Using optimisation for integrated water network management

The water industry has undergone radical change in the late 1980s and changes continue apace. We have been, and will continue to be, under increasing pressure to reduce costs and increase service within a framework where regulations are becoming tighter and demanding more information to achieve and substantiate performance. The major challenge will lie with the leaders of the industry. They have to achieve the right attitude, management technique and technical excellence to meet the requirements of change and to create adaptable organizations that can manage the challenges of change in a positive and proactive way. Cultural change has started but has a long way to go. We must overcome the traditional attitude of many water suppliers, which has typically been one of the ‘professional stewardship’ of a resource in which they supply water in the way they believe to be best. This must change and is changing to a more commercially minded management which is ‘customer centred’ rather than ‘product centred’. We must realize that our organizations manage a complex asset base which has to work towards strictly defined objectives of service quality, operational efficiency and regulatory requirements, all of which, as time goes on, are influenced more and more by substantial external forces.     

Quality assurance — an effective project management technique

The principles behind quality assurance as an effective strategy for management of large-scale capital projects are discussed. ‘Fitness-for-purpose’ objectives are analysed, and the need to minimize economic and other consequences of failure is shown to be essential as a means of obtaining customer confidence. Quality assurance management techniques involve thorough design review, document and drawing checking, and prototype testing. Assessments by purchasing organizations and third-party bodies ensure compliance with standards.     

Outsourced urban governance as a state rescaling strategy in Hyderabad,India

In the years since liberalization, state power has been rescaled in India's polity and this is both a cause and consequence of greater inter-state competition for footloose capital. In this context, some state governments are designing special regulatory tools to attract and concentrate investments by easing ‘doing business’ for private investors and leveraging land resources—primarily in their largest cities. Equally important, they ensure public investments are channelled to these select spaces and that resources are available for maintaining high standards of infrastructure. In Hyderabad, the ‘Industrial Area Local Authority’ (IALA) is a powerful tool that allows privatised management by state and non-state actors of recently constructed productive spaces, mainly concentrating globalised service sector activities, including by collecting local tax revenues and various development charges to be spent exclusively within the industrial area. In this way, governance and fiscal functions are outsourced to non-elected bodies, outside the purview of democratic institutions. By essentially replacing municipal authorities, the IALA framework produces new forms of governance at the same time that it generates fragmentation of the institutional fabric of urban spaces. In effect, it creates a tool for by-passing urban politics, or in the case of periurban spaces does not allow an urban politics to emerge. Building on recent research, this paper examines the implications of IALAs in Hyderabad on urban governance and local state sovereignty.     

Ordering in disguise: digital integration in built-environment practices

ABSTRACT

The digital integration of built-environment practices aims to bridge a large variety of organizations to improve building delivery and operation. However, recent research on building information modelling (BIM) reported organizational challenges arising from digital integration. This suggests a need to develop a critical perspective on digital-integration-driven organizational change. Adopting a practice-based approach, this paper exposes the practice-level phenomenon responsible for the ongoing change to develop a critical understanding and enable better interventions. The concepts of ‘simplification’ and ‘systematization’ of digital integration are developed from previous literature and then used to explore and interrelate the practice-level experiences of digital integration (i.e. the experience of the change from within) and the emerging patterns of interactions (i.e. the picture of the change from outside) in a BIM-enabled design project. The concept of ‘ordering in disguise’ is proposed to capture this phenomenon. It shows that practitioners experience digital integration as various task-specific instances of unresponsive technology. However, they are unaware that their ongoing efforts to accommodate it actually further reinforce digital integration’s simplification and systematization. This makes the unresponsiveness of technology harder to challenge, and ultimately forces the organization to change and adapt to it. Implications for management of practice are outlined.     

‘But that is a systems solution to me’ – negotiations in IT design

In this paper we argue that it is not self-evident how ‘requirements’ are defined, but that ‘requirements’ are enacted differently by differently situated actors, and that this has consequences in design practices. The purpose of the paper is to explore the consequences of prototyping practices in a local IT design project. The empirical material was gathered through the use of ethnographic methods, and analysed diffractively. Graphical user interface prototypes were tools for formulating business requirements in a business process analysis. Through a reading of a discussion which took place in a work meeting about the prototypes, we discuss how business requirements were enacted. This is discussed in relation to divergent and convergent approaches in IT design. One consequence was a risk that the prototyping process moved too fast to solutions, and another was the risk that the business process analysis method reproduced the dominant story of women's absence in IT design.     

Housing First programs in congregate-site facilities: can one size fit all?

