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A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sciences".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 October 2021.
Special Issue Editors
Interests: sustainable built environment; smart cities and urban informatics; urban climatology and thermal balance; environmental urban planning and public health
Interests: sustainability of structures; sustainable materials; green buildings and infrastructure; use of waste in construction materials; structural stability; structural mechanics; biomimicry
Special Issues and Collections in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Sustainable Built Environments aim to achieve unprecedented levels of ecological balance, through new and retrofit construction and built environment especially in 21th century when rapid level of urbanization and population growth are inevitable. To create spaces with both long-term viability and humanization, we merge the natural, minimum resource conditioning solutions of the past, with the innovative technologies of the present and consider both environmental and social impacts. This may include land use, biodiversity damages, urban climate, energy consumption, carbon emission, material, water consumption, social inclusion, public health, and other impacts.
The focus of this Special Issue will be researches related to the innovative approaches and solutions of sustainable built environment, including design, construction, urban design, assessment models, case studies, and best practices analyses or their limitations.
Dr. Elmira Jamei
Dr. Zora Vrcelj
Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- Sustainable smart cities
- Urban Planning and public health
- Sustainable Landscapes
- Sustainable construction and Building Information Modelling (BIM)
- Urban climatology and thermal balance
- Biodiversity in Cities
- Water sensitive urban design
- Regenerative Development and Design
- Renewable energy in Built Environments
- Sustainable building materials
- Waste management
- Intelligent Buildings Assessment
- Sustainability Performance Simulation Tools for Building
- Biomimicry for an Innovative Built Environment
- Social inclusion and universal design
- Sustainable housing practices
Planned Papers
The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.
Title: Expanding the Basis for Decision Making on Reuse of Industrial Heritage Buildings – Socio-Cultural Values as Part of a Holistic Environmental Assessment
Author: Anne-Catrine Flyen, Cecilie Flyen and Selamawit Mamo Fufa
Abstract: To obtain the national obligations in achieving the goals of the Paris agreement, the existing building stock must become more energy efficient and environmentally friendly. The Norwegian Government is aiming at pioneering the development of a green circular economy. This implies the need for a more comprehensive reuse of existing buildings, supporting the notion long maintained by cultural heritage discourses; that heritage buildings can contribute to a needed green shift.
This paper is written as part of the ADAPT project, studying adaptive reuse and transformation of industrial heritage buildings. Several research projects emphasize that new buildings are often favoured when comparing with existing buildings. In ADAPT, we find that such preferential treatment might be faulty because the grounds for comparison are misleading. Further, that several important value factors are missing in the assessment; Factors favouring new and disfavouring existing buildings (emissions from operational phase), are prevailing, while factors favouring existing and disfavouring new buildings (emissions from construction process) are merely assessed. Also, inherent, socio-cultural values of the existing buildings are rarely added to the assessments. Furthermore, assessments of socio-cultural values in industrial heritage buildings are even more limited. The aim of the paper is to fill in the above-mentioned challenges and lift the knowledge base to support decision-making in reusing industrial heritage buildings.
The findings indicates that present systems for socio-cultural value assessment of buildings are not consistent, highly varying, descriptive/qualitative, however based on mainly the same value criteria sets. Further, that if values in the basic comparison are omitted, the grounds for decision making might be questionable. This reflects some of the challenges and complexity of such value assessments, and display the need for a baselined, systematic approach. This paper contributes to develop a better understanding and more veracious comparison of the socio-cultural and environmental performance of new and existing buildings, through assessing a broader spectre of inherent attributes. By employing the described compilation of methods, an enriched description of socio-cultural values in industrial heritage building environments will be obtained. This will contribute to display the value of industrial heritage buildings, to more socio-culturally and environmentally sound decisions, and to the understanding of the fact that also cultural heritage buildings can contribute to a needed green shift.
Keywords: adaptive reuse, heritage buildings; industrial heritage; socio-cultural value, value assessments
Title: Biomimicry and the Built Environment - Learning from Nature's Solutions
Author: Elmira Jamei and Zora Vrcelj