Construction costs comparison between ‘green’ and conventional office buildings

The actual construction cost of certified green office buildings in New Zealand is compared with conventional buildings. Although a large body of research exists on the financial and environmental benefits of green buildings, there is little evidence on capital cost implications for building green. This study serves as the first empirical study to analyse detailed cost plan data in New Zealand to quantify the impact of green building on construction cost. Data from 17 Green Star NZ v1-certified office buildings were paired with a set of modelled cost estimates derived from the Davis Langdon Blue Book and the Rawlinsons New Zealand Construction Handbook (the authoritative published sources for New Zealand construction cost data). The paired data were analysed across five panels using the non-parametric Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed ranks test. When benchmarked against the modelled costs, green building construction costs were higher on average, but the difference was not statistically significant. This was true across all five panels tested: the entire green building dataset, mid-rise buildings, high-rise buildings, 4 Green Star-rated buildings, and 5 and 6 Green Star-rated buildings. Each panel featured buildings that were above comparative costs as well as several whose actual costs were below modelled estimates.

Le coût de construction réel des immeubles de bureaux certifiés verts en Nouvelle-Zélande est comparé à celui des immeubles classiques. Bien qu'il existe un important corpus de recherche sur les avantages financiers et environnementaux des bâtiments verts, il y a peu d'éléments probants sur les implications en termes de coût du capital pour la construction de bâtiments verts. Cette étude constitue la première étude empirique qui analyse les données des plans détaillés des coûts en Nouvelle-Zélande pour quantifier l'impact du bâtiment vert sur les coûts de construction. Les données provenant de 17 immeubles de bureaux certifiés Green Star NZ v1 ont été couplées à une série d'estimations modélisées des coûts tirée du Livre Bleu de David Langdon et du Rawlinsons Manuel de Construction de Nouvelle-Zélande (les sources publiées qui font autorité concernant les données relatives aux coûts de construction pour la Nouvelle-Zélande). Les données couplées ont été analysées sur cinq panels en utilisant le test non paramétrique des rangs signés de Wilcoxon pour échantillons appariés. Lorsqu'ils ont été comparés aux coûts modélisés, les coûts de construction des bâtiments verts étaient supérieurs en moyenne, mais la différence n'était pas statistiquement significative. Ceci s'est vérifié sur la totalité des cinq panels testés : l'ensemble des données des immeubles verts, les immeubles de hauteur moyenne, les immeubles de grande hauteur, les immeubles classés Green Star 4, et les immeubles classés Green Star 5 et 6. Chaque panel comprenait des immeubles qui se situaient au-dessus des coûts comparatifs, ainsi que plusieurs dont les coûts réels étaient inférieurs aux estimations modélisées.

Mots clés: coût du capital, construction, coût, immeuble vert, Green Star [Etoile Verte], immeubles de bureaux, durabilité     

Do indoor chemicals promote development of airway allergy?

Allergic asthma has increased worldwide in the industrialized countries. This review evaluates whether the major groups of indoor chemical exposures possess allergy-promoting (adjuvant) effects; formaldehyde was excluded, because of the size of the literature. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are used as an example of gases and vapors. The precipitation of asthmatic symptoms by VOC exposures is probably because of VOC levels considerably above typical indoor levels, or VOCs may be a surrogate for exposure to allergens, combustion products or dampness. Indoor particles possessed adjuvant effects in animal studies and allergy-promoting effects in humans. Quaternary ammonium compounds may possess adjuvant effects in animal studies and promoted sensitization in humans in occupational settings. The use of cleaning agents, anionic and non-ionic surfactants are not considered to possess an important adjuvant effect in the general population. Regarding phthalate exposures, results from animal and epidemiological studies were found to be discordant. There is little evidence that the indoor chemicals evaluated possess important adjuvant effects. If buildings are kept clean, dry and free of combustion products, the important question may be would it be profitable to look for lifestyle factors and non-chemical indoor exposures in order to abate airway allergy? PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: Indoor chemicals (pollutants) have been accused to promote development of airway allergy by adjuvant effects. In this review, we evaluated the scientific literature and found little support for the supposition that indoor chemicals possess important adjuvant effects. This rises the question: would it be profitable for abatement of airway allergy to look for non-chemical indoor exposures, including lifestyle factors, and exposures to allergens, microorganisms, including vira, and their interactions?     

