The application of ‘least-cost’ modelling as a functional landscape model

The growing awareness of the adverse effects of habitat fragmentation on natural systems has resulted in a rapidly increasing number of actions to reduce current fragmentation of natural systems as well as a growing demand for tools to predict and evaluate the effect of changes in the landscape on connectivity in the natural world. Recent studies used ‘least-cost’ modelling (available as a toolbox in GIS-systems) to calculate ‘effective distance’, a measure for distance modified with the cost to move between habitat patches based on detailed geographical information on the landscape as well as behavioural aspects of the organisms studied. We applied the method to a virtual landscape and a small scaled agricultural system subject to different scenarios in a land re-allotment project. We discuss the importance of technical aspects and ecological assumption underlying this modelling method. The model is shown to be a flexible tool to model functional connectivity in the study of the relation between landscape and mobility of organisms as well as in scenario building and evaluation in wild life protection projects and applied land management projects. Since ‘effective distance’ has the same units as Euclidean distance (m), this effective distance may be a straightforward way to include landscape and behavioural aspects in other models which include distance as a measure for isolation. We show the importance of the ‘ecological’ quality of the input maps and the choice of relevant landscape features and resistance values.     

Israel: metropolitan integration or ‘fractured regions’? An alternative perspective

This paper proposes an alternative account of the high degree of power centrality in Israel, by arguing that the territorial ‘fracturing’ of Israel's main social and ethnic groups has prevented the emergence of effective pressure for regional devolution. Israel's character as a settler and settling state, and its central project of Judaising contested territories, enabled the Israeli ‘ethnocracy’ and its (mainly Ashkenazi) elites to create a political geography of ‘fractured ethnic and social regions’. This was achieved by dispersing minorities and legitimising segregation and inequality, all in the name of the ‘national interest’.The Israeli political landscape is therefore organised as ‘fractured regions’, each representing a distinct and interconnected, yet geographically dispersed, set of localities. The logic of dispersal and segregation, in turn, has also influenced patterns of development and residential separation within Israel's main urban areas. Thus ethnic and social fragmentation and conflict, and not a putative process of national or metropolitan integration, can explain much of Israel's highly centralised power structure.     

A relict of vegetational landscape related to seasonal migratory grazing in the south of Italy: the ‘Bosco dell'Incoronata’ (Foggia) southern Italy

In the past transhumance of sheep was an important phenomenon which took place all over the territories of central and southern Italy. The flocks, which in summer were pastured in the mountains of the central Apennines, in winter were moved across an intricate network of tracks (called ‘Tratturi’ in Italian) to the lowlands of the Adriatic cost and the plains of Puglia. As a result of a crisis this type of sheep-rearing is disappearing as well as the characteristics of the landscape which resulted from these journeys. We examine what remains of the characteristics of the landscape and vegetation of the ‘Bosco dell'Incoronata’ one of the last winter pastures of Puglia.     

New ‘rural lifestyle estates’ in The Netherlands

Recent studies tend to indicate that no longer all presently agricultural land in The Netherlands is required for sustainable agricultural production. Apart from various urban uses and some projects turning agricultural land into nature reserves or giving it a secondary function, like national landscape parks or drinking water supply area, it is not easy to find alternative users for the land presently managed by farmers. At the same time, many urban companies or families are vainly looking for building lots away from our ‘compact urban areas’. This paper explores a way to bring this supply and demand together in a landscape-wise more than acceptable manner: the planning concept and experiment of ‘new rural lifestyle estates’.     

Greenways: multiplying and diversifying in the 21st century

Building on the legacy of historic greenway planning in the U.S., several new initiatives have been taking shape and gaining recognition in the past decade. One is ‘Green Infrastructure’ planning which is a ‘must have’ inter-connected system of green spaces. Another is ‘Smart Conservation’—the counterpoint of another planning initiative that preceded it known as ‘Smart Growth’. This is the establishment of critical green corridors that should be preserved and maintained for predominantly ecological functions, in advance of or in conjunction with new development. ‘New Urbanism’ has focused on bringing order and coherence to escalating ‘Edge Cities’ on the urban fringe, based on walkable, mixed-use towns, villages and neighborhoods with integrated open-space systems. Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) are transportation plans for accommodating regional growth around clustered ‘pedestrian pockets’ linked by transit systems. Both New Urbanism and TODs have applied similar principles to ‘brown sites’ and declining city neighborhoods.All these initiatives are different aspects of the greenway movement, expressing its many possibilities, enriching its original concepts, enlarging its credibility—if need be—and emphasizing its importance for and relevance to current issues of sustainability and ‘green’ planning and design. The author, a teacher/practitioner, discusses recent U.S. greenway examples at site, metropolitan and regional scales for which he has been the principal planner/designer or a consultant, and compares New Urbanism and TOD methodologies and approaches to established greenway-planning practices and the premises of Smart Conservation.     