The ‘Pathways to Housing’ Program (PHP) is an internationally recognized reference point for solutions to chronic homelessness espousing principles of ‘Housing First’. In Australian capital cities, the introduction of Housing First has mostly taken the form of congregate-site housing, unlike the scatter-site housing that has been closely associated with PHP in the United States. This has raised questions about whether the translation of the PHP model to Australia has resulted in a loss of fidelity to the ‘active ingredients’ that explain its success. Drawing on an evaluation of two congregate-site facilities in Tasmania, we show how tensions between program fidelity and local factors shaping the program assemblage, have compromised program success in relation to flexibility of service response and client agency and choice. Our findings challenge policy-makers and service providers to attend carefully to how successful overseas programs are adapted to different policy and service contexts to ensure that features critical to their success are not lost in translation.     

From ‘special needs’ housing to independent living?

How best to combine housing and support services for frail elderly people and for people with learning difficulties, mental health problems and physical disabilities is a long established debate in most industrialised countries. This debate occurs in the context of concerns to identify the extent of unmet need through such mechanisms as ‘special needs’ housing surveys. This article draws upon a ‘special needs’ housing survey. However, the emphasis is not upon the ‘facts’ uncovered about existing provision and levels of unmet need, but rather about the principles which need to underpin local policy debates and the implication of these for service developments at the locality level. The principles proposed include a commitment to citizenship, the need to combine appropriate housing with appropriate support and the importance of partnership with service users. The final section of the article explores the implications of such principles for policy developments at the local level by discussing survey findings relating to elderly people and physically disabled people.     

Tensions in human-centred design

In human-centred design (HCD), researchers and designers attempt to cooperate with and learn from potential users of the products or services which they are developing. Their goal is to develop products or services that match users’ practices, needs and preferences. In this position paper it is argued that HCD practitioners need to deal with two tensions that are inherent in HCD: they need to combine and balance users’ knowledge and ideas with their own knowledge and ideas; and they need to combine and balance a concern for understanding current or past practices with a concern for envisioning alternative or future practices. Six HCD approaches – participatory design, ethnography, the lead user approach, contextual design, codesign and empathic design – are discussed in order to argue that these different approaches are different ways to cope with the two tensions. In addition, several examples from practice are provided to illustrate these tensions. Moreover, it is advocated that HCD practitioners critically reflect on their practices, their methods and their own involvement, so that they can more consciously follow specific HCD approaches and more mindfully cope with the two tensions.     

Place and Special Places: Innovations in Conservation Practice in Northern Ireland

The ‘sense of place’ that relates human beings to their environment is under threat from the rising tide of ‘placelessness’ which can result from potentially positive forces such as urban regeneration as well as negative ones such as incremental degradation. The concept of ‘sense of place’, and the need to protect and enhance ‘special places’, has underpinned UK conservation legislation and policy in the post-war era. In Northern Ireland, due to its distinctive settlement tradition, its troubled political circumstances and its centralised administrative system, a unique hierarchy of ‘special places’ has evolved, involving ‘areas of townscape and village character’ as well as conventional ‘conservation areas’. For the first time a comprehensive comparative survey of the townscape quality of most of these areas has been carried out in order to test the hypothesis that too many conservation area designations may ‘devalue the conservation coinage’. It also assesses the contribution that ‘areas of townscape character’ can make in this situation, as potential conservation areas or as second-level local amenity designations. Its findings support the initial hypothesis: assessment of townscape quality on the basis of consistent criteria demonstrates a decline in the quality of more recent conservation area designations, and hence some ‘devaluation of the coinage’. However, the need for local discretion in the protection of local amenity supports the concept of ‘areas of townscape and village character’ as an additional and distinct designation. This contradicts recent policy recommendations from the Northern Ireland Planning Commission and contains valuable lessons for conservation policy and practice in other parts of the UK.     

Fit for the task: the future of the small scale domestic repair and maintenance industry in the UK

The poor condition of much of the UK's older housing stock is an important policy issue. Some disrepair arises because owners cannot afford work, because they are not aware of the need for it or because they do not know how to go about organizing it. However, the poor reputation of that sector of the building industry dealing with small scale domestic repair and maintenance is also a deterrent. If anything, the problems of this sector have worsened during the recession as the supply of unskilled ‘cowboy’ operators has increased. This paper reviews the factors leading to underinvestment and poor quality work in the privately owned housing stock and examines the extent to which the shortcomings of the building industry contribute to this phenomenon. It describes the results of a survey of firms operating in the domestic repair and maintenance sector of the UK building industry, the majority of which were very small. The survey examined the size and composition of firms, their organization and working practices, the types of work they carried out, how they went about obtaining business, the extent to which their work-force was trained and the problems they faced in competing with one another and with the cowboy sector. On the basis of the survey conclusions and discussions with a wide range of organisations representing the industry, consumers, local authorities and government, a series of options for reform are discussed with the aim of stimulating debate on the future of this sector of the construction industry. It is argued that the problems of the UK industry cannot be solved by tighter controls on builders alone, but by a range of measures designed to provide more support and training to reputable builders, measures to exert greater controls over building techniques and safety provision to reduce unfair competition and programmes to educate the consumer to demand better standards and to be willing to pay for them. Ultimately only compulsory measures may succeed in improving standards, but much could be achieved by voluntary licensing or registration schemes backed up by incentives to use qualifying firms such as guarantees. This is more likely to work if backed up for an initial period by government or local authority funding. In the long run, however, the improvements to building quality could save public money.     

