Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 1587
-
ItemRepertory Grid Methodology to Research Tacit Knowledge in Construction(CIB, 2022)Quality and buildability are important issues in construction, and both emerge at the earliest stages of design. However, neither are well-defined concepts. Our premise is that behaviour, values and culture impact on quality and buildability in the design stage, but these are also vulnerable to precise definition and difficult to investigate within a typical hypothesis-driven positivist approach. A better method may lie in a theory of personal constructs or ‘constructivism’ which takes the human experience as a whole. Qualitative research methods and data collection techniques are critically reviewed to assess those methods best fit for the purpose of approaching the research problem. Personal Construct Psychology (PCP), using repertory grids, emerges as a suitable candidate and is applied in two pilot studies in Australia and Singapore. Preliminary results show the appropriateness of the approach for engaging in buildability studies.
-
Item‘Rethinking the way we practice our professions’: social-ecological resilience for built environment professionals(Informa UK Limited, 2022-01-01)Urbanisation and industrialisation have contributed to significant and detrimental changes in the earth’s natural environments. The concept of social-ecological resilience can assist this problem, by integrating the consideration of human and ecological systems in decision-making. An implication is that built environment professionals must be competent in social-ecological resilience knowledge and skills to ensure cities are well adapted to current environmental challenges, and do not further contribute to them. Yet the capabilities of built environment professionals to incorporate resilience thinking (theory and knowledge) into their work (skills and practice), is not well understood and is not well addressed in education theory. This paper contributes to this gap by: exploring the social-ecological resilience knowledge, skills, and practical experience of Australian built environment professionals, thereby identifying gaps to address in further and higher education. Results indicate that built environment professionals’ know about social-ecological resilience, but they identify their practical experience is low. Additionally, respondents are more confident with their abilities, compared to colleagues, and their profession at large. The results indicate that further and higher education offerings (e.g. university education, continuing professional education, and practice) must assist built environment professionals to further develop social-ecological skills. As one respondent stated–it will require ‘rethinking the way we practice our professions’.
-
ItemBetween virtue and profession: Theorising the rise of professionalised public participation practitioners(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2022-06-09)Participatory planning practice is changing in response to the rise of specially trained public participation practitioners who intersect with but are also distinct from planners. These practitioners are increasingly being professionalised through new standards of competence defined by their industry bodies. The implications of this are not well accounted for in empirical studies of participatory planning, nor in the theoretical literature that seeks to understand both the potential and problems of more deliberative approaches to urban decision-making. In this paper, we revisit the sociological literature on the professions and use it to critically interrogate an observed tension between the ‘virtues’ of public participation (justice, equity and democracy) and efforts to consolidate public participation practice into a distinct profession that interacts with but also sits outside of professional planning.
-
ItemDeal-making, elite networks and public-private hybridisation: More-than-neoliberal urban governance(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2022-02-08)In this commentary, we argue that augmented concepts and research methods are needed to comprehend hybrid urban governance reconfigurations that benefit market actors but eschew competition in favour of deal-making between elite state and private actors. Fuelled by financialisation and in response to planning conflict are regulatory reforms that legitimise opaque alliances in service of infrastructure and urban development projects. From a specific city (Sydney, Australia) we draw upon one such reform – Unsolicited Proposals – to point to a broader landscape of hybrid urban governance, its reconfigurations of power and potential effect on cities. Whereas neoliberal governance promotes competition and views the state and private sectors as distinct, hybrid urban governance leverages state monopoly power and abjures market competition, instead endorsing high-level public–private coordination, technical and financial expertise and confidential deal-making over major urban projects. We scrutinise how Unsolicited Proposals normalise this approach. Commercial-in-confidence protection and absent tender processes authorise a narrow constellation of influential private and public actors to preconfigure outcomes without oversight. Such reforms, we argue, consolidate elite socio-spatial power, jeopardise city function and amplify corruption vulnerabilities. To theorise hybrid urban governance at the intersection of neoliberalism and Asia-Pacific state-capitalism, we offer the concepts of coercive monopoly (where market entry is closed, without opportunity to compete) and de jure collusion (where regulation reforms codify informal alliances among elites connected across government and corporate and consultancy worlds). We call for urban scholarship to pay closer attention to public–private hybridisation in governance, scrutinising regulatory mechanisms that consecrate deal-making and undermine the public interest.
-
ItemDe-politicising and re-politicising transport infrastructure futures(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2022-04-29)The planning for future transport and its infrastructure is deeply political. Yet, how we understand re-politicisation, and what those efforts tell us about what is political in the planning for future cities, remains under explored. One lens through which to explore these acts is to consider the role of urban coalitions in drawing attention to the dominant politics of planning and setting the ground for the re-politicisation of transport infrastructure futures. Drawing on the work of post-foundational scholars Mouffe and Rancière, this paper examines the interplay between de-politicisation and re-politicisation and how two urban coalitions negotiated this landscape in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area during a sustained period of contestation surrounding the proposal of new transport infrastructure. Through this analysis, this paper draws on in-depth interviews with coalition members, transport planners, politicians and engaged citizens to illustrate how these urban coalitions produced a ‘collective will’ and a struggle towards a ‘consensus cure’ in their re-politicising actions. This paper reveals how coalition-led re-politicisation establishes the grounds for the politics to shift on contested future transport proposals and offers insight into the incremental and oftentimes incomplete ways re-politicisation nurtures transformational change.