Marketing view of project startup

Over three years, 25 project startups were conducted using a ‘marketing’ or ‘user-oriented’ approach. About 60% of the project startups were project restarts. The need for restarts resulted mainly from poor user/client orientation during the original project-initiation activities. Sometimes, however, it was also due to poor projectmanagement practices in general.The paper concentrates on the user/client aspects of the startups and the benefits resulting from them. The term ‘user’, or client, is used for four categories of user, who are brought together in negotiations during project starts and phase transitions. Of course, all the methods and techniques developed for project startup remained valid and indispensable, always indicating the known but often difficult-to-realize truth: invest in the start.For the majority of the organizations using this approach, it meant a breakthrough in the global ‘time-and-quality’-based competition.     

A landscape ecological model for wildlife enhancement of stormwater management practices in urban greenways

A spatial distribution model has been developed to predict the pattern of stormwater catchment facilities in developing urban areas. The model has been validated through comparison of predicted results with historical data in Guelph, Canada, using nearest neighbour analysis. The validated model has been applied to developing urban-rural fringe lands in Guelph to illustrate land use patterns likely to occur under different scenarios. Simulations of various scenarios for incorporating stormwater catchment facilities into greenways have been tested with the model and the resultant land use patterns compared with the status quo, through measures of landscape ecological integrity such as connectivity and porosity. The model was applied to an area on the edge of Guelph scheduled for development. The predicted land use patterns of various planning scenarios were generated and analysed. The results demonstrated that landscape integrity could be increased, urban wildlife habitat enhanced, and opportunities for residential non-consumptive wildlife recreation improved through integration of the evolving ‘blue-green’ open space provided by urban stormwater management facilities into existing greenways.     

‘Management by projects’: the management approach for the future

The trend toward the project-oriented company, performing simultaneously a network of internal and external projects, creates the demand for the management approach ‘Management by Projects’. The specific feature of ‘management by projects’ is that the management of single projects, the management of the network of projects and the management of the relationships between the company and the single projects are considered. For the successful management of the project-oriented company, instruments of ‘Management by Projects’ are presented.     

Continuous accountability for acceptable building performance

Complexities in building technology when not fully understood, have resulted in a less than favorable aggregate impact on the building's environment. A surprisingly high portion of U.S. non-industrial buildings do not provide satisfactory task environments. Developments in computer technology have infused new thought processes in the way we plan, design, build and operate our buildings. This paper proposes a social and technical use of Knowledge-based-systems (KBS) for continuous accountability to assure healthy buildings. Diagnostics, as an emerging discipline in building design and operation, is also discussed. A proposed framework for such accountability and the resulting ‘chain of custody’, that draws on the medical paradigm and associated diagnostic procedures is presented. It is suggested that KBS also be used for the development and interpretation of criteria for evaluating building performance from initial conception through design, construction and operation. Thus, KBS is expected to aid in the analysis of ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’ buildings that may be ‘sick’ or ‘healthy’. It is proposed that for a building to provide satisfactory performance over its life-time, the ‘life-cycle’ concept must be modified in terms of the roles, responsibilities, and configuration of the building team, and in terms of its costing procedures.     

Full-scale experimental study on smoke flow in natural ventilation road tunnel fires with shafts

Three full-scale burning tests were conducted in a natural ventilation city road tunnel with shafts. Fire sources were placed to be at different locations but its peak release heats were all around 5 MW. Results showed that large amounts of smoke and heat were released through shafts. The maximum smoke temperatures under the ceiling were below than 100 °C, and being lower than 110 °C at the safe height farther 3 m away from fires. The maximum smoke spreading horizontal lengths were less than 240 m both in the upwind and downwind. During the late stages, many smoke particles descended from the ceiling and downdraught occurred at shafts due to low smoke temperatures, but the visibility was not very bad and people needn’t evacuate. All These results are valuable for fire protection and construction of natural ventilation road tunnel with shafts.     

GBT formulation to analyse the buckling behaviour of thin-walled members with arbitrarily ‘branched’ open cross-sections

This paper presents the derivation, validates and illustrates the application of a Generalised Beam Theory (GBT) formulation developed to analyse the buckling behaviour of thin-walled members with arbitrarily ‘branched’ open cross-sections. Following a brief overview of the conventional GBT, one addresses in great detail the modifications that must be incorporated into its cross-section analysis procedure, in order to be able to handle the ‘branching’ points — they concern mostly issues related to (i) the choice of the appropriate ‘elementary warping functions’ and (ii) the determination of the ‘initial flexural shape functions’. The derived formulation is then employed to investigate the local-plate, distortional and global buckling behaviour of (i) simply supported and fixed asymmetric E-section columns and (ii) simply supported I-section beams with unequal stiffened flanges. For validation purposes, several GBT-based results are compared with ‘exact’ values, obtained by means of finite strip or shell finite element analyses.     

