A planning-oriented sustainability assessment framework for peri-urban water management in developing countries

Testing the integrated risk and sustainability assessment (RSA) framework for ‘water scarcity – water reuse’ situations: The case of Cerrillos de Tamaya, Chile

The combination of multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and participatory planning is an approach that has been applied in complex planning situations where multiple criteria of very different natures are considered, and several stakeholders or social groups are involved. The spatial character of forest planning problems adds further to the complexity, because a large number of forest stands are to be assigned different treatments at different points in time. In addition, experience from participatory forest planning indicates that stakeholders may think about the forest in terms of place-specific values rather than in forest-wide terms. The objective of this study was to present an approach for including place-specific values in MCDA-based participatory forest planning and illustrate the approach by a case study where the objective was to choose a multipurpose forest plan for an area of urban forest in northern Sweden. Stakeholder values were identified in interviews, and maps were used to capture place-specific spatial values. The nonspatial and nonplace-specific spatial values were formulated as criteria and used to build an objective hierarchy describing the decision situation. The place-specific spatial values were included in the creation of a map showing zones of different silvicultural management classes, which was used as the basis for creation of forest plan alternatives in the subsequent process. The approach seemed to work well for capturing place-specific values, and the study indicates that formalized methods for including and evaluating place-specific values in participatory forest planning processes should be developed and tested further.

The aim of the study is a practical analysis of social network services as a place to store multimedia resources that allow you to store and share digital photos, audio and video recordings, text files, presentations, and organize resource discussions for free. They can be used as educational materials (educational videos, photos on various topics, audio and video recordings of scientists' speeches, eyewitnesses of events, etc.), as well as means to store student video, photo, audio files and creative works. Method. Theoretical materials of the research are the best practices of foreign and domestic scientists in the field of network communications and their impact on the future specialists preparing in geography and tourism, namely articles, monographs, abstracts, dissertations. The study uses the method of theoretical materials analysis, as well as methods of observation, abstraction in identifying the qualification characteristics of social Internet networks. Content analysis (analysis of the social networks community messages content); statistical and comparative information analysis was carried out. Empirical research on the social Internet networks lies in creating and filling a community on the social Internet network, as well as engaging students in that community. Results. In the research it was found out that social networks can be used to solve the following tasks: to organize the collective work of students in the classroom (and outside it), which will be favourable to the communication, to gain the team experience; to ensure the development of the students personalized learning environment; to promote students independent learning, as everyone works in his own rhythm; to promote informal communication between the tutor and the students; to change the tutor's role, who will become an assistant, friend, mentor; to create digital educational content of the disciplines. The scientific novelty of the obtained results lies in the fact that on the comprehensive analysis of social internet networks, internet blogs, tourist internet resources basis, their place and role in the information and educational environment of higher education institutions are determined, in particular: the specifics of the content, prospects and mechanisms of the development of the social Internet networks from the point of view of training future tourists are determined; the dependence of the functions of the Social Internet Network, Internet blogs on their structural elements is established. Practical significance. The obtained scientific results are used in the educational process of future specialists in the field of training "Tourism", with the educational qualification "tourism expert, organizer of excursion and animation activities" when teaching the disciplines "study of local lore and tourism", "tourist work", "recreational geography", "geography of Ukraine", "professional competencies in tourism business", "organization of tourist activities". The research practices can be used to conduct tourist, museum, local history, excursion and other types of student's practice.

Sustainable city development concerns various dimensions such as citizen well-being, urban infrastructure, environmental friendliness, accessible transportation, and solid economics. Effective utilization of resources and energy is inevitable if a city wishes to transit towards sustainability. A sustainable city assessment framework is a useful tool in measuring and evaluating the management of the city resources without negative impact on the environment, facilitating the city to grant the well-being of the citizen in terms of safety, happiness, and convenience. The management can make use of the framework in planning and executing various policies for robust economic growth. Moving towards a status of a sustainable city is of great interest to an emerging city like Chiang Mai in Thailand. As a case study, Chiang Mai is unique in terms of its medium size, with the potential to be the regional hub. Chiang Mai is the 2nd largest city in Thailand, located in a strategic location and surrounded by diverse and nice natural environments, and is the center of medical and education excellence in northern Thailand. In this works, an overview of sustainable city indicators employed for several cities was conducted. The suitability of key indices was evaluated and discussed against the context of Chiang Mai. The Thai government's bio-circular-green (BCG) economy concept was also considered for economic and social development along with environmental protection to properly realize the potential of the city. From the preliminary findings, potential indicators of the sustainable city assessment may be grouped into three main components: economic, social, and environmental. Useful plans and guidelines from the sustainable city assessment framework were also proposed for the future development and expansion of Chiang Mai.

