Abstract: In recent years, the concept of resilience has been introduced to the engineering field in particular related to disaster mitigation and management. However, the built environment is only part of the elements that support community functions. Maintaining community functionality during and after a disaster, defined as resilience, is influenced by multiple components. The paper is proposing a framework for measuring community resilience at different spatial and temporal scales. Seven dimensions are identified for measuring community resilience: population and demographics, environmental and ecosystem, organized governmental services, physical infrastructures, lifestyle and community competence, economic development, and social-cultural capital. They are summarized with the acronym PEOPLES. Each dimension is characterized by a corresponding performance metric that is combined with the other dimensions using a multilayered approach. Therefore, once a hybrid model of the community is defined, the propo...

Abstract: Active travel is enthusiastically promoted in the Western world due to its clear and demonstrated individual and collective benefits. While active travel has been shown to be associated with features of the built environment such as density and land-use mix, it is also associated with walking and cycling accessibility—which we designate as active accessibility. However, the measurement of active accessibil- ity is not straightforward and it can represent significantly different features of the built environment. This paper presents an extensive review of published research that measures active accessibility. We classified the literature into four categories based on the methodology used: distance-based, gravity-based or potential, topological or infra- structure-based, and walkability and walk score-type measures. A fifth category was created to classify outliers consisting of distinct methodological approaches or hybrids of the four main categories. We argue that almost all of these methods have conceptual and computational limitations, and that there are inconsistencies in the use of concepts and terms. Furthermore, no sensitivity analysis was carried out on the selected parameters. We conclude by presenting some guidelines that might improve the value and clarity of active accessibility research, theory, and practice.

Abstract: Introduction Mounting evidence documents the importance of urban form for active travel, but international studies could strengthen the evidence. The aim of the study was to document the strength, shape, and generalizability of relations of objectively measured built environment variables with transport-related walking and cycling. Methods This cross-sectional study maximized variation of environments and demographics by including multiple countries and by selecting adult participants living in neighborhoods based on higher and lower classifications of objectively measured walkability and socioeconomic status. Analyses were conducted on 12,181 adults aged 18–66 years, drawn from 14 cities across 10 countries worldwide. Frequency of transport-related walking and cycling over the last seven days was assessed by questionnaire and four objectively measured built environment variables were calculated. Associations of built environment variables with transport-related walking and cycling variables were estimated using generalized additive mixed models, and were tested for curvilinearity and study site moderation. Results We found positive associations of walking for transport with all the environmental attributes, but also found that the relationships was only linear for land use mix, but not for residential density, intersection density, and the number of parks. Our findings suggest that there may be optimum values in these attributes, beyond which higher densities or number of parks could have minor or even negative impact. Cycling for transport was associated linearly with residential density, intersection density (only for any cycling), and land use mix, but not with the number of parks. Conclusion Across 14 diverse cities and countries, living in more densely populated areas, having a well-connected street network, more diverse land uses, and having more parks were positively associated with transport-related walking and/or cycling. Except for land-use-mix, all built environment variables had curvilinear relationships with walking, with a plateau in the relationship at higher levels of the scales.