-
Item'Knowing we have these rights does not always mean we feel free to use them': athletes' perceptions of their human rights in sport.(BMJ, 2022)Objectives: Modern sport safeguarding strategies include published global rights declarations that enshrine athletes' entitlements at the policy level. It is unclear how these documents translate to athletes' lived experiences. The study aimed to determine athletes' knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about their human rights in sports settings. Setting: Web-based survey. Participants: 1159 athletes from 70 countries completed a validated web-based survey. Over half of participants (60.1%) were between 18 and 29 years, currently competing (67.1%), not members of players' unions (54.6%), elite (60.0%) and participating in individual (55.8%) non-contact (75.6%) Olympic (77.9%) sports. Gender distribution was equal. Primary and secondary outcome measures: Participant demographics (eg, gender, age) and athletes' knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about their human rights in sports settings. Results: Most (78.5%) were unaware of any athletes' rights declarations. Gender influenced participants' confidence in acting on their rights in sport significantly. Males were more likely to accept pressure from coaches and teammates than females, but age affected how likely males were to accept this pressure. Paralympic athletes were less likely to agree that violence is acceptable in sports, compared with Olympic. Player union membership increased confidence in freely expressing one's opinion in sports settings. Athletes' rights-related awareness, knowledge and beliefs were disconnected. Conclusions: Awareness raising is not enough to prevent human rights violations in sports. The cultural climate of the entire ecosystem must be targeted, using systems-level strategies to shift stakeholders' biases, beliefs and behaviours. This approach takes the onus of addressing abuse off athletes' shoulders and places accountability on sports organisations.
-
ItemEssential work and emergency childcare: identifying gender differences in COVID-19 effects on labour demand and supply(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2022)We examine whether the COVID-19 crisis affects women and men differently in terms of employment, working hours, and hourly wages, and whether the effects are demand or supply driven. COVID-19 impacts are studied using administrative data on all Dutch employees up to December 2020, focussing on the national lockdowns and emergency childcare for essential workers in the Netherlands. First, the impact of COVID-19 is much larger for non-essential workers than for essential workers. Although female non-essential workers are more affected than male non-essential workers, on average, women and men are equally affected, because more women than men are essential workers. Second, the impact for partnered essential workers with young children, both men and women, is not larger than for others. Third, single-parent essential workers respond with relatively large reductions in labour supply, suggesting emergency childcare was insufficient for them. Overall, labour demand effects appear larger than labour supply effects.
-
ItemWalking at the edges of green criminology: The edges of the city and the extraordinary consequences of ordinary harms(Open Journal Systems, 2022)Positioned at the periphery of green and urban criminology, this article focuses on the heuristic value of the edge. Examining the urban physical edges ‒ the continued horizontal (outwards) and the vertical (upwards and downwards) sprawl of our cities ‒ exposes serious harm. I employ the concept of atmosphere to explore both phenomenological and ontological atmospheres. This leads me to interrogate the edge between ordinary (slow) and extraordinary (more immediate) environmental harms, highlighting the need to move beyond binary conceptions of human and more-than-human concerns. I develop the concept of ‘the city beyond the city’, which transcends the material urban edges to further untangle green and urban criminological boundaries.
-
ItemComputational design and robotic fabrication of a self-supporting acoustic shell(ICSA, 2022)In the early twentieth century, acoustic shells were primarily conceived as permanent structures, generally made in reinforced concrete. Architects like Candela and Niemeyer exploited the high density and plasticity of concrete to realise forms that could reflect sound efficiently. However, building doubly-curved shapes required laborious construction methods, including using complex and wasteful formworks. This paper presents the development and application of a computational workflow for the design and fabrication of acoustic concrete shells. The workflow allows controlling the shape of discrete, curved panels that can be assembled into continuous surfaces. The panels are designed to comply with the robotic fabrication requirements of a novel Parametric Adjustable Mould (PAM) technology and assembled to create shells that satisfy a set of acoustic requirements. The technology is used to fabricate custom curved concrete panels using a single mould frame that reduces waste in concrete formwork.
-
ItemA Transformation in City-Descriptive Input Data for Urban Climate Models(FRONTIERS MEDIA SA, 2022-07-06)In urban climate studies, datasets used to describe urban characteristics have traditionally taken a class-based approach, whereby urban areas are classified into a limited number of typologies with a resulting loss of fidelity. New datasets are becoming increasingly available that describe the three-dimensional structure of cities at sub-metre micro-scale resolutions, resolving individual buildings and trees across entire continents. These datasets can be used to accurately determine local characteristics without relying on classes, but their direct use in numerical weather and climate modelling has been limited by their availability, and because they require processing to conform to the required inputs of climate models. Here, we process building-resolving datasets across large geographical extents to derive city-descriptive parameters suitable as common model inputs at resolutions more appropriate for local or meso-scale modelling. These parameter values are then compared with the ranges obtained through the class-based Local Climate Zone framework. Results are presented for two case studies, Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, as open access data tables for integration into urban climate models, as well as codes for processing high-resolution and three-dimensional urban datasets. We also provide an open access 300 m resolution building morphology and surface cover dataset for the Sydney metropolitan region (approximately 5,000 square kilometres). The use of building resolving data to derive model inputs at the grid scale better captures the distinct heterogenetic characteristics of urban form and fabric compared with class-based approaches, leading to a more accurate representation of cities in climate models. As consistent building-resolving datasets become available over larger geographical extents, we expect bottom-up approaches to replace top-down class-based frameworks.