Energy-related standards and UK speculative office development

Non-domestic buildings have great potential for energy-related emission reductions in response to climate change. However, high-specification office buildings in the UK demonstrate that regulation, assessment and certification (‘standards’) have not incentivized the development of lower-energy office buildings as expected. Making use of the concepts of ‘qualculation’ and ‘calculative agency’, qualitative case studies of 10 speculatively developed office buildings in London, UK, provide new insight into why this is the case. Interview data (n?=?57) are used to illustrate how ‘market standards’ substitute for user needs, and ratchet up the provision of building services to maximize marketability competitively. The examples of energy modelling and the market’s (mis)use of British Council for Offices guidelines are used to explain how such standards perversely bolster energy-demanding levels of specification and building services, and militate against lower-energy design, in the sector researched. The potentials for alternative, performance-based standards and new industry norms of quality are discussed. It is concluded that at least the London speculative office market by its very constitution and operation, including the reliance on standards, continues to create increasingly energy-demanding buildings.     

Towards democratic planning? Negotiating change in St Kilda,Melbourne

Are planners ‘dealmakers’ caught up in selling urban areas to the highest bidder, or are they negotiators concerned to maintain democratic planning and social diversity in areas that are subject to gentrification? This paper explores this question through the example of two sites in St Kilda, Melbourne. The sites highlight planning strategies used at the local government level by planners who are attempting to negotiate change and to maintain the social and cultural diversity of the area. The first example illustrates the processes of ‘democratic planning’ where planners question what is ‘legitimate’ and draw on discourses of local need. The second example illustrates the problems of co‐opting local culture within a process of democratic planning that is based on community consultation. Together, the examples illustrate the need for tighter local government policies, including stricter policies about the use of developer contributions, and a closer and more critical focus on the term ‘community consultation’, if democratic planning is to be achieved.     

Sizing up ‘the box’ in order to fit in

Participants in design processes make an effort to come up with solutions that will be deemed acceptable, while accomplishing to ‘think out of the box’. Thinking ‘outside the box’ is often announced as a challenge to and for design teams. ‘The box’ is a metaphor often used in creative processes, and in organisational practices, as a term for rules and regulations, everyday routines and tacit knowledge of ‘how things usually are’ and ‘what we know about the world’. Such a challenge is meant to encourage participants to approach a situation with an open mind, challenge the most basic assumptions and be willing to do things differently. Basically, something different is being called for. Studies have shown that it is striking, how much the participants orient to actually ‘fit’ the box, even when asked to develop it. This paper shows how participants in design processes are ‘sizing up the box’, while participating in meetings or workshops in order to develop a design. They identify key stakeholders of the designated design project; they share their own expectations of these key stakeholders' possible perceptions, discuss the success criteria and negotiate the values that are to govern the design team in the development process.     

Performance‐Based Contracting: an alternative approach to transacting in construction

Cost versus quality has often been presented as if it were a zero sum game — ‘If I gain in terms of quality then I will hare to lose in terms of the money I need to spend’.In reality most design teams would contend that this is not necessarily true but find that they lack the technique to evaluate the proper balance between cost and quality in order to achieve value for their client. This paper outlines the problem and a possible framework for investigating a marginal increase in design quality against cost at the critical stage before drawn information is provided.     

South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the planning of Afridar,Ashkelon, 1949–1956

In 1949, in the newly founded state of Israel, South African architects Norman Hanson and Roy Kantorowich planned the city of Ashkelon and, within it, the exclusive neighbourhood unit Afridar. Managed by the South African Jewish Appeal, which initiated and funded the project, Afridar presented a radical exception to Israel’s centralized planning approach during that period. An early example of a semi-private settlement initiative for an ethnic and class-based enclave reserved for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Jewish immigrants, it functioned as a ‘model town’ for the immigrant population from the Middle East and North Africa, which was housed by the government in the rest of the city of Ashkelon. Afridar’s enclave reproduced planning practices from South Africa, which had been coloured by race since the 1920s. Despite its exclusive image, it was modelled after progressive experiments in the design of Native Townships. Their main objective of such experiments was to improve the standards of housing of racially discriminated populations yet, in practice, they served as a tool to implement apartheid policies. This paper interrogates this ambivalence of social aspirations and complicity with state segregation practices through examining the translation of apartheid’s planning practices to the Israeli context, and the negotiations and conflicts this translation entailed.     

