Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemEndogenous Climate Resilience: Informal Adaptation Pathways in the Pacific’s Small Island Developing Cities( 2020)More than half of the world’s population currently lives in cities, with an additional 2.5 billion people projected to join these urban inhabitants by the middle of the 21st century. With urban areas being both responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions associated with energy use, and simultaneously facing substantive risks associated with climate impacts, it is clear that efforts to both mitigate and adapt to climate change impacts will be ‘won or lost’ in cities. The term resilience is increasingly being applied to these urban systems, particularly in reference to climate-driven shocks and stresses. The uptake of resilience thinking has been driven in part by its capacity to bridge climate mitigation and adaptation, while incorporating additional fields and methodologies such as those associated with disaster risk management. This flexibility has been particularly appealing to international development actors and institutions, who have accelerated the term’s national and sub-national uptake through the embedding of resilience language in international policy frameworks and financing mechanisms. Resilience’s conceptual fluidity, however, has led to sustained criticism from social scientists. These critiques have focused particularly on three areas: resilience thinking’s lack of sensitivity to social inequality; the risk of divergence in normative perceptions of ‘core’ urban functions; and a capacity for the term to facilitate the devolution of the state’s duty of care to its most vulnerable citizens. These concerns are especially pertinent for informal settlements, which house an estimated 880 million urban inhabitants globally and operate outside of institutionally recognised urban structures and systems. This thesis examines the interaction between informally derived endogenous climate resilience and donor-driven exogenous climate resilient development initiatives in two Pacific cities: Honiara, Solomon Islands and Port Vila, Vanuatu. These two case studies provide critical insight into the accelerating process of urbanisation in a region characterised as one of the world’s most climate vulnerable, focused through the experiences of two major climate-driven shock events. Drawing on primary data from interviews with representatives from six informal settlements (n=57) as well as institutions engaged in the deployment of climate resilient development initiatives (n=26), I identify how the endogenous forms of climate resilience that are prevalent in informal settlements interact with donor-driven, exogenous development initiatives. These primary datasets have been integrated with analysis of project documentation, policies and finance, as well as sociodemographic and spatial data. The results from this research demonstrate that ‘informal climate resilience’ is an integral part of sub-city systems, especially – but not exclusively – informal settlements. These forms of endogenous resilience are shown to be critical to the recovery, survival, and development of climate vulnerable communities. At the same time, they remain disconnected from institutional resilience-building efforts. Their prevalence, at times in conflict with city-scale values and functional assumptions, is found to be largely unrecognised within contemporary resilience theorisations and practice. By adapting resilience thinking heuristics originating from ecological applications – set within institutional analytical frameworks for engaging with informality – this research identifies strategies for engaging with informal climate resilience, with the potential for application within and beyond the Pacific.
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ItemAssessing the impact of urban form on the energy consumption and Green House Gas (GHG) emissions in Metropolitan Melbourne( 2020)The resource use and environmental impacts of buildings and transport energy consumption are some of the key aspects of sustainable development. The relationship between urban form and energy and Green House Gas (GHG) emissions has been explored in several studies suggesting a strong link between housing density and public transport (PT) accessibility and urban energy consumption. However, most studies only explore building or transport energy impacts, and mostly focus on largely aggregated levels of analysis (metropolitan or municipal). Different modelling approaches have been used to explore this relationship, mainly top-down and bottom-up building energy models, however top-down approaches have limited use in assessing impacts of specific policies and actions on the built environment. Also, previous research has only focused on building or transport energy use. Integrated modelling approaches that explore the important synergies between these two main sectors of energy use are still needed. Therefore, this Thesis proposes a bottom-up integrated modelling methodology for assessing the impacts of alternative urban forms on the urban energy and carbon footprints by employing an integrated building and transport typology approach, with household typologies as the common element of analysis. This integrated modelling approach can be scaled up from small geographical scales to Metropolitan scale and can be used as a base to explore the implications of alternative urban growth scenarios and housing locations, types and densities, and transport mode options. The proposed model will allow key stakeholders to pre-assess impacts of energy consumption and GHG emission of specific urban policies on housing and transport infrastructure growth and the adoption of new, alternative energy technologies in urban areas. The research shows that the urban form has an impact on energy consumption, however, multiple dimensions of this impact should be considered in order to understand the existing trade-offs between building density and transport energy use. In order to explore the implications of future urban growth scenarios in terms of the carbon footprint of Metropolitan Melbourne, six urban growth scenarios were co-created with planning professionals and academy researchers. These scenarios were: Business-as-usual Scenario (BAU), Compact City, Sprawl City, Urban Corridor City, Activity Centre City, and High Efficiency City. The study of the six urban growth scenarios considered herein suggests that the Compact City and Activity Centre city scenarios lead to better energy performance or urban energy use and a significant reduction in GHG emission, when compared with a Business-as-Usual Scenario. Both the Compact City and Activity Centre city scenarios propose a decentralisation of housing and employment, add more medium-density activity centres, and connect employment centres by public transport. The High Efficiency City scenario showed that the increase in the adoption of Solar PV and Electric Car technology could support the carbon emissions targets more effectively, in combination with a more efficient distribution of future residential areas and employment centres. The results of this Thesis indicate that a more varied mix of building types in middle areas of Melbourne could provide a significant reduction in building energy use and GHG emissions, as it is shown in the Compact City scenario model that included a larger percentage of medium-density developments in its building type distribution in the middle areas of Metropolitan Melbourne. Future research directions to contribute further to the evaluation of urban energy efficiency are identified, which provide a better comprehension of urban energy use efficiency and support future carbon emissions reductions schemes in Australia and the world.