A decentralised Web3 framework for ecological landscape Design in Urban Parks Based on AI-aided Virtual Interaction. The framework links multi-source park data, a spatial ecological graph, AI co-design, and smart-contract governance so that design states, feedback records, and voting outcomes remain verifiable, with large scene assets stored off-chain. After ten iterations of the three renewal modes, its composite ecological benefits index was 0.95, with a mean habitat suitability value of 0.89 for all six parks; There was a relatively average gain rate of +56% in visitor satisfaction and +50% in carbon storage between new and old buildings. At the peak of five thousand simultaneous user access, the system's response time per unit of operation were respectively eight-two (ms), four-hundred-eighty-nine (-81%), forty-seven-fortytwo-six(-77%). Ablation test results show: without consensus confirmation, eco-enforcement and virtual reinforcement the effectiveness decreased by 4.8-12.7 per cent. Although the form is not perfect yet; still provides an operational path to join ecological Design and participatory Governance.
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.
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 âmining actionsâ 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 multiâlayered approach, drawing upon the authorsâ previous research on urban commons, we here summarize key insights on environmentally oriented urban commons and elaborate on what role they have in instigating climateâproofing activities in urban areas. We deal with three types of urban commons, i.e., âurban green commons,â âcoworking spaces,â and âcommunity climate commons.â 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 climateâchange 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 climateâchange 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 lowâcarbon 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 netâzero carbon goals. We conclude this article by identifying some critical determinants for the upâscaling of environmentally oriented urban commons.
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.
Problem: Critics have problematized infrastructure for its inability to keep pace with the rising social and ecological impacts of urbanization. Researchers identify urban green infrastructure (GI), including urban forests, as an important strategy for providing public goods and increasing resiliency while reducing ecological footprints and social inequity in metropolitan areas; however, realizing these benefits through planning is still uncertain ground, as most contemporary urban GI endeavors in the United States are small, individual projects rather than integrated, community-wide efforts. This underinvestment has left planners with little experience in developing GI at a metropolitan scale. Purpose: We address this deficit in infrastructure planning by studying planning's role in advancing large-scale, urban tree-planting initiatives (TPI) in eight major U.S. cities and one metropolitan county. In this study, we explore stakeholder perspectives on successes and setbacks in TPI planting, stewardship, business, and outreach plans. From these perspectives, we identify possible best practices that can better inform future efforts to plan GI on a metropolitan scale. Methods: From a review of the literature, we identified ideal planning elements researchers and practitioners considered fundamental to well-planned, urban forestry-based GI programs. We interviewed key stakeholders (n = 86) in eight major cities and one metropolitan county (New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Baltimore, Seattle, Denver, Albuquerque, Sacramento, and Salt Lake County), using multiple-choice and open-ended questions to explore their perceptions of TPI successes, failures, and opportunities for improvement. We used this data to compare TPI planning and implementation with ideal urban forestry and GI planning elements, to identify TPI best practices, and to locate TPI program elements such as business and stewardship planning in relation to traditional infrastructure. We discuss these findings in light of opportunities to bring GI into the mainstream of metropolitan infrastructure planning. Results and conclusions: We found that cities employed a spectrum of planning strategies to advance TPI, ranging from highly institutionalized, data-driven initiatives to decentralized, grassroots efforts. Participants viewed TPI as bringing GI to the mainstream; however, uncertainties in funding and long-term stewardship belie this perspective. Lacking access to traditional infrastructure financing, several TPI used creative development and contracting strategies to maintain program funding and momentum, while others stagnated. Additionally, programs lost momentum when mayors who launched TPI were not reelected. Successful underfunded initiatives focused on community-level engagement. However, institutionalized, diverse funding structures and robust, agency-level commitment to maintaining and expanding urban forests were considered most effective in advancing urban forestry-based GI. Overall geographic distribution of TPI, and the relatively sophisticated financial and institutional approaches achieved by New York and Seattle, provide insight into possible national strategies to advance metropolitan-scale GI. Similarly, Los Angeles's and Baltimore's use of focused corporate sponsorship and community engagement to advance underfunded programs could inform international GI efforts. Takeaway for practice: Through large-scale TPI, planners are beginning to engage in planning metropolitan-scale GI as a conscious strategy to address urban ecological issues and deliver public goods. Initiatives benefit from being launched early in an administration's term. Further, detailed, data-driven planting plans, combined with diversified funding sources and the institutionalization of tree-acquisition in the capital budget, can enable TPI to establish a) long-term contracts, b) control over supply chains, and c) stability in recessionary times. Contracting with grassroots and advocacy organizations to perform education and fieldwork can provide means for underfunded programs to maintain momentum toward meeting TPI goals; however, accessing traditional infrastructure financing mechanisms and institutionalizing stewardship plans are fundamental to long-term expansion and maintenance of investments in metropolitan GI. Research support: None.
This article examines the evolution of garden city ideas in the United States during the twentieth century. It distinguishes between four sets of goals: environmental reform; social reform; town planning, and regional planning. Much of the literature on American garden city movements focuses on the general political failure of its advocates to achieve key social reforms and regional planning objectives. By contrast, the accomplishments in environmental reform and town planning have been far more successful. Though Ebenezer Howard's proposals did not lead to widespread adoption in their purest form, urban decentralization and subâurbanization have produced significant improvements in the building of higherâquality and lowerâdensity housing and in providing more open space and greenery for a large segment of the population. This pattern of planning and development may be viewed as âthe garden metropolis.â Its relationship to garden city ideas is best symbolized by the central role of Thomas Adams, the British planner who served as a leading proponent of the garden metropolis in the United States. Many of Adamsâ policy recommendations, including his strong support for mass home owership initiatives, were later implemented by the Federal Housing Administration beginning in 1934. The FHA, through its mortgage insurance programs, its property and neighborhood standards, and its Land Planning Division, was extremely influential in shaping the growth of the garden metropolis, especially during the 1940s and 50s.