Ecology on the edge:: Landscape and ecology between town and country

The trends are world wide: people and goods are increasingly mobile, compact cities develop into urban networks, industrialising agriculture is becoming footloose, rural life becomes urban life in a green setting. Social segregation, traffic nuisance, urban sprawl and other unwanted impacts of these trends challenge urban and regional planners. The search for planning answers to these issues is further complicated by the need for sustainable development at a global scale. What is the role of ecology in the context of the discussions on the future of town and country? The traditional, and still dominant, approach is based on the polarity of urban and rural worlds. In this perspective, ecology focuses on the ‘nature’ of protected areas and biodiversity. The papers in this special issue explore the prospects of a wider perspective in which natural processes are seen as basic to both, rural and urban development. This article is digging up the fundamental ‘discourses’ underlying the two approaches to ecology and nature. Firstly, the ‘object-oriented’ and ‘process-oriented’ discourses are analysed. Secondly, the prospects of a process-oriented discourse are illustrated with plans for the Dutch Randstad and the German Ruhr area. Then, some new concepts are introduced that may strengthen the institutional conditions for the process-oriented approach. Discourses, concepts, plans and projects all circle around the central question in this article about the role of ecology in planning the edge of the city.     

Ecological issues related to wetland preservation, restoration, creation and assessment

A wide range of local, state, federal, and private programs are available to support the national (USA) policy of wetland ‘No Net Loss’. Implementation of programs, however, has resulted in the continued loss of natural wetlands on the premise that restored or created wetlands will replace the functions and values lost by destruction of natural wetlands. What are the ecological implications and consequences of these programs from a biodiversity and ecosystem perspective? From a biodiversity perspective, ongoing wetland protection policies may not be working because restored or created wetlands are often very different from natural wetlands. Wetland protection policies may also be inadequate to preserve and restore ecological processes such as nutrient cycling because they mostly focus on individual wetlands and ignore the fact that wetlands are integral parts of landscapes. Wetland mitigation projects, for example, often result in the exchange of one type of wetland for another and result in a loss of wetland functions at the landscape level. The most striking weakness in the current national wetlands policy is the lack of protection for ‘dry-end’ wetlands that are often the focus of debate for what is and what is not a wetland. From an ecological perspective, dry-end wetlands such as isolated seasonal wetlands and riparian wetlands associated with first order streams may be the most important landscape elements. They often support a high biodiversity and they are impacted by human activities more than other types of wetlands. The failings of current wetland protection and mitigation policies are also due, in part, to the lack of ecologically sound wetland assessment methods for guiding decision making processes. The ecologically based Hydrogeomorphic (HGM) approach to wetland assessment has the potential to be an effective tool in managing biodiversity and wetland ecosystem function in support of the national ‘No Net Loss’ policy.     

Some comments on the numerical analysis of plates and thin-walled structures

The paper briefly reviews the theoretical analysis of plates structures that might exhibit multiple ‘loading paths’ and highlights the need for engineers using non-linear numerical modelling to be aware of the multi-mode phenomenon and to ensure that the modelling is set up in such a manner that the various ‘loading paths’ and possible changes of path would be incorporated in the modelling response. The paper presents a simple example of numerical analysis of thin-plate buckling that involves ‘coupled buckling modes’ and provides comments on suitable methods for defining in a simple and straightforward way the numerical modelling that could ensure that results from computer analysis describe the physically correct relationship between applied loadings and deformations of thin-walled structural components.     

Fluid dynamic performances of traditional and alternative jet fans in tunnel longitudinal ventilation systems

This paper presents the results of a numerical investigation carried out on an alternative jet fan, known in literature like Banana Jet®, and it compares its fluid dynamic performances to traditional axial ventilation systems. The alternative jet fan is equipped with inlet/outlet sections inclined at a fixed pitch angle (α) toward the tunnel floor. This approach establishes an alternative solution that is able to provide a safety level equivalent to the traditional solution, in different scenarios. Both systems are installed in an one-way tunnel and two different scenarios (without vehicles and with traffic jam) are considered, in event of fire. The fire was simulated setting heat flux on Heavy Good Vehicle (HGV) surface and comprehensive of radiative heat flux. Computational Fluid-Dynamic (CFD) are applied to simulate the ventilation in the unidirectional tunnel through k–ε model, including temperature fields. The results show, for both scenarios, the existence of an optimal pitch angle which offers advantages in comparison with the traditional system (α = 0°) in terms of plant and running costs. In the next paper, the influence of the radiative heat flux for the optimal pitch angle will be explicitly considered.     