Abstract: Author(s): Bhan, Gautam | Advisor(s): Roy, Ananya | Abstract: Millennial Delhi is a city whose landscape has been scarred by a series of evictions of the homes of some of its most vulnerable citizens. These evictions are different not just in degree but in kind from those that have come before. Evictions at this scale last occurred in Delhi during what is known as the Emergency from 1975-77 when democratic and fundamental rights were suspended. Unlike evictions within the Emergency, however, contemporary evictions have occurred through democratic processes rather than in their absence- they mark a different set of negotiations, legitimations, processes as well as horizons of resistance. A further factor makes contemporary evictions distinct: they were ordered not by the sarkar -the institutions of the executive across local, state and federal scales that govern the national capital - but by the adalat, the Judiciary. They were, in fact, ordered by the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India within a unique judicial innovation in India called the Public Interest Litigation that had been established, ironically, to enable the poor to access justice in the highest courts of the land. To understand how the evictions of the poor can be read as acts in the "public interest," this dissertation argues that we must first locate the basti in the particularity of the production of space in Delhi. The Hindustani word "basti" comes from basna which means to settle or inhabit. It is the term used most often by the poor to describe their homes that are often marked by some measure of physical, economic, and infrastructural vulnerability. The basti is often reduced to the slum, a marker of illegal occupation of land and, more broadly, the dysfunctional landscape of the megacities of the global South. Yet this dissertation argues that more than just a `slum,' built environment, material housing stock, or planning category, a basti is, in fact, a territorialisation of a political engagement within which the poor negotiate their presence in as well as right to the city. It is a spatial manifestation of the negotiations of citizenship. Its eviction then represents not just the demolition of a built environment but the transformation of precisely this political engagement- an erasure of the poor's presence within and right to the city. Put another way, contemporary evictions represent an altered urban politics where a set of familiar referents- development, order, governance, citizens, and the public- are redefined to not only enable evictions but also to see them as acts of good governance, order and planning. Read this way, evictions allow us to access the central theoretical and ethical concern of this dissertation: the politics of the production and reproduction of poverty and inequality in the contemporary Indian city and the negotiations of citizenship that underlie it. Broadly, this dissertation argues that evictions make visible make visible a juridicalisation of politics in the Indian city. This juridicalisation is marked by the emergence of new frameworks, discourses and practices in urban politics that instantiate themselves in the city through the judiciary rather within the more familiar institutional compacts between institutions of representative government and urban residents. The juridicalisation of politics marks the expansion of the jurisdiction not just of the courts but also of the realm of the law within urban politics. As the sphere of authority of the Courts widens in the city, a series of questions, concerns, interventions, processes and debates within urban politics come to be come to seen, articulated, and addressed as juridical questions - they speak and are spoken about within the frameworks of law. Following its concern with the politics of poverty, inequality and citizenship, the dissertation traces juridicalisation along one particular vector: it shows how evictions were made to make "legal sense" within public interest litigations. Four key frameworks thus emerge: (a) planned illegalities; (b) planned development and/as crisis; (b) the impoverishment of poverty; and (c) the juridicalisation of resistance. The dissertation first constructs a spatial history of inhabitation in the city to challenge the assumed relationships between "illegality," planning and the settlements of the poor, arguing that the "illegal" production of urban space in Delhi comprises not just the `slum' but the production of illegal housing by the middle and upper middle classes as well. It does so by problematizing the familiar and commonsensical narrative of the "failure of planning" in the Indian city and showing that the traces of planning ensure that the city may not be as it was planned but it is an outcome of planning. It argues that illegality is the dominant mode of the production of housing in Delhi and that it is within illegalities that the production of urban space in the city must be understood. Questions of urban politics must thus look not at the dichotomy of the legal-illegal but instead at the ways in which planning and planned development produce illegality. Equally, they must interrogate the processes by which particular kinds of urban practices and actors are framed as "illegal" relative to others and what work such a framing is meant to do. Having established the relationship between illegality, planning and planned development in the city empirically, the dissertation then analyses a body of case law in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India to show that the Courts misrecognise illegality in their twin understandings of "encroachment" and "encroacher" when they portray the former as the visible manifestation of what they see as the crisis of the city and the latter as one of the actors primarily responsible for this crisis. Showing how the courts use narratives of the failure of "planned development" and what they call "Government" to justify their interventions into the city, the dissertation describes their attempt to make the city into a governable space using the "Plan in its legal position" to represent an idealized spatial order. Intervening in the crisis of the city towards this idealized order thus becomes not only the primary definition of public interest but also an ethico-moral imperative that acts as a rationality of judicial government.Further, the dissertation argues that the case-law on evictions makes visible the impoverishment of poverty, drawing upon Upendra Baxi's concept of impoverishment as a dynamic process of public decision-making in which it is considered just, right and fair that some people may become or stay impoverished. The Courts enable impoverishment by through the creation of the category of the "encroacher" that binds the identity of the poor to a spatial illegality and becomes the basis of a disavowal of their rights. Additionally, through the discursive erasure of the vulnerability of the poor and the emergence of a new "urban majority" as the subject of urban politics, they transform the poor into improper citizens thereby legitimizing a regime of differentiated citizenship. Using interviews with activists in urban social movements in Delhi, the dissertation further shows how the emergence of the judiciary as the site and object of resistance has resulted in the juridicalisation of resistance: the impact of the presence of the Court within the calculus of negotiation and confrontation as modes of engagement and resistance to evictions. The presence of the Court challenges the choice of strategies of urban social movements, introduces new actors and decision-making processes into movement spaces, alters the content of right-claims and forecloses certain kinds of claimants just as it shapes the political identity and history of basti and its residents themselves. Finally, in conclusion, the dissertation explores how new forms and claims to the city can emerge in response to these challenges that will be not just impassioned, but equitable and effective.

