Search results

This paper discusses how project management styles and methods impact on energy conscious design decisions by building design teams. Within the broad field of energy conscious design the emphasis of this paper is on the selection of energy saving technologies in appropriately configured building components. The premise of the research is that these selections are not well rationalized. Choices of energy saving features in current practice are discussed against the background of available computational tools and the way these tools are used (or not) to enhance the decision‐making process. Through empirical data gathering based on case studies, improved project management techniques that enable a more timely and rational selection of energy saving technologies will be identified. A follow‐up research project that implements the findings in an operational design system is briefly presented to sketch the practical implications of the reported research.

This contribution conceptualizes the politicization of MNCs from outside – the processes by which MNCs become confronted with demands for regulation and engage in political contestation with other non-state actors. It compares two global industries, athletic footwear and toys, to show that the dynamics of politicization follow different trajectories, which are only partially to explain with structural differences across industry fields. If politicization leads to increasing political functioning of business or to a depoliticization of criticism depends to a great extend on the agency of business and their capacity to strategically counter mobilization, but also on the difficulties for activist to construct continuing collective action across a diverse range of cultural-institutional settings.

Sovereignty retains considerable currency today insofar as it fuses ordinary understandings of the state, the nation, and democracy. Against widespread expectations, however, the European Union has increasingly harnessed sovereignty as a source of vitality. We are thus witnessing a mainstreaming of populist politics, as the rhetoric of sovereignty no longer disqualifies new EU institutions and policies. This can be better understood if we consider sovereignty, from a constructivist perspective, as an evolving set of practices. First, sovereignty evolves within political and administrative circles, as European officials act to modify longstanding practices of state sovereignty. Second, sovereignty evolves in an increasingly politicized context, as political leaders dramatize EU crises in order to mobilize coalitions around new practices of popular sovereignty. This dual dynamic of state sovereignty and popular sovereignty is demonstrated in the case of the Eurozone and then extrapolated to the current trajectory of the EU polity against the benchmark of US federalism after the Civil War. An open question is whether sovereignty practices in the European Union will continue to evolve without compromising the Union's cosmopolitan and liberal objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to explore twentieth century sportscapes and their role in the development of urban arenas as places of sport.

Utilizing frame theory and sport business history scholarship, the author examines entrepreneurs' development of six‐day bicycle races at Madison Square Garden. The main primary sources include autobiographies, morgue files, and newspapers.

In this paper, it is argued that entrepreneurs' shaping and marketing of six‐day races and their sportscapes resulted in a popular sporting spectacle and helped to promote arenas as spaces and places of sport.

The paper demonstrates the process and development of “frame management” in urban arenas and their transition to spaces and places of sport. By exploring six‐day bicycle races at Madison Square Garden, the paper shows the importance of a now‐forgotten cultural event to the development of the multi‐billion dollar sport industry and to one of the world's most iconic arenas. The paper adds to scholarship on bicycle racing and marketing history, as well as the historiography of the sport industry.

Traditional central courtyards have been advocated for being thermally efficient for hot-climate regions. However, exploring previous literature shows that it is not clear to what extent courtyards are truly thermally comfortable. This study determines the level of thermal comfort in residential courtyards in hot-climate regions, taking Baghdad as a case study.

This study develops a novel Courtyard Thermal Usability Index (CTUI) to quantify the ability of courtyards to provide thermal comfort to occupants. CTUI is the fraction of useable thermally comfortable hours in courtyards of the total occupation hours during a specific period. To operationalise CTUI, the research employs the Envi-met 4.2 simulation tool to determine the annual thermal conditions of 360 courtyards. An adaptive thermal comfort model developed by Al-Hafith in 2020 for Iraq is used to judge simulated thermal conditions and determine CTUI.

CTUI enables determining the level of thermal comfort courtyards offer to occupants by showing the ratio of the thermally comfortable period versus the occupation period. Results show that, in Iraq, annually, courtyards offer up to 38% comfortable hours out of the total potential occupation hours. The rest of the time the courtyard will not be comfortable, mostly due to overheating. When designing courtyards, the most effective geometric property impacting courtyards' thermal conditions is width/height. The most important microclimatic factor impacting occupants' thermal sensation is mean radiant temperature (MRT). This study can be used to inform designing thermally efficient courtyards for hot-climate regions.