Modeling, analysis, control, and management of complex social networks represent an important area of interdisciplinary research in an advanced digitalized world. In the last decade social networks have produced significant online applications which are running on top of a modern Internet infrastructure and have been identified as major driver of the fast growing Internet traffic. The "Second International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Management of Social Networks and Their Applications" (SOCNET 2018) held at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, on February 28, 2018, has covered related research issues of social networks in modern information society. The Proceedings of SOCNET 2018 highlight the topics of a tutorial on "Network Analysis in Python" complementing the workshop program, present an invited talk "From the Age of Emperors to the Age of Empathy", and summarize the contributions of eight reviewed papers. The covered topics ranged from theoretical oriented studies focusing on the structural inference of topic networks, the modeling of group dynamics, and the analysis of emergency response networks to the application areas of social networks such as social media used in organizations or social network applications and their impact on modern information society. The Proceedings of SOCNET 2018 may stimulate the readers' future research on monitoring, modeling, and analysis of social networks and encourage their development efforts regarding social network applications of the next generation.

Water is a key driver for socio-economic development, livelihoods and ecosystem integrity. This is reflected in the emergence of unified paradigms such as Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) and the weight accorded to it in the Sustainable Development Goals agenda. This paper interrogated the effectiveness of existing participatory planning and assessment models adapted from IWRM model on water quality and public health at community level. The analysis was built around public health ecology perspective and drew useful lessons from critique of basin wide integrated Modeling approaches and existing community participatory models envisaged under Water Users Associations (WUA) in South Africa. We extended the use of political ecology lenses to ecological public health through use of communication for development approaches, to argue that public health risk reduction and resilience building in community water projects require the use of innovative analytical and conceptual lenses that unbundle cognitive biases and failures, as well as, integrate and transform individual and collective agency. The study concludes that the inherent “passive participation” adapted from IWRM model fail to adequately address water quality and public health dimensions in its pillars. Since water quality has direct bearing on disaster risks in public health, building a coherent mitigatory vision requires the adoption of active participatory assessment and planning models that incorporate livelihoods, agency, social learning dynamics and resilience through recognition of communication for development approaches in community empowerment.

A framework for dynamic life cycle sustainability assessment and policy analysis of built environment through a system dynamics approach

Sustainability aims to fulfill the current generation's needs without jeopardizing the quality of life for future generations. This is primarily achieved through saving the environment, enhancing society, and prospering the economy; hence, developing a construction sustainability assessment framework for buildings in Uganda will help to streamline the construction industry towards achieving environmental, social, and economic sustainability. The purpose of this research was to develop a Uganda Building Sustainability Assessment Framework (UBSAF). The rationale is based on the fact that sustainability assessment of buildings has acquired new momentum in recent years. Currently, the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) in the United Kingdom (UK), LEED Green Building Rating System in the US), and the Green Star Assessment Method (GSAM) in Australia (AU) are being used as best practices globally. However, these methods have been criticized for their unsuitability and inability to consider country and regional contexts, such as global variations in climate, geographical differences, etc., which need consideration. Therefore, this study was intended to address this challenge by developing a building assessment framework specifically for buildings in Uganda. Triangulation research method was used to collect relevant data for the study. A systematic literature search and review was conducted on the available literature, and various sustainability assessment indicators were established under the environmental, social, and economic aspects. Forty nine (49) sustainability assessment indicators were obtained from the literature and the pilot study done by industry experts. Delph technique was used to obtain primary data from an expert group of 30 construction industry experts, including structural engineers, urban planners, environmentalists, architects, quantity surveyors, mechanical engineers, and academicians. A three-round questionnaire was administered to construction industry experts to ascertain the importance of the various sustainability indicators in the construction industry in Uganda, with the overall objective of achieving consistency in the construction industry experts' opinions about the various sustainability indicators. The contribution of this research will be developing a sustainability assessment framework for buildings in Uganda. Several statistical measures like weighted mean score, standard deviation, Cronbach's alpha reliability test, a Shapiro-Wilk test of normality, Kendall's concordance test, Chi-square test, and inter rater agreement (IRA), were used to analyze the various sustainability indicators and discussions. Consistency was achieved after Delphi round three; hence, the various sustainability indicators relevant to the construction industry were attained. These indicators include but are not limited to land use, access to social, domestic, and socio-economic facilities, building form and orientation, daylighting and viewing comfort, building total lifecycle costs, access to public transport, parking capacity, annual operating costs, natural ventilation, and affordability. The relative weights of the sub-criteria (indicators) were determined using the CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) method, a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) technique. This method measures the correlation between different criteria and helps to determine their relative weights. The study used the Normalized Weighted Mean Score (NWMS) to evaluate the sustainability of construction projects in Uganda. This is a commonly used sustainability study technique that aggregates the scores of different sub criteria to provide an overall score for sustainability. To test the proposed framework's practicality, the study applied it to three case studies, including one completed and two ongoing construction projects. The framework's applicability was determined by consulting with experts, and the results indicated that it could be widely used in different projects to assess their sustainability. The proposed framework will enable contractors and developers to evaluate sustainability in new construction. In addition, the framework promotes corporate social responsibility, which can enhance the quality and standards of the construction industry.