Abstract: Problem, research strategy, and findings: There is increasing interest in planning for healthy communities, but little is known about how planners can affect mental health and wellbeing in neighborhoods, although much is known about how planners can affect physical health through neighborhood design. In this review essay, we draw lessons from a cross-disciplinary set of studies to reveal how the neighborhood built environment may affect one aspect of residents' wellbeing: happiness. Providing residents access to open, natural, and green space may directly increase their happiness. Incorporating design features that allow for social interaction and safety also may promote residents' happiness.Takeaway for practice: Planners have the capacity to contribute to greater opportunities for happiness in neighborhoods. Strategies include integrating happiness-related indicators into health impact assessments and employing a new, participatory neighborhood planning process, the Sustainability Through Happiness Fram...

Abstract: The reduction of the energy consumption and the improvement of the indoor climate issues when renovating can achieve added benefits including reduced outlay on government subsidies, and improved health due to less air pollution and a better indoor quality conditions and improved worker productivity. This is the essence of assessing the level of sustainability of building renovation projects. The functionality of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) approach has made it one of the most popular and valuable tools among recorded literature regarding the measurement of the level of sustainability of construction projects. The aim of this paper is to review the previous studies that employed the KPIs approach in buildings renovation for the measurement of the sustainability of the built environment. This work provides a brief foreword regarding the state of the art in building renovation projects, as well as the suitability of the application of the KPIs approach for the assessment of the level of sustainability in such projects and analyzes the results of the literature review. The future trends in building assessment methodologies for sustainability purposes are also presented, while some significant conclusions are also given based on the identification of the existing gaps of the specific field.

Abstract: Metropolitan areas around the world are looking for sustainable strategies to reduce use of private automobiles, energy consumption and emissions, often achieved by built environment interventions that encourage use of sustainable modes of transport. This study contributes by providing the empirical evidence on the relation between built environment and mode choice in context of Indian city of Rajkot. Using personal interview data and data available from Rajkot Municipal Corporation it is observed that there is a strong tendency among Rajkot residents to preselect their residential location to suit their modal preferences. This is especially true for non-motorized transport users. Among the built environment variables, access to destination and land use related indicators also have significant influence on mode choice. The study Infers that the land use policy should focus on accessibility and mixing of diverse uses, and transport supply will have to be location based to support non-motorized and public transport travel.