Rural water asset management practices in Ghana: the gaps and needs

This study evaluates primary and secondary data from two districts to assess the status of asset management practices, and to examine requirements for improved asset management. Asset inventory data shows that asset management practices in the districts are currently poor, leading to high rates of nonfunctionality and low service levels. The existing ‘fix on failure’ approach to water systems’ repair has become a common practice. However, many repairs which relied on ‘fix on failure’ were found to have delayed, often due to the length of time it takes to mobilise financial resources from ‘post‐paid’ water users. This paper contends that without an improved asset maintenance, system it is likely that rural water systems in Ghana will continue to provide unsustainable services. The Findings demonstrate that improving the current asset management practices is dependent on human and financial resources, access to timely water service monitoring data at district levels, and planning and budgeting regime to reflect life cycle costs of water systems.     

Informal and Gendered Practices in a Homeless Persons Unit

The informal categorisation of clients into those who are more and those who are less ‘deserving’ of help has been a noted occurrence amongst welfare officials. Whilst such practices usually do not constitute official policy, it is recognised that shorthand rules and stereotyping are inevitable and necessary for the effective delivery of public service work. Using data from observations and interviews at several homeless assessment sites, this paper examines the evidence that the gender of a homeless person affects the way they are categorised by housing officers. The research finds that housing officers see homeless women as the more ‘deserving’ group and explanations for this are explored. However, a relative lack of appropriate short-term housing options for women means that the outcomes of women's cases may not reflect their more ‘deserving’ categorisation.     

Designers’ articulation and activation of instrumental design judgements in cross-cultural user research

Abstract

Cross-cultural design practices have begun to rise in prominence, but these practices have infrequently intersected with common user-centred design practices that value the participation and lived experience of users. In this paper, we analyse a shared data-set that documented the efforts of a Scandinavian design team as they designed a co-creation workshop with Chinese consumers. We identified how the design team referred to workshop participants, focusing on how these references implicated the design team’s understanding of Chinese culture. We identified referents to the participants to locate projection of and reflection on participant interaction, and performed a thematic analysis of design and debrief activities to document the team’s articulation and activation of instrumental judgements relating to culture. The team’s instrumental judgements shifted over time, moving from totalising cultural references in the design phase to frequent translator-mediated interactions in the debrief phase. Translators ‘nuanced’ the cultural meanings being explored by the design team, while team members attempted to engage with cultural concerns by ‘making familiar’ these concerns within the context of their own culture. Implications for considering culture as a part of standard user research methods and paradigms are considered, along with practical considerations for foregrounding cultural assumptions in design activity.     

ISO 9000 and beyond: from a Hong Kong construction perspective

Client driven ‘pushes’ for ISO 9000 certification in Hong Kong are observed to have overtaken any spontaneous ‘pull factors’ (motivators) towards quality improvements ‘for their own sake’. For example, the need for ISO 9000 certification as a prerequisite for even being considered for public sector construction works appears to have distracted some organizations from a more comprehensive organization-specific development of their quality management systems. Both positive (beneficial) and negative (detrimental) outcomes from ISO 9000 certification, as observed from relevant previous studies, are summarized herein. These provide a useful background against which to present perceptions derived from the current study in Hong Kong construction. The target groups were predominantly from consultants in the initial survey and all from contractors in the second and more comprehensive survey. The more significant positive and negative outcomes from ISO 9000 certification as derived from the two current surveys are identified. Recommendations are made for realigned approaches to ISO 9000 certification and for seamless integration with other quality management approaches such as TQM, as well as with other management subsystems, such as for productivity improvement and dispute minimization.     

Democratic design experiments in urban planning – navigational practices and compositionist design

In the field of urban planning, public participation and inclusion of citizens have been practised and researched for many years. However, a focus on co-creative urban planning practices seems to have gained more focus over the last decade and calls for new urban planning practices, which allow experimentation and imagination, and at the same time take its outset in the existing networks in the city (such as visions, strategies, regulations and practices) when planning for the future. In this article, we investigate how a compositionist design programme can be translated into the practices of urban planners. We find that the notion of ‘democratic design experiments’ in many ways meet the demands of the increasingly complex field of urban planning and set out to explore how such a design programme can be applied in practice. We suggest ‘navigational practice’ as a way of describing how urban planners deal with ‘drawing things together’ in urban space and introduce ‘sensitivity’, ‘staging’ and ‘mobilization’ as interconnected elements of this practice. We exemplify the significance of these navigational practices by analysing two democratic design experiments in the area of urban waste management in Copenhagen. The article concludes that compositionist design is a powerful contribution to the framing of urban planning projects and that navigational practice can be a productive way of operationalising democratic design experiments in the urban context.