Challenges

Challenges, Vol. 2, Pages 94-108: The Dynamics of People Movement Systems in Central Areas

John Zacharias — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 CET

Certain pedestrian facilities, by their nature and the spatial imperatives they impose, exert a powerful role in organizing and promoting the development of associated central places. The need for an expanded public space in the city has found expression in the new public spaces that have emerged in relation to this transport infrastructure within long developed urban environments. In contemporary, advanced urban society, such new spaces need to have polyvalent purposes and to respond to emergent demands. It is proposed that certain characteristics of these pedestrian systems support intensification and multiplication of activities over a particular spatial environment defined by activities. In the three cases—the Underground system of Montreal, Tokyo Station City and the Central Mid-levels Escalator area—common characteristics proposed as important to the achievement of the developmental goals include specific spatial relations, system open-endedness and structural complexity.

Challenges, Vol. 2, Pages 73-93: Challenges and Opportunities in Transforming a City into a “Zero Waste City”

Atiq Uz Zaman — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:00 CET

The currently consumption-driven society produces an enormous volume of waste every day. Continuous depletion of natural finite resources by urban populations is leading the globe to an uncertain future. Therefore, to prevent further depletion of global resources, sustainable consumption and a strategic waste management system would be required. It is evident that a significant number of global non-renewable resources such as cadmium, mercury and tellurium will experience permanent shortfall in global supply within the next two to three decades. Astonishingly, the current recycling rate of these very scarce metals is significantly low in all cities around the globe. The concept of the zero waste city includes a 100% recycling of municipal solid waste and a 100% recovery of all resources from waste materials. However, transforming currently over-consuming cities into zero waste cities is challenging. Therefore, this study aims to understand the key factors waste management systems in cities such as consumption, resource depletion and possible decoupling opportunity through implementing the “zero waste city” concept. The study proposes five significant principles for transforming current cities into zero waste cities in the context of long-term sustainability. A simultaneous and harmonized application of sustainable behaviour and consumption, product stewardship, a 100% recycling and recovery of resources, legislated zero landfill and incineration are required to transform current city into a zero waste city.

Challenges, Vol. 2, Pages 55-72: The Metacity: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Ecology and Urban Design

Brian McGrath — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 CEST

We introduce the term metacity as a conceptual framework that can be shared by ecologists and designers and applied across the wide variety of urban habitats found around the world. While the term metacity was introduced by UN-HABITAT to designate hyper cities of over twenty million people, for us it is not limited to large urban agglomerations, but rather refers to the proliferation of new forms of urbanization, each with distinct ecological and social attributes. These various urban configurations when combined with new digital sensing, communication and social networking technologies constitute a virtual meta-infrastructure, present in all cities today. This new metacity has the potential to integrate new activist forms of ecological and urban design research and practice in making the transition from sanitary to sustainable city models globally. The city of Baltimore, Maryland will be used both as a site to illustrate these recent urban trends, and also as an example of the integration of ecology and urban design pursued by the two authors over the past seven years [1,2]. Metacity theory is drawn from both an architectural analysis of contemporary forms of urbanism, new forms of digital monitoring and communication technologies, as well as metapopulation and metacommunity theories in ecology. We seek to provide tools and lessons from our experiences for realizing an integrated metacity approach to achieving social sustainability and ecological resilience on an increasingly urbanized planet.

Challenges, Vol. 2, Pages 45-54: Reinventing Detroit: Reclaiming Grayfields—New Metrics in Evaluating Urban Environments

Jon Burley — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 CEST

Planners, designers, citizens, and governmental agencies are interested in creating environments that are sustainable and fulfill a wide range of economic, ecological, aesthetic, functional, and cultural expectations for stakeholders. There are numerous approaches and proposals to create such environments. One vision is the 1934 “Broadacre City” proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Taliesin, Wisconsin area that was never implemented. Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision integrated transportation, housing, commercial, agricultural, and natural areas in a highly diverse pattern forming a vast urban savanna complex. He also applied his “Broadacre City” idea to the 1942 Cooperative Homesteads Community Project in Detroit, Michigan, another un-built project. This vision concerning the composition of the urban environment may be conceptually realized in the ongoing gray-field reclamation in suburban Detroit, Michigan. Recent science-based investigations, concerning the metrics to measure and evaluate the quality of designed spaces, suggest that this “Broadacre City” approach may have great merit and is highly preferred over past spatial treatments (p ≤ 0.05). These metrics explain 67 to 80% of the variance concerning stakeholder expectations and are highly definitive (p < 0.001).