Abstract: Purpose While technology is a major driver of many of society's comforts, conveniences, and advances, it has been responsible, in a significant way, for engineering regular physical activity and a number of other positive health behaviors out of people's daily lives. A key question concerns how to harness information and communication technologies (ICT) to bring about positive changes in the health promotion field. One such approach involves community-engaged "citizen science," in which local residents leverage the potential of ICT to foster data-driven consensus-building and mobilization efforts that advance physical activity at the individual, social, built environment, and policy levels. Method The history of citizen science in the research arena is briefly described and an evidence-based method that embeds citizen science in a multi-level, multi-sectoral community-based participatory research framework for physical activity promotion is presented. Results Several examples of this citizen science-driven community engagement framework for promoting active lifestyles, called "Our Voice", are discussed, including pilot projects from diverse communities in the U.S. as well as internationally. Conclusions The opportunities and challenges involved in leveraging citizen science activities as part of a broader population approach to promoting regular physical activity are explored. The strategic engagement of citizen scientists from socio-demographically diverse communities across the globe as both assessment as well as change agents provides a promising, potentially low-cost and scalable strategy for creating more active, healthful, and equitable neighborhoods and communities worldwide.

Abstract: Concerns over transportation energy consumption and emissions have prompted more studies into the impacts of built environment on driving-related behavior, especially on car ownership and travel mode choice. This study contributes to examine the impacts of the built environment on commuter’s driving behavior at both spatial zone and individual levels. The aim of this study is threefold. First, a multilevel integrated multinomial logit (MNL) and structural equation model (SEM) approach was employed to jointly explore the impacts of the built environment on car ownership and travel mode choice. Second, the spatial context in which individuals make the travel decisions was accommodated, and spatial heterogeneities of car ownership and travel mode choice across traffic analysis zones (TAZs) were recognized. Third, the indirect effects of the built environment on travel mode choice through the mediating variable car ownership were calculated, in other words, the intermediary nature of car ownership was considered. Using the Washington metropolitan area as the study case, the built environment measures were calculated for each TAZ, and the commuting trips were drawn from the household travel survey in this area. To estimate the model parameters, the robust maximum likelihood (MLR) method was used. Meanwhile, a comparison among different model structures was conducted. The model results suggest that application of the multilevel integrated MNL and SEM approach obtains significant improvements over other models. This study give transportation planners a better understanding on how the built environment influences car ownership and commuting mode choice, and consequently develop effective and targeted countermeasures.

Abstract: The ageing of the population raises questions regarding the quality of life of future generations. This article focuses specifically on feelings of loneliness as an important aspect of quality of life in relation with mobility aspects and built environmental characteristics. Based on data collected in the southeast of the Netherlands among 344 respondents in 2014 four ordered logit models were estimated to explain the extent to which people feel lonely or socially isolated. The explanatory variables in the models are age; other personal and household characteristics; characteristics of the built environment and mobility aspects. The results indicate that, although age has little explanatory power, older people are likely to feel lonelier. Other personal and household characteristics, such as household composition, education, health status, being a volunteer and the number of social interactions are found to have more explanatory power. Characteristics of the built environment also explain a substantial part of variance in loneliness. Significant effects are found for living in an apartment, length of residence in the neighbourhood and satisfaction with the neighbourhood and its facilities. Finally, we find that the use of different transport modes (bicycle, car and public transport) significantly reduces loneliness.

Abstract: There is now a strong body of research that suggests that the form of the built environment can influence levels of physical activity, leading to an increasing interest in incorporating health obje...

Abstract: Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of studies that focus on enhancing resilience of cities against a multitude of man-made and natural disasters. There has also been an increase in the number of frameworks and tools developed for assessing urban resilience. As climate change advances, resilience will become an even more significant topic in the science and policy circles that influence future urban development. Resilience indicators, in particular, will be essential for helping planners and decision makers understand where their communities stand in terms of resilience and develop strategies and action plans for creating more resilient cities. This chapter draws on the extensive literature on urban resilience assessment and provides a set of principles and indicators that can be used for developing an urban resilience assessment tool. Selected indicators cover multiple dimensions of urban resilience. They are divided into five main categories, namely, materials and environmental resources, society and well-being, economy, built environment and infrastructure, and governance and institutions. It is argued that resilience indicators should be used to help planners understand how best to enhance the abilities to plan/prepare for, absorb, recover, and adapt to disruptive events. The chapter concludes with proposing a matrix to relate resilience indicators with the main underlying characteristics of urban resilience that are namely, robustness, stability, flexibility, resourcefulness, redundancy, coordination capacity, diversity, foresight capacity, independence, connectivity, collaboration, agility, adaptability, self-organization, creativity, efficiency, and equity.