Do LEED-certified buildings save energy? Not really…

Newsham et al. have recently published a re-analysis of energy-consumption data for LEED-certified commercial buildings supplied by the New Buildings Institute (NBI) and US Green Building Council. They find that, on average, LEED buildings use 18-39% less energy per floor area than their conventional counterparts, consistent with and adding clarity to conclusions originally reached by NBI. These conclusions, however, hang on a particular definition of the mean energy intensity of a collection of buildings that is not related to the total energy used by those buildings. Furthermore, site energy considered by Newsham et al. and NBI, unlike source energy used for the EPA's building Energy Star rating, does not account for the energy consumed off-site in generating and delivering electric energy to the building, whose inclusion is crucial for understanding greenhouse gas emission associated with building operation. Here I demonstrate that both the site energy and source energy used by the set of 35 LEED office buildings and Newsham et al.’s matching CBECS office buildings are statistically equivalent. Hence Newsham et al. offer no evidence that LEED-certification has collectively lowered either site or source energy for office buildings.     

Do LEED-certified buildings save energy? Yes, but…

We conducted a re-analysis of data supplied by the New Buildings Institute and the US Green Buildings Council on measured energy use data from 100 LEED-certified commercial and institutional buildings. These data were compared to the energy use of the general US commercial building stock. We also examined energy use by LEED certification level, and by energy-related credits achieved in the certification process. On average, LEED buildings used 18-39% less energy per floor area than their conventional counterparts. However, 28-35% of LEED buildings used more energy than their conventional counterparts. Further, the measured energy performance of LEED buildings had little correlation with certification level of the building, or the number of energy credits achieved by the building at design time. Therefore, at a societal level, green buildings can contribute substantial energy savings, but further work needs to be done to define green building rating schemes to ensure more consistent success at the individual building level. Note, these findings should be considered as preliminary, and the analyses should be repeated when longer data histories from a larger sample of green buildings are available.     

The ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’: metaphors from The Great Gatsby in planning New York

ABSTRACT

Visions in planning of what a city could or should be tend to be constructed around metaphors, rhetorical tropes that crystalize the image of a preferable future city. Such metaphorizations are never innocent: they draw on pre-existing cultural narratives and activate particular frames of expectation. This article examines two metaphors used in the planning of New York City, and its shores, in particular: the spectre of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the dream of the ‘fresh green breast’. These metaphors, taken from F. Scott Fizgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925), appear time and again in the planning and thinking of the New York shoreline, from Robert Moses’s plans for Flushing Meadow to Major Bloomberg’s waterfront development and Eric Sanderson’s vision of a 2406 New York in Mannahatta (2006). This article examines how the metaphors of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’ have been adapted throughout decades of planning New York City to accommodate changing relationships, conflicts and ideals, always infused by a pastoral undercurrent that is already questioned in Fitzgerald’s novel.     

Droplet fate in indoor environments,or can we prevent the spread of infection?

Abstract Abstract When considering how people are infected and what can be done to prevent the infections, answers from many disciplines are sought: microbiology, epidemiology, medicine, engineering, and physics. There are many pathways to infection spread, and among the most significant from the epidemiological point of view is airborne transport. Microorganisms can become airborne when droplets are generated during speech, coughing, sneezing, vomiting, or atomization of feces during sewage removal. The fate of the droplets is governed by the physical principles of transport, with droplet size being the most important factor affecting their dispersion, deposition on surfaces and determining the survival of microorganisms within the droplets. In addition, physical characteristics of the indoor environment as well as the design and operation of building ventilation systems are of critical importance. Do we understand the mechanisms of infection spread and can we quantify the droplet dynamics under various indoor conditions? Unfortunately no, as this aspect of infection spread has attracted surprisingly little scientific interest. However, investigations of numerous cases in which a large number of people were infected show how critical the physics of microorganism spread can be. This paper reviews the state of knowledge regarding mechanisms of droplet spread and solutions available to minimize the spread and prevent infections.     