This study presents the first assessment of the thermal efficiency of courtyards in hot-climate regions depending on an assessment of their ability to provide thermal comfort to occupants. The study presents a novel index that can be used to quantify the ability of courtyards to provide a thermally comfortable environment to occupants.

The growth of the nationalist right in Europe and the United States has set off a debate over whether “economic anxiety” or “racial resentment” is at the root of this phenomenon. Examining the case of the French National Front, I suggest that this is a poor way of posing the question of the significance of class in explaining the rise of the nationalist right. Recent advances by the National Front—particularly among working-class voters—have tended to be attributed to the party's strategic pivot toward a “leftist” economic program and an embrace of the republican tradition. This in turn has been critically interpreted in two different ways. Some take the FN’s strategic pivot at face value and see the party's success as the expression of a new political cleavage between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Others see the National Front's embrace of republicanism as a cynical ploy hiding its true face. Both interpretations, however, point to a strategy of “republican defense” as a means to counteract the National Front. I argue that this strategy is likely to misfire and that class remains central to explaining—and countering—the rise of the National Front, albeit in a peculiar way. Working-class support for the National Front does indeed appear to be driven primarily by ethno-cultural, not class, interests, but this is itself predicated on a historical decline in the political salience of class due to the neoliberal depoliticization of the economy. I argue that it was this disarticulation of class identity that helped deliver the working-class vote to the National Front and that any strategy for combating the nationalist right must thus find new ways to articulate a class identity capable of neutralizing racist and chauvinist articulations.

This study explores the utilization of simulation tools for building performance assessments among design professionals in Ghana.

A quantitative approach was used to obtain responses from 104 design professionals in Ghana through a structured questionnaire. The questionnaire was generated through a critical review of the related literature on the subject matter. Data from respondents were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics.

Results from the analysis indicated that design professionals in Ghana possessed a low level of awareness of the simulation tools used for building performance assessments. Subsequently, the findings also revealed that the design professionals' level of usage of the simulation tools was low.

Practically, the establishment of this study informs design stakeholders, educational institutions and researchers in Ghana. For design professionals, these findings will focus on enhancing their use of simulation tools for evaluating building performance in Ghana. For educational institutions, these findings will enable them to implement the necessary strategies for incorporating the concept of building performance simulation into their curriculum in order to boost awareness and utilization. Finally, researchers will also use the study's findings to identify any research gaps for future studies.

The findings from this study pioneer knowledge on an under-investigated topic within the Ghanaian construction industry. It also provides insight into the developing state-of-the-art technology employed in the built environment.

Presents a review on implementing finite element methods on supercomputers, workstations and PCs and gives main trends in hardware and software developments. An appendix included at the end of the paper presents a bibliography on the subjects retrospectively to 1985 and approximately 1,100 references are listed.

Recent climate change projections estimate that the average summertime temperature in the southern part of Great Britain may increase by up to 5.4°C by the end of the century. The general consensus is that projected increases in temperature will render British dwellings vulnerable to summer overheating and by the middle of this century it may become difficult to maintain a comfortable indoor environment, if adaptation measures are not well integrated in the design and operation of new dwellings, which are likely to remain in use beyond the 2050s. The challenge is to reduce overheating risks by integrating building and user adaptation measures, to avoid energy intensive mechanical cooling. Developing guidelines and updating building regulations for adaptation, therefore, requires an understanding of the baseline scenario; i.e. the performance of existing buildings in future climates.

This paper aims to investigate the performance of new-build multi-occupancy British dwellings for human thermal comfort in the present-day and projected future climates in four regional cities: Birmingham, Edinburgh, London and Manchester. Evaluations are carried out by a series of dynamic thermal simulations using widely adopted threshold temperature for overheating, as well as adaptive thermal comfort standards. This study thus offers a unique perspective on regional variations of performance and provides a clearer snapshot because of the use of more appropriate adaptive comfort standards in the evaluations. Finally, the paper sheds light on possible personal and building adaptation measures to alleviate overheating risks.

This paper presents an efficient methodology to calculate fuzzy eigenvalues and eigenvectors of finite element structures defined by imprecise parameters. The material and geometric parameters are then described by fuzzy numbers. The proposed methodology, based on α‐cut discretization of fuzzy numbers and Taylor's expansion, determines the extreme eigensolutions for each α‐cut. The study of a finite element model and the comparison of results with a combinatorial approach, based on Zadeh's extension principle, show the efficiency of this methodology.