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This paper compares the energy consumption of elderly and non-elderly households, recognizing the ever-increasing importance of the aging population for energy policy. Decisions of the domestic (in-home) and transport (out-of-home) sectors at the household level are jointly incorporated by building a multivariate Hierarchical Archimedean Copula model with intra-sector and inter-sector dependencies. Data from a life-oriented behavioral survey in Japan are used, which includes 532 elderly households and 340 non-elderly households. A variety of life-related factors, together with built environment factors, are introduced into the above model. Modeling analysis results show that inter- and intra-sector dependencies are heterogeneous across households in terms of these factors. It is found that almost equal numbers of influential factors are sensitive and insensitive to age-based sample segmentation. Various similarities and dissimilarities across energy types between elderly and non-elderly households are revealed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resource conservation, sustainability, quality, and cost control have been considered significant issues for the construction sector worldwide. Green Lean Six Sigma not only improves quality, process flow, resource conservation, and environmental performance but also minimizes cost, waste, and lead time. The construction sector in Pakistan is struggling to adopt sustainable and quality-oriented practices. In this context, this paper aims to identify Green Lean Six Sigma enablers from the perspective of Pakistan's construction industry. Interpretive Structural Modelling consolidated with the Fuzzy Matrice d'Impacts Croises – Multipication Applique a classement technique, was employed to establish an ISM model and measure fuzzy indirect interactions, strengths, effectiveness and categorization of enablers. The findings signify that the most significant driving enablers are government support and incentives, availability of financial resources, top-management determination to enhance sustainability, and organizational capability and quality maturity level for GLS operations. These results could facilitate practitioners, policymakers, and government by providing insights to promote GLS methods for the sustainable growth of the construction sector. This study will assist practitioners and policymakers in developing appropriate strategies considering the intricate relationships and intensity of influence among Green, Lean and Six Sigma enablers during GLS adoption. Researchers can identify and analyze the elements related to their industries and country. Society will benefit in terms of health and the environmentally friendly built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While accounts of urban climate change governance and planning are growing, there is a need for further conceptual and empirical work to better understand processes of change and uptake across a range of local responses. This paper uses the Council Alliance for a Sustainable Built Environment (CASBE) as an urban experiment seeking to influence development and planning decisions to improve sustainability outcomes in the built environment in the State of Victoria, Australia. The evaluation is structured using Luederitz et al.'s tentative evaluative scheme for sustainability transition experiments. This paper also seeks to test, reflect, and further develop the scheme by highlighting the challenge of evaluating unbounded and not necessarily purposefully designed experiments. Finally, this paper calls for developing an approach to better reveal the political, social, and institutional complexities influencing the potential of experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing society and the spatial planning system plays a crucial role in ensuring that important adaptations to the built environment are evaluated. Drawing upon a mixed-methods research approach, this paper explores the progress that has been made by the planning system in England in addressing the challenge of climate change adaptation in coastal urban areas. The results indicate that the adaptation produced through the planning system remains incremental rather than transformative. It is focused on experienced hazards, especially flooding, and there is a lack of attention being paid to wider impacts of climate change, such as rising average temperatures. Furthermore, it was found that the contemporary contribution of planning to climate change adaptation is seriously limited by the government's emphasis on housing and economic growth and by the development industry's emphasis on economic viability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goals and performance targets are commonly used as tools in the policy-implementation process. In Sweden, environmental policy is operationalized through a system of environmental quality objectives that were adopted by the Swedish Riksdag in the late 1990s. The objectives describe what level of environmental quality Sweden should aim for within a generation, and are designed to guide decision making in all sectors of society. However, to guide decision making toward improved environmental quality, these objectives should satisfy a set of rationality (functionality) criteria; they should be precise, evaluable, approachable, motivating and coherent. In this paper, five Swedish environmental quality objectives are investigated through an application of the suggested criteria: (1) a balanced marine environment, flourishing coastal areas and archipelagos; (2) a magnificent mountain landscape; (3) a non-toxic environment; (4) natural acidification only; and (5) a good built environment. The aim of the paper is to bring the rationality of the objectives up for discussion, and to illustrate the range of issues and difficulties that are involved in choosing and assessing environmental policy goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While public health and urban planning were closely linked in the past, today both domains are institutionally separate. In most cases, health intersects with spatial planning processes only through obligatory evaluations, such as environmental impact assessments, or restrictive environmental legislation. This institutionalisation of health criteria in most western countries has difficulty in dealing with recent environmental health challenges, leading to continual distrust and conflict between citizens and the government. This impasse has recently been discussed by academics who acknowledge the complexity of both city and health issues. It seems, however, that the full extent of the issue has not been covered yet, leading to recommendations and frameworks that are useful but fixed and retrospective. This paper moves beyond those fixed frameworks to develop a better understanding of the complexity of the current disconnect and explores ideas for a future planning approach, grounded on new ideas of co-evolutionary and adaptive planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While sustainable land use planning ensures land preservation through urban compactness, liveable residential environments are commonly associated with low density levels. Analyzing the relationships between density and neighborhood satisfaction (as a measure for liveability) may therefore help urban planners to offer sustainable infill