Blockchain Papers

Zhen Liu, Zulan Yang, Ming-Jie Liang, Yi Liu · 6 authors

In the face of the health challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, healing and therapeutic design (HTD) as interventions can help with improving people's health. It is considered to have great potential to promote health in the forms of art, architecture, landscape, space, and environment. However, there are insufficient design approaches to address the challenges during the HTD process. An increased number of studies have shown that emerging information modeling (IM) such as building information modeling (BIM), landscape information modeling (LIM), and city information modeling (CIM) coupled with blockchain (BC) functionalities have the potential to enhance designers' HTD by considering important design elements, namely design variables, design knowledge, and design decision. It can also address challenges during the design process, such as design changes, conflicts in design requirements, the lack of design evaluation tools and frameworks, and incomplete design information. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a conceptual BC enhanced IM for HTD (BC-HTD) framework that addresses the challenges in the HTD and promotes health and well-being. The structure of BC-HTD framework is twofold: (1) a conceptual high-level framework comprising three levels: user; system; and information, (2) a conceptual low-level framework of detailed content at the system level, which has been constructed using a mixed quantitative and qualitative method of literature analysis, and validated via a pre-interview questionnaire survey and follow-up interviews with industry experts and academics. This paper analyzes the process of BC enhanced HTD and the knowledge management of HTD to aid design decisions in managing design information. This paper is the first attempt to apply the advantages of BC enabled IM to enhance the HTD process. The results of this study can foster and propel new research pathways and knowledge on the value of design in the form of non-fungible token (NFT) based on the extended advantages of BC in the field of design, which can fully mobilize the healing and therapeutic behaviors of designers and the advantage potential of HTD to promote health, and realize the vision of Health Metaverse in the context of sustainable development.

William Riggs, Vipul Vyas, Menka Sethi

This report investigates and develops specifications for using blockchain and distributed organizations to enable decentralized delivery and finance of urban infrastructure. The project explores use cases, including: providing urban greening, street or transit infrastructure; services for street beautification, cleaning and weed or graffiti abatement; potential ways of resource allocation ADU; permitting and land allocation; and homeless housing. It establishes a general process flow for this blockchain architecture, which involves: 1) the creation of blocks (transactions); 2) sending these blocks to nodes (users) on the network for an action (mining) and then validation that that action has taken place; and 3) then adding the block to the blockchain. These processes involve the potential for creating new economic value for cities and neighborhoods through proof-of-work, which can be issued through a token (possibly a graphic non-fungible token), certificate, or possible financial reward. We find that encouraging trading of assets at the local level can enable the creation of value that could be translated into sustainable “mining actions” that could eventually provide the economic backstop and basis for new local investment mechanisms or currencies (e.g., local cryptocurrency). These processes also provide an innovative local, distributed funding mechanism for transportation, housing and other civic infrastructure.

Johan Colding, Stephan Barthel, Robert Ljung, Felix Eriksson · 5 authors

Climate change and the coupled loss of ecosystem services pose major collective action problems in that all individuals would benefit from better cooperation to address these problems but conflicting interests and/or incomplete knowledge discourage joint action. Adopting an inductive and multi‐layered approach, drawing upon the authors’ previous research on urban commons, we here summarize key insights on environmentally oriented urban commons and elaborate on what role they have in instigating climate‐proofing activities in urban areas. We deal with three types of urban commons, i.e., “urban green commons,” “coworking spaces,” and “community climate commons.” We describe how allotment gardens, community gardens, and other types of urban green commons contribute to environmental learning that may boost understanding of environmental issues and which constitute important learning arenas for climate‐change mitigation and adaptation. We also deal with the newly emerging phenomenon of coworking spaces that share many essential institutional attributes of urban commons and which can work for climate‐change mitigation through the benefits provided by a sharing economy and through reduction of domestic transportation and commuting distance. Community climate commons represent commons where local communities can mobilize together to create shared low‐carbon assets and which hold the potential to empower certain segments and civil society groups so that they can have greater influence and ownership of the transformation of reaching net‐zero carbon goals. We conclude this article by identifying some critical determinants for the up‐scaling of environmentally oriented urban commons.

Laura Cambra‐Rufino, Andrea Brambilla, José León Paniagua Caparrós, Stefano Capolongo

AIM: The research sheds light on the challenges and limitations of Spanish and Italian hospital design by looking at the gaps between education and practice. BACKGROUND: Hospital design plays an important role in providing high-quality and cost-effective facilities for any healthcare system. Spain and Italy face contemporary challenges (i.e., elderly population, staff retention, and obsolete healthcare facilities) and have similar issues of life expectancy, health expenditure, hospital beds provision, and decentralized tax-financed healthcare systems. METHOD: A cross-sectional, mixed-method study was used. This involved two different data collection strategies and analysis for each area of investigation: (i) education and (ii) practice. For the former, educational programs were reviewed via a web search; for the latter, an online survey of 53 architectural/engineering offices involved in hospital design was conducted. RESULTS: Hospital design education is limited to 0/58 in Spanish and 2/60 courses in Italian universities, although each country offers three postgraduate courses. The practitioners' survey shows that even though their offices have a long history of healthcare design, only 48% in Spain and 60% in Italy have received specific university training. Office staff lack employees with medical backgrounds, which hinders any partnership between health and design fields either for design practice or the education fields. Laws, national regulations, technical guidelines, and previous experience are the most useful information sources, while international scientific publications appear underused by practitioners. CONCLUSIONS: Italian and Spanish healthcare architecture could be improved by promoting multidisciplinary teams (in practice and education) and improving the education offer by tailoring it to national needs.