Natursyns model: A conceptual framework and method for analysing and comparing views of nature

This article presents a conceptual framework and methodology by which stakeholders’ views of nature can be investigated, explained, compared and ‘ideal types’ distilled based on qualitative interviews and, plans, laws and other texts analysed. The aim of such studies is to increase the knowledge about personal, social and cultural aspects of landscape and their relations in general to improve the basis of countryside planning and management in particular. Within the Natursyns model (the Danish word ‘natur’ corresponding to “nature” in English and “syn” implying perceived, imagined, cognized and culturally agreed interpretations) landscape is understood simultaneously as: ‘habitat’, unrealised sense impressions; ‘area’, all the ways in which nature is cognised; and as ‘symbol’, all types of representations of nature and its parts. The use of the model is illustrated; its epistemological foundation, the semiotics and phaneroscopy (phenomenology) of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, is described; the content of its fields explained; and benefits and shortcomings discussed.     

Reconquering the city

Choosing a title for the 1900 campaign in favour of the cities of Europe and for improving the quality of life in them was a difficult task for the experts of the Council of Europe. Before arriving at the rather weak term ‘renaissance’, alternatives ranging from ‘renewal’ to ‘rehabilitation’ and even ‘reconquest’ of the city were considered. This last term seems to me, in spite of its military connotations, to grasp the problem well enough.     

Swedish experiences of incentives for the protection of nature

In Sweden, the maintenance of biological diversity is considered a key element in the development towards a sustainable society. However, the link between sustainable development and biodiversity is far from clear to everybody. It is an important task to explain this link. A cornerstone of Swedish biodiversity policy is that each sector in society has a sectoral responsibility to ensure that its own activities do not cause any long-term loss of biodiversity (but instead help to maintain it). The concept of sectoral responsibility is an important feature of environmental policy in the context of developing new incentives. Besides ‘traditional’ nature conservation tools — such as the protection of sites, purchasing land and general environmental legislation — new, more market-oriented incentives have emerged during the last few years, e.g. certifications schemes in forestry and eco-labelling in agriculture. These new incentives have developed alongside political processes (parliament, government, agencies etc.) and have been formulated and negotiated by ‘market players’. Environmental NGOs, such as WWF Sweden and the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, have often taken the lead role in this process. Another feature of these incentives is that they not only apply to products but also to production; an example of this is in forestry where not just the wood but also forest management are in focus. The national agri-environmental programmes, within the context of the European Union's subsidy programme for environmental measures in agriculture, provide a powerful tool for conserving and enhancing biodiversity. In Sweden at least, there is nowadays complete acceptance for the basic view that it is both desirable and necessary to pay the farmers for their ‘production’ of common benefits such as biodiversity in well-managed pastures and meadows. Market-oriented incentives, such as eco-labelling and certification schemes, have an important role to play and should complement other, more traditional tools such as general environmental legislation and protection of sites.     

Public policy for a multiproduct firm : Tearing down the ‘Berlin Wall’ in telecommunications

United States telecommunications policy contains ‘Berlin Walls’ that due to technology advances are being breached. Policies that encourage competitors are unnecessarily constraining traditional providers, the local exchange carriers. These constraints are causing market distortions, harmful to consumers. We propose four specific policy changes that should be adopted in order to bring down the walls while providing protections against any residual market power held by the exchange carriers. Specifically: use of incremental cost test to deter/detect cross-subsidies, price imputation for intrafirm transfers, generalized open network architecture, and removal of prohibitions on exchange carrier provision of video programming.     

Rhetorics and realities in new product development in the subsea oil industry

In any context people draw on an abstract, generative structure of rules and resources in order to act. While some of the rules are ‘open’ and accessible to everyone in an industrial network, there are also ‘hidden’ rules, which can be derived using data which may come from several sources—such as informal communications, and individual perceptions of past actions of participants within the network. These sources are differentially accessible, and consequently the hidden rules may be construed differently by different players. One situation in which researchers have an unusual opportunity to uncover the hidden rules governing collaborative new product development, and the process by which they are inferred, is when major changes are disrupting hitherto smooth business relationships, provoking highly vocal self-examination of industry network functions. The study reported here is utilising such a period in the North Sea oil and gas-related industry to elucidate the process of inference of the hidden rules, the varied construction of these by different actors within the industry network, and the impact of the abstract structure thus generated on decisions about product and service innovation by the actors. In this industry the new ‘products’ developed are productive oilfield infrastructures and their diverse product and technical service components.