projects that also guarantee liveability for the residents. Objective or subjective measures of density can be proposed. While the literature considering objective density is plentiful, the empirical work analyzing the relationships between density perception and neighborhood satisfaction is surprisingly scarce. In this study, we use a 2015 online survey in the Loire-Atlantique Département in France that provided 1,134 questionnaires, which we analyzed using a discrete choice experiment. We find that neighborhood satisfaction has no relationship to the perceived density of the built environment by individuals. What matters is peacefulness as another type of neighborhood perception. Healthcare accessibility is also valued by the residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal settlements in developing megacities are often vulnerable to extreme heat and other environmental hazards. Yet, understanding of this vulnerability remains limited due to inadequate attention to the relationships between characteristics of the built environment and land surface temperature. To address this, we focus on the Mumbai region and employ a Geographically Development-Weighted Regression model that can link land surface temperature with datasets that can capture key characteristics of the built environment, particularly formal or informal settlement types and infrastructure quality. We find the existence of spatial heterogeneity in these relationships suggesting that informal settlements are correlated with higher land surface temperatures, especially under low development conditions. We also find that this effect grows with settlement size, and that the growth in these settlements would increase land surface temperature. We conclude with some guidance for planners and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban resilience is one of the most debated concepts that confronts environmental, socioeconomic, and political uncertainty and risk. Decision-makers cannot deploy substantial principles of resilience in urban design practice unless they have a vivid operational definition. To form a clear definition for Resilient Urban Design (RUD) in practice, this research connects the approach of urban resilience and urban design principles. This framework includes extracted attributes from urban resilience criteria through morphological, perceptual, functional, social, economic, governance, and ecological urban design dimensions. Then, 10 academic experts in urban design and planning conducted stages of screening, validation, and analysis using the Delphi technique and Shannon method. Results reveal that criteria of Good Governance, Innovation, Diversity, Adaptive Design, Redundancy, Robustness, Social Learning, Connectivity, Legibility, Identity, and Social Capital are all incorporated in the formation of the concept of RUD. These elements imply a more profound basis to make decisions, affecting resilient built environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green infrastructure (GI) has been identified as a promising approach to help cities adapt to climate change through the provision of multiple ecosystem services. However, GI contributions to urban resilience will not be realized until it is more fully mainstreamed in the built environment and design professions. Here, we interrogate five key challenges for the effective implementation of GI: (1) design standards; (2) regulatory pathways; (3) socio-economic considerations; (4) financeability; and (5) innovation. Methods include a literature review, case studies, and interviews with resilience managers. We propose a people-centred and context-dependent approach to advance effective implementation of GI in urban planning. We highlight two underlying currents that run across all of the challenges – (1) the role of political will as a pre-condition for tackling all challenges holistically; and (2) the role of stakeholder engagement in achieving public support, harnessing funding, and maintaining and monitoring GI in the long term. Highlights: • The effective implementation of GI is context-specific and should adhere to the basic principles of appropriate technology. • Continuous community engagement is needed to ensure the inclusivity and multi-functionality of GI. • Challenges to successful GI are intersectional and therefore cannot be addressed singly in isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate vulnerabilities of the built environment are increasingly recognised. Mainstreaming adaptation concerns in urban development and redevelopment projects is commonly propagated as an effective policy strategy. Adaptation mainstreaming research often studies public actors. This article investigates the adaptation practices by housing associations, in the institutional and discursive developments of the social housing domain in which they are embedded. The analytical concepts of mainstreaming and adaptation barriers are combined with the discursive-institutional policy arrangement approach to answer the question: what factors influence the mainstreaming of climate change adaptation measures in development and renovation projects in the social housing domain in the Netherlands? We conclude that anticipatory and deliberate adaptation action to date was very scarce and attention limited in the social housing domain. On the project implementation level, factors that hampered adaptation mainstreaming in housing development were limited awareness, low priority in relation to other issues, financial constraints, regulatory constraints, lacking cooperation, and no materialisation of adaptation concerns in procedures and performance agreements. On the level of the policy arrangement, adaptation is weakly institutionalized in the Dutch social housing domain. The institutionalisation of a competing 'core activities' discourse hampered the legality of climate adaptation measures and eroded financial resources, dispersing the power to mobilise them over the arrangement. Uncertainty over the meaning of the new regulations, in combination with the absence of a comprehensive regulatory framework for adaptation and the self-identified culture of risk aversion by housing associations, delimits adaptation action becoming a standard operating procedure of social housing associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning for hazard mitigation is frequently detached from other planning activities that influence development patterns in hazardous areas. Consistent integration of mitigation reduces hazard vulnerability for people and the built environment. We apply a plan integration for resilience scorecard in six US coastal cities to evaluate the integration of local networks of plans and the degree to which they target areas most vulnerable to flooding hazards. We find that plan integration scores vary widely across the six cities, and that some plans actually increase vulnerability in hazard zones. Policies also frequently support mitigation in areas with low vulnerability, rather than in areas with high vulnerability. The plan integration for resilience scorecard can generate information to improve hazard planning by allowing planners to identify conflicts between plans, assess whether plans target areas that are most vulnerable, and better inform decision makers about opportunities to mainstream mitigation into multiple sectors of planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]