Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications

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    Reconsidering the Safety in Numbers Effect for Vulnerable Road Users: An Application of Agent-Based Modeling
    Thompson, J ; Savino, G ; Stevenson, M (Taylor and Francis Group, 2015)
    OBJECTIVE: Increasing levels of active transport provide benefits in relation to chronic disease and emissions reduction but may be associated with an increased risk of road trauma. The safety in numbers (SiN) effect is often regarded as a solution to this issue; however, the mechanisms underlying its influence are largely unknown. We aimed to (1) replicate the SiN effect within a simple, simulated environment and (2) vary bicycle density within the environment to better understand the circumstances under which SiN applies. METHODS: Using an agent-based modeling approach, we constructed a virtual transport system that increased the number of bicycles from 9% to 35% of total vehicles over a period of 1,000 time units while holding the number of cars in the system constant. We then repeated this experiment under conditions of progressively decreasing bicycle density. RESULTS: We demonstrated that the SiN effect can be reproduced in a virtual environment, closely approximating the exponential relationships between cycling numbers and the relative risk of collision as shown in observational studies. The association, however, was highly contingent upon bicycle density. The relative risk of collisions between cars and bicycles with increasing bicycle numbers showed an association that is progressively linear at decreasing levels of density. CONCLUSIONS: Agent-based modeling may provide a useful tool for understanding the mechanisms underpinning the relationships previously observed between volume and risk under the assumptions of SiN. The SiN effect may apply only under circumstances in which bicycle density also increases over time. Additional mechanisms underpinning the SiN effect, independent of behavioral adjustment by drivers, are explored.
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    Colabella, S ; Pone, S (Electa, 2014)
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    Borders in Focus: IPCS Seminar and Symposium
    Pieris, A (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2015)
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    In-between: Spaces for Border-thinking
    Pieris, A (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2015)
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    Temporal Cities: Commemoration at Manzanar, California and Cowra, Australia
    Pieris, A ; Horiuchi, L (Brill Academic Publishers, 2017)
    This article compares two former Pacific War incarceration histories in the us and Australia, inquiring how their narratives of confinement and redress might be interpreted spatially and materially, and how these sensibilities are incorporated into contemporary heritage strategies including, in these examples, through Japanese garden designs. At the Manzanar Historic Site in California, the efforts of several generations advocating for civil rights and preservation of the Manzanar Relocation Center have overlapped with the National Park Service’s efforts to fulfil its federal mandates to preserve and restore the historic site. Conversely at Cowra, New South Wales, these histories are interwoven with post-war commemorative spaces, aimed at drawing visitors to former incarceration sites and encouraging contemplation of these difficult histories. This article analyses their complex creative processes and interpretive strategies as useful for drawing these isolated national stories into broader global interrogations of their significance.
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    Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps
    Pieris, A (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016)
    Characterisations of the Pacific Basin as a tropical archipelago essentialise its geocultural diversity as an alternative way of envisioning the region and its politics. This paper offers a darker projection of this archipelagic imagination as one forged by imperial competition and wartime violence. It traces its genesis across the history of the Second World War internment and prisoner of war camps. Their spatial proliferation as a carceral geography produces a variety of temporary environments where civil and legal rights are suspended. The roles adopted by captors in their treatment of prisoners reflect the social prejudices of the period, the politics of imperialism and the specific responses of warring nations during various stages of the conflict. This paper asks how architectural scholarship might address this imperial history. It draws together diverse models of incarceration related to the Pacific War, acknowledging the different treatment of racially different colonial and national subjects and tracing their passage through multiple spatial configurations of camps. The camps in Australia are contextualised in their wider Pacific geography with special attention to Victoria’s Tatura Group.
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    Changi: A Penal Genealogy across the Pacific War
    Pieris, A (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016-01-02)
    Anglophone scholarship on the Pacific War in Singapore is largely focused on records and memoirs of captive allied forces, extending imperial histories of that period. The punitive environments that incarcerated soldiers and civilians are examined through that lens. This essay approaches the Pacific War as an interregnum in a longer penal genealogy and a historical border to political decolonisation. It reviews this literature as significant for understanding the evolution of the colonial prison and its wartime transformation into a Prisoner of War (POW) camp environment posing questions about incarceration, citizenship and penal labour. It asks how residential carceral facilities such as the prison, the POW camp and the home are adapted and transformed. The main foci of this paper and its genealogy are the Changi Prison and the Changi POW Camp.
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    Building service life and its effect on the life cycle embodied energy of buildings
    Rauf, A ; Crawford, RH (Elsevier, 2015)
    The building sector is responsible for significant energy demands. An understanding of where this occurs across the building life cycle is critical for optimal targeting of energy reduction efforts. The energy embodied in a building can be significant, yet is not well understood, especially the on-going ‘recurrent’ embodied energy associated with material replacement and building refurbishment. A key factor affecting this ‘recurrent’ embodied energy is a building's service life. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the service life and the life cycle embodied energy of buildings. The embodied energy of a detached residential building was calculated for a building service life range of 1–150 years. The results show that variations in building service life can have a considerable effect on the life cycle embodied energy demand of a building. A 29% reduction in life cycle embodied energy was found for the case study building by extending its life from 50 to 150 years. This indicates the importance of including recurrent embodied energy in building life cycle energy analyses as well as integrating building service life considerations when designing and managing buildings for improved energy performance.
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    Designing robust and revisable policies for gender equality: lessons from the Australian construction industry
    Galea, N ; Powell, A ; Loosemore, M ; Chappell, L (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2015-06-03)
    The construction industry remains the most male dominated sector in Australia. Several decades of formal gender equality initiatives by government and business have failed to bring about any meaningful change to the hierarchical and numerical representation of women in the sector. Drawing on new institutionalism, particularly the concepts of ‘robustness’ and ‘revisability’, the nature and intent of formal policies and programs that impact on gender equality are analysed in two large Australian multinational construction firms. Through in-depth interviews with senior management and a document analysis of formal policies, it is concluded that gender equality initiatives and broader policies are primarily focused on increasing the numbers of women in construction rather than addressing gender practices and outcomes. These policies lack many of the qualities of robustness and revisability, which impacts on their capacity to genuinely challenge the gendered norms, practices and narratives of the sector.
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    A corpus of potentially contradictory research claims from cardiovascular research abstracts
    Alamri, A ; Stevenson, M (BMC, 2016-06-07)
    BACKGROUND: Research literature in biomedicine and related fields contains a huge number of claims, such as the effectiveness of treatments. These claims are not always consistent and may even contradict each other. Being able to identify contradictory claims is important for those who rely on the biomedical literature. Automated methods to identify and resolve them are required to cope with the amount of information available. However, research in this area has been hampered by a lack of suitable resources. We describe a methodology to develop a corpus which addresses this gap by providing examples of potentially contradictory claims and demonstrate how it can be applied to identify these claims from Medline abstracts related to the topic of cardiovascular disease. METHODS: A set of systematic reviews concerned with four topics in cardiovascular disease were identified from Medline and analysed to determine whether the abstracts they reviewed contained contradictory research claims. For each review, annotators were asked to analyse these abstracts to identify claims within them that answered the question addressed in the review. The annotators were also asked to indicate how the claim related to that question and the type of the claim. RESULTS: A total of 259 abstracts associated with 24 systematic reviews were used to form the corpus. Agreement between the annotators was high, suggesting that the information they provided is reliable. CONCLUSIONS: The paper describes a methodology for constructing a corpus containing contradictory research claims from the biomedical literature. The corpus is made available to enable further research into this area and support the development of automated approaches to contradiction identification.