Abstract: Evidence regarding the association of the built environment with physical activity is influencing policy recommendations that advocate changing the built environment to increase population-level physical activity. However, to date there has been no rigorous appraisal of the quality of the evidence on the effects of changing the built environment. The aim of this review was to conduct a thorough quantitative appraisal of the risk of bias present in those natural experiments with the strongest experimental designs for assessing the causal effects of the built environment on physical activity. Eligible studies had to evaluate the effects of changing the built environment on physical activity, include at least one measurement before and one measurement of physical activity after changes in the environment, and have at least one intervention site and non-intervention comparison site. Given the large number of systematic reviews in this area, studies were identified from three exemplar systematic reviews; these were published in the past five years and were selected to provide a range of different built environment interventions. The risk of bias in these studies was analysed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias Assessment Tool: for Non-Randomized Studies of Interventions (ACROBAT-NRSI). Twelve eligible natural experiments were identified. Risk of bias assessments were conducted for each physical activity outcome from all studies, resulting in a total of fifteen outcomes being analysed. Intervention sites included parks, urban greenways/trails, bicycle lanes, paths, vacant lots, and a senior citizen’s centre. All outcomes had an overall critical (n = 12) or serious (n = 3) risk of bias. Domains with the highest risk of bias were confounding (due to inadequate control sites and poor control of confounding variables), measurement of outcomes, and selection of the reported result. The present review focused on the strongest natural experiments conducted to date. Given this, the failure of existing studies to adequately control for potential sources of bias highlights the need for more rigorous research to underpin policy recommendations for changing the built environment to increase physical activity. Suggestions are proposed for how future natural experiments in this area can be improved.

Abstract: Urbanization and the shaping of the built environment have provided a number of socioeconomic benefits, but they have also brought unwanted side effects on health. We aimed to review the current epidemiological evidence of the associations between the built environment, closely related exposures, and child health. We focused on growth and obesity, neuropsychological development, and respiratory and immune health. We used existing review articles and supplemented these with relevant work published and not included in existing reviews. The present review shows that there is good evidence for an association between air pollution and fetal growth restriction and respiratory health, whereas for other exposure and outcome combinations, further evidence is needed. Future studies should make efforts to integrate the different built environment features and to include the evaluation of environments other than home, as well as accessibility, qualitative and perception assessment of the built environment, and, if possible, with improved and standardized tools to facilitate comparability between studies. Efforts are also needed to conduct longitudinal and intervention studies and to understand potential mechanisms behind the associations observed. Finally, studies in low- and middle-income countries are needed.

Abstract: Establishing consistent criteria for assessing the performance of structural systems and infrastructure networks is a critical component of communities’ efforts to optimize investment decisions for the upkeep and renewal of the built environment. Although member-level performance and reliability assessment procedures are currently well-established, it is widely recognized that a member-oriented approach does not necessarily lead to an efficient utilization of limited resources when making decisions related to the management of existing deteriorating structures or lifeline systems, especially those that may be exposed to extreme events. For this reason, researchers have renewed their interests in developing system-level assessment methods as a basis to modern structural and infrastructure performance evaluation and design processes. Specifically, system-level performance metrics and characteristics such as reliability, redundancy, robustness, resilience, and risk continue to be refined. The objecti...

Abstract: Our purpose was to determine the relative importance of individual- and park-related characteristics in influencing both local park use and specific engagement in active sports, walking and sedenta...