A critical review of reductionist approaches for assessing the progress towards sustainability

Systemic sustainability assessment: Analyzing environmental and social impacts of actions on sustainable development

Few cities in the world have the appropriate models, tools and skills required to translate broad commitments to urban ecological sustainability into practical policies, programs and projects. Many cities are compelled to act in the absence of rigorous analysis and modelling to provide a better evidence base of how their environments behave at present, let alone following planned interventions. A number of computer-based urban simulation models are being employed to forecast and evaluate land use change (Landis & Zhang, 1998a, 1998b; Batty, et al., 1999; Batty, 2003; Wegener et al., 2002; Benenson & Torrens, 2004, 2005; Waddell, 2000, 2002, 2004 & 2006). These models represent a spatial and dynamic approach that enables planners to view and analyse the future outcomes of current decisions and policies before they are put in action. However, there remain several challenges. Modelling efforts have proceeded separately and disciplinary approaches have not adequately addressed the processes and variables that couple human and ecological systems and there exists a gap between most stakeholders and urban planners and the modellers who develop, operate and interpret these models. In response, this empirical research aims to develop an urban sustainability assessment framework which integrates (1) a process approach in the form of a multidisciplinary participatory process (involving local and expert knowledge) and (2) an analytical approach in the form of a computer-based urban simulation system. To develop this approach to sustainability assessment, we are proposing to adopt a methodology of collaborative design, adaptation and evaluation (an adapted form of action research). To date, the study involved the search for an operational computer based urban simulation system and an appropriate participatory integrated assessment methodology. Hence the Open Platform for Urban Simulation (OPUS) and UrbanSim of Paul Waddell and the Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA) process of Rotmans & Weaver (2006) were selected. The following stage of the study will involve the design and development of an urban simulation system prototype. Once a prototype has been developed, the final stage will involve the implementation and evaluation of the urban simulation system in combination with the participatory sustainability assessment process of Rotmans & Weaver (2006), as part of a case study.