Challenges, Vol. 2, Pages 44: Special Issue: Risk Management Challenges: Mitigate the Risk from Natural Hazards

Douglas Paton — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:00:00 CEST

Within minutes of the March 2011 earthquake in Japan, news media provided unprecedented coverage of an unfolding natural catastrophe. Events such as this place natural disasters firmly in the public eye but only for a short time. It falls to the research community to learn the lessons offered by these events and turn them into opportunities for developing more effective risk management and mitigation strategies and identifying the factors that contribute to the vulnerability and resilience of communities and response and recovery agencies. Disasters such as the Japanese tsunami also highlight the ever-present need for systematic, rigorous research into the risk posed by natural hazards and how these risks can be managed. Of course it is vital to ensure that the findings from such research endeavours are disseminated to those who can use the findings.

Challenges, Vol. 2, Pages 43: Special Issue: Challenges in City Design: Realize the Value of Cities

Kongjian Yu — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:00:00 CEST

In 1900, only about 13% of the world’s population lived in cities; now the figure has increased to over 50%, and is expected to reach 60% by populations in cities and suburban areas, developing countries are still in the process of urbanization. Every day, hundreds and thousands of people move to the city. Why do we choose to concentrate ourselves in cities? What is the value of cities? What do cities offer us? [...]

Challenges, Vol. 2, Pages 37-42: How to Preserve Documents: A Short Meditation on Three Themes

Jan Petr — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 CET

The capability to present electronic media that can preserve information is highly restricted to few decades (e.g., a lifetime of DVD media does not exceed 100 years), and therefore the question of how to preserve documents for more than thousands or millions of years presents a challenging task. In this article, we discuss three thinkable possibilities for long-term data storage: (i) self-assembly systems, (ii) chirality, and (iii) nucleic acids. These systems have, in our opinion, added-value regarding functionality and storing capability. Self-assembly systems form 3D structures, which could reflect any information more precisely than a 2D structure, and therefore they could be used as a training information package. Chirality provides the next added value in the possibility of using an interval of for storing the data (fuzzy logic) and could be also interesting in increasing the storage capacity if using compounds with more chiral centers, such as polysaccharides. Finally, nucleic acids represent a method of storage in which the reading step is developed and probably will be still active if people inhabit the Earth, which will realize the whole process of writing/storing and reading easier.

Challenges, Vol. 2, Pages 19-36: Long-Time Data Storage: Relevant Time Scales

Miko C. Elwenspoek — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:00 CET

Dynamic processes relevant for long-time storage of information about human kind are discussed, ranging from biological and geological processes to the lifecycle of stars and the expansion of the universe. Major results are that life will end ultimately and the remaining time that the earth is habitable for complex life is about half a billion years. A system retrieved within the next million years will be read by beings very closely related to Homo sapiens. During this time the surface of the earth will change making it risky to place a small number of large memory systems on earth; the option to place it on the moon might be more favorable. For much longer timescales both options do not seem feasible because of geological processes on the earth and the flux of small meteorites to the moon.

Challenges, Vol. 2, Pages 1-18: Using a Mobile Laboratory to Study Mental Health, Addictions and Violence: A Research Plan

Samantha Wells — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 CET

This paper describes an innovative new research program, Researching Health in Ontario Communities (RHOC), designed to improve understanding, treatment and prevention of co-occurring mental health, addictions, and violence problems. RHOC brings together a multi-disciplinary team of investigators to implement an integrated series of research studies (including pilot studies and full studies). The project involves use a mobile research laboratory to collect a wide range of biological, behavioral and social data in diverse communities across Ontario, Canada, including remote and rural communities, areas experiencing poverty and social disorganization, urban areas, and Aboriginal communities. This paper describes the project background and research plan as well as the anticipated contributions of the project to participating Ontario communities and to broader scientific knowledge.

Challenges, Vol. 1, Pages 5-26: Paths to Attaining Food Security: The Case of Cameroon

Genesis T. Yengoh — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:00:00 CEST

This paper sets out to develop a framework for characterizing agricultural growth orientations. We identify four main components in the global food system (technology, institutions, people, and natural resources). Based on the extent to which any two of these components are important in driving the growth of agriculture, we distinguish four main orientations of agricultural growth: local food, high resource-technology driven, guided technology driven, and right-to-food growth orientations. Given the social and environmental challenges that agricultural growth has to meet in Cameroon, we argue that the local food orientation and guided technology-driven orientation offer better opportunities for meeting the problem of food security in this country.

Challenges, Vol. 1, Pages 3-4: The Human Document Project and Challenges

Manz — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 CEST

Literature, newspapers or science use the internet, paper and written language for documenting their contents and transmitting it to the readers. The time scale for this is typically a human generation or can be much less. Technically speaking, printed paper, as such, will not necessarily survive very much longer. The computerized modern world has boosted the storage and accessibility of much more information. However, this has not improved the survival time scale [1]. [...]

Challenges, Vol. 1, Pages 1-2: Challenges – An Open Access Scientific Journal for Research Proposals and Open Problems

Shu-Kun Lin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CET

One of the unique features of several journals launched by me is that manuscripts regarding research proposals and research ideas are particularly welcomed for presentation. Now, a journal Challenges is created for this purpose. [...]