spatial dimension and the quality of the urban environment, therefore architectural and urban design are deeply involved in facing ecological transitions and envisioning new strategies to implement the quality of the cities we live in. How to face these emergent challenges? What are the ongoing design strategies for climate change effects? what will be the role of design in transitional systems? Do we recognize it as an opportunity to improve the public space? Design Actions for Shifting Condition is a collaborative effort, and aims to present, from an architectural and urban design point of view, methodologies, practices, and approaches to overcome existing and new fragilities for Cities in Times of Transition. Theory, Territories & Transitions Projects

During their lifespan, products can cause severe environmental and social impacts in all stages of their lifecycle. The circular economy with its focus on closing and slowing material and energy loops is a means to reduce these broad impacts. Circular economy forms the basis of the EU’s ambitions to reconcile present economic activities within the planetary boundaries while meeting its aim for climate neutrality by 2050. Electronic and electronics equipment is a key product focus area for the European Commission, during the waste stage. Similar to other EU Directives, current electronics waste legislation will be updated in the coming years. The transition to a circular economy will require new and modified roles and responsibilities for actors, e.g. government, businesses and citizens. This report provides a detailed exploration of the governance issues within the current electronics waste policy, focusing on the instrument of extended producer responsibility. Through three detailed case studies of Italy, France and the Netherlands, the key organisational and policy features are explained, and the strengths and weaknesses are outlined. Based on the analysis of the case studies, we argue the subsequent developments for extended producer responsibility for waste electrical and electronic equipment to include the four followings aspects in its development: 1. Introducing the modulation of fees at the European level: the fee paid by producers for the collection and recycling of their products should be modulated based on the circularity and sustainability of the product in question. Fee modulation is allowed under the current EU WEEE law. However, it is not applied systematically. This is already done in France for EEE based on the standardisation of components, weight and specific materials. Fee modulation guidelines have been developed by the OECD. However, the key aspect to the ability of the fees to affect product design is the size of the fee. Studies have illustrated that current fees are between 0.2 and 2% of the product price. Higher levels of fees, e.g. more than the 2% product price, combined with a visible fee are recommended to be implemented at the EU level; 2. Broadening the scope of which actors are included in national EPR systems while promoting high R-strategies: the types of actors and responsibilities within the extended producer responsibility schemes need to be broadened. This is possible under EU law and has partly been done in France, where civic actors are now included in the functioning and directing of the schemes. However, the transition to a circular economy requires the promotion of more than just recycling of EEE to the other R-strategies. This requires systematically integrating the other economic actors in the design and functioning of the system, e.g. Repair, Remanufacturing etc.; 3. Measures to promote the highest value recycling of collected WEEE: products that reach their end-of-life they need to be effectively collected and treated to the best standard. The current targets and quality measures promote the collection and recycling of electronics based on mass, not on a specific material or quality criteria. A standard for the treatment of WEEE EN 45558 is available, although it is not mandatory. We recommend this standard be made mandatory across the EU. In addition, we call for a systematic pan-EU assessment of available and future recycling technologies, possibilities for urban mining from WEEE, and funding options needed to direct this, specifically in the area of critical raw materials recovery from electronics; 4. Expanding the scope of EPR beyond national borders: the scope of extended producer responsibility schemes needs to be expanded to account for the multiple uses of the product and the responsibility when products move internationally. While EPR has shown great ability to shift WEEE away from landfilling. The complexity of systems, rules and their enforcement between member states and beyond has led to varying national rules and issues of transparency between jurisdictions. The quantity of producers, importers, distributors and second-hand sellers makes the tracking and monitoring of WEEE within and between national jurisdictions challenging, especially for the export of collected and secondary products. In particular, this relates to the need for a solid understanding of the quantities of WEEE moving between jurisdictions and suitable mechanisms in place to finance the appropriate disposal. The highly international nature of WEEE supply chains and global trade and flows of WEEE have led some to call for a ‘global EPR’ or ‘ultimate producer responsibility’ system.

Following its mission and vision, eScience Center develops research software in collaboration with researchers. Availability of research software is the crucial first step, but uptake by the research community is required to make it alive and sustainable. An efficient way to facilitate the uptake is to bring together the developers and potential users through hands-on training workshops, which allow researchers to learn the software directly from its developers. Likewise, the developers can get direct feedback from the domain experts, which can help them to improve their software. This project aims such a workshop series on environment and sustainability-related eScience Center research software for the researchers of the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), which is a world-renown education and research institution in the field. Besides enabling the growth of the user communities by involving highly skilled researchers, the events will also support better collaboration between the institutions. This proposal is funded by the Netherlands eScience Center's Fellowship Programme 2022-2023.

This paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of the water-, sanitation- and hygiene (WASH)-related insecurities that people experiencing homelessness in urban areas of high-income countries (HIC) are facing, and how these insecurities are further complicated during extreme weather events. While limited recent research has looked into WASH among people experiencing homelessness in HICs, and while some work has considering the implications of climate change on WASH and health, the nexus of WASH, extreme weather events and homelessness in HICs have not been studied thus far. We conducted the first systematic scoping review of peer-reviewed literature on this nexus, which is understudied and marked by complexity, involving a range of systems and forms of impact. A total of 50 publications were included in our analysis.We found that public facilities like drinking water fountains, toilets, handwashing facilities, and showers are scarce, frequently unavailable, often pose safety and cleanliness issues, and access to non-public facilities may be cost-prohibitive for homeless populations. Consequently, people experiencing homelessness, including those sleeping rough, in encampments, or shelters, are often forced to limit drinking water consumption, forego healthy hygiene behaviours, and resort to open urination and defecation, all of which carry health risks. Extreme weather events, like heatwaves, extreme cold, heavy rain and flooding exacerbate challenges for people experiencing homelessness, further complicating their access to WASH, and reducing the ability of service providers to deliver extra relief, creating a dual WASH and health burden.Our review highlights that the Human Right to Water and Sanitation is not met for people experiencing homelessness in urban areas of high-income countries, with women emerging as one of the most vulnerable subgroups. It reveals that the impact of certain WASH issues (e.g. drinking water) on homeless populations are better understood than others (e.g. waste), and, similarly, the effects of certain extreme weather events (e.g. heatwaves) on the health and WASH conditions of people experiencing homelessness are better understood than others (e.g. flooding). Data gaps and the lack of information on limited WASH access and health circumstances of people experiencing homelessness, further minimize their representation and consequently impose obstacles to improve their situation.Based on our analysis, we established a framework which operationalizes the nexus of WASH, extreme weather events and homelessness. This framework improves our understanding of the underlying complexities at the intersection of these three issues and provides a foundation for enhanced preparedness and health-oriented planning.

Basic infrastructure services – water and sanitation, waste collection and management, transport, energy, and housing – form the foundation upon which cities are built. Sustainable and equitable provision of services is key to combating climate change, eradicating poverty and meeting targets set out in international sustainability agendas. However, even as the language of the sustainability transitions literature is being appropriated by governments, social movements and practitioners, the concepts of sustainability and sustainability transitions remain ill-defined and often narrowly applied. We conduct a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the sustainability transitions literature on urban basic infrastructure services to tap into prevailing representations and conceptions. Findings show that the delivery of sustainable urban services is discursively framed as a predominantly institutional and economic challenge, favouring a top-down techno-managerial approach to transitions that applies technical fixes to environmental problems at the expense of social dimensions of sustainability. While some studies, such as those with a focus on the Global South and/or water and sanitation services, engage to a greater degree with issues such as justice and equality, they still tend towards technical and economic solutions. An integrated approach encompassing all dimensions of sustainability and a broader understanding of infrastructure services not as separate, single-purpose technologies but as part of interconnected systems with multiple social, economic and environmental objectives is needed if we are to transition to a more sustainable urban future. Management in the Built Environment Urban Development Management

This paper deals with developing an indicator system for monitoring, analyzing, and assessing sustainability of airports. The sustainability implies simultaneous increasing of the overall socialeconomic benefits and increasing at a slower rate, stagnating, and/or diminishing of the negative impacts of these airports during the specified medium- to long-term period of time. The indicator system consists of the indicators and their measures reflecting the airport operational, economic, social, and environmental dimension of performances. These include effects-benefits and impacts-externalities of the airport operations. The effects-benefits include mainly the airport contribution to local employment, regional (local) economy, and consequently GDP (Gross Domestic Product). The impacts-externalities embrace local noise, air pollution, congestion and delays, land use (take), and waste. The particular indicators and their measures are specified respecting interests and attitudes of particular actors involved such as users and providers of air transport services, private and public investors, governmental organizations, local community members, lobbies and pressure groups, and general public. An application of the proposed indicator system has shown that it could be considered as an initial step in developing a “tool” for assessing the current and prospective level of the airport sustainable development.

This e-book has been made in the framework of the European Training Network on Durable, Reliable and Sustainable Structures with Alkali-Activated Materials (DuRSAAM), which organized a training course on AAM technology held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology 27-29 January 2020. This open source book collects the lecture notes by the teachers of this training course and provides building professionals and stakeholders new insights on alkali-activated concrete as an emerging building technology.

A new concept of Decision Support System (DSS) is presented. It is able to account for and support all phases of the risk analysis process: event forecast, prediction of reliable and accurate damage scenarios, estimate of their impact on Critical Infrastructures (CI), estimate of the possible consequences. It also provides an estimate of the consequences in terms of service degradation and of impact on citizens, on urban area and on production activities, essential for the mitigation of the adverse events. It can be used in two different modes, either in an operational mode (on a 24/7 basis) or in a simulation mode to produce risk analysis, setting up synthetic natural hazards and assessing the resulting chain of events (damages, impacts and consequences). Among the various possible external data sources an aerial, drone based one is presented. The system may capture both thermal and visual images of CI, processing them into 3D models or collect chemical pollutants concentrations for the monitoring of dangerous air quality due to catastrophic events such as volcano eruptions or large fires. The obtained models and the chemical data can be easily displayed within the framework of the DSS. International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management, Vol 24 (2019)