Recommender system is the system which, by using automated information filtering technology, recommends products or services to the customers who are likely to be interested in. Those systems are widely used in many different Web retailers such as Amazon.com, Netfix.com, and CDNow.com. Various recommender systems have been developed. Among them, Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been known as the most successful and commonly used approach. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. However, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting in advance whether the performance of CF recommender system is acceptable or not is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose a decision making guideline which helps decide whether CF is adoptable for a given application with certain transaction data characteristics. Several previous studies reported that sparsity, gray sheep, cold-start, coverage, and serendipity could affect the performance of CF, but the theoretical and empirical justification of such factors is lacking. Recently there are many studies paying attention to Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a method to analyze social relationships among people. SNA is a method to measure and visualize the linkage structure and status focusing on interaction among objects within communication group. CF analyzes the similarity among previous ratings or purchases of each customer, finds the relationships among the customers who have similarities, and then uses the relationships for recommendations. Thus CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. Under the assumption that SNA could facilitate an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in transaction data for CF recommendations, we focus on density, clustering coefficient, and centralization which are ones of the most commonly used measures to capture topological properties of the social network structure. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. We explore how these SNA measures affect the performance of CF performance and how they interact to each other. Our experiments used sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well?known department stores in Korea. Total 396 data set were sampled to construct various types of social networks. The dependant variable measuring process consists of three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used UCINET 6.0 for SNA. The experiments conducted the 3-way ANOVA which employs three SNA measures as dependant variables, and the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure as an independent variable. The experiments report that 1) each of three SNA measures affects the recommendation accuracy, 2) the density's effect to the performance overrides those of clustering coefficient and centralization (i.e., CF adoption is not a good decision if the density is low), and 3) however though the density is low, the performance of CF is comparatively good when the clustering coefficient is low. We expect that these experiment results help firms decide whether CF recommender system is adoptable for their business domain with certain transaction data characteristics.

The social network model is powerful enough to provide for the analysis and study of a variety of application domains from daily life, including health care and health informatics. After the widespread appearance of automated tools capable of deriving and analyzing social networks, social network analysis (SNA) and mining in the health care domain has recently received considerable attention for its key role in understanding how various bodies within the health care system form communities and how they are socially connected with each other. This understanding helps enhance the organizational structures and process flows, among others. In this article, we show how SNA techniques can solve issues in the medical referral system in the Canadian health care system and the like, by analyzing the social network of general practitioners (GPs) and specialists (SPs). One of the main targets is to optimize the communication between GPs and SPs with hopes of decreasing the waiting time of patients to be seen by SPs. Various SNA and mining techniques are described and analyzed, backed by reporting some experimental results.

In the transition to an information society, a government structure that possesses integrated, efficient, transparent and simplified business processes is a basic principle. In line with this, providing interoperability within the public sector that encompasses not only corporations and organizations but also local administrations and identifying the necessary procedures and standards for this is of significant importance. In this context, the social network analysis (SNA) is an effective tool. Using SNA, this study examined real estate (immovable) appraisal (valuation) that is widely used by the public sector as well as the private sector that is realized through multi-headed organizational structures in Turkey. With the numerical and visual analysis conducted at the central county of the province of Afyonkarahisar, answers were sought to questions such as, “In the work relating to real estate appraisal which organization is most concerned?” “In obtaining real estate appraisal related data which organization is cooperated with the most?” “Of the organizations that undertake real estate appraisal which organization is known the most?” “Which organization that carries out real estate appraisal is trusted the most?” In conclusion, the relationship between organizations that undertook real estate appraisals were evaluated using the SNA and an unseeable social relationship network was revealed. Key words: Social networks, social network analysis, real estate appraisal, Turkey.

Increasing efforts have been devoted to promoting sustainable demolition waste management (DWM) from a life cycle thinking perspective. To this end, facilitating sustainability-oriented decision-making for DWM planning requires a sustainability assessment framework for assessing the trade-offs among multifaceted criteria. This study develops a BIM-based DWM sustainability assessment approach to facilitate the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) and decision-making by integrating LCSA-related properties and hybrid Multi-Criteria Decision-Aiding (MCDA) methods into a BIM environment using Dynamo visual scripting. A dynamic linkage is developed in the streamlined BIM-based LCSA process, where the enriched Industry Foundation Class (IFC) models are coupled with custom LCSA data templates to achieve seamless data exchange between the BIM platform and external LCA tools. Subsequently, hybrid MCDA methods convert the assessment results into DWM scenario ranking. A pilot study verifies the applicability of the BIM-based framework. The results unveil that the sustainability score ascended with the recycling rate. The optimal DWM alternative with the highest recycling rate yields the highest sustainability score at 91.63. Conversely, a DWM alternative reflecting the ‘status quo’ in China’s recycling industry has the lowest score at 8.37, significantly lower than the baseline scenario with a 50% recycling rate. It is worth noting that the ‘growth curve’ of the sustainability score continuously flattens as the target recycling rate escalates. The increment in recycling rate from the “Australian standard” scenario to the optimal scenario is 18.4%, whereas the sustainability score merely increases by 2.3%, implying that the former scenario arrived at an optimum point for maximising the cost-efficiency of DWM under the predefined settings.