Genetic algorithms based optimization of artificial neural network architecture for buildings’ indoor discomfort and energy consumption prediction

Growing concerns about energy consumption reduction and comfort improvement inside buildings make it more and more necessary to be able to predict with fine precision building’s heating loads and indoor discomfort. This article proposes a method based on genetic algorithms (GAs) to optimize the architecture, training parameters and inputs of an artificial neural network (ANN). The ANN is doomed to predict energy consumption and indoor discomfort in future work on the development of an on-line method for control setting optimization. Simple and advanced controllers were used in this study: ON-OFF, PID and fuzzy controllers. Validation of the optimized ANN showed good prediction accuracy, as regression coefficients R ² for consumption and discomfort were respectively greater than 0.77 and 0.84 for the three tested controllers. Various prediction “distances” and ANN training data quantities were tested. Conclusion is that prediction at a 2-hour “distance” and a 3-day quantity of data are the best tested optimization conditions.     

Towards a ‘New Project Management’ movement? An international development perspective

This article offers an international development perspective on project management. A brief history of the ambitious and controversial role that projects have played over seven decades of development assistance in diverse operational contexts evokes many of the themes vividly articulated by the flourishing contemporary project management literature. They highlight the limitations of conventional project management practices dominated by Management by Objectives principles. Development experience also stresses the promise of adaptable approaches to project design and management in complex and turbulent operating environments and it suggests that projects conceived as experiments can contribute to sound decision making at the higher plane of strategy formulation and policy-making. Beyond confirming the soundness and utility of contemporary project management scholarship, the article puts forward six recommendations grounded in development experience that may be worth consideration by the nascent ‘New Project Management’ movement.     

Advanced fuzzy logic controllers design and evaluation for buildings’ occupants thermal–visual comfort and indoor air quality satisfaction

The aim of this paper is to present and evaluate control strategies for adjustment and preservation of air quality, thermal and visual comfort for buildings’ occupants while, simultaneously, energy consumption reduction is achieved. Fuzzy PID, fuzzy PD and adaptive fuzzy PD control methods are applied. The inputs to any controller are: the PMV index affecting thermal comfort, the CO₂ concentration affecting indoor air quality and the illuminance level affecting visual comfort. The adaptive fuzzy PD controller adapts the inputs and outputs scaling factors and is based on a second order reference model. More specifically, the scaling factors are modified according to a sigmoid type function, in such a way that the measured variable to be as closer as possible to the reference model. The adaptive fuzzy PD controller is compared to a non-adaptive fuzzy PD and to an ON–OFF one. The comparison criteria are the energy required and the controlled variables response. Both, energy consumption and variables responses are improved if the adaptive fuzzy PD type controller is used. The buildings’ response to the control signals has been simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK.     

‘Every Tenant Matters’? The New Governance of Social Housing in England

This paper begins by considering the series of reviews of aspects of housing policy carried out by the Westminster government between 2004 and 2007. It then moves on to describe and evaluate the legislative changes derived from those reviews in the form of the Housing and Regeneration Act, 2008. Responsibility for funding social housing was separated from the regulatory role, after more than 30 years during which they had been combined within the Housing Corporation. The changes were intended to introduce and promote a new culture, on the one hand encouraging wider involvement of private, profit-seeking organisations in the production and management of social housing. On the other hand, the expressed intention was to develop a more consumer oriented approach to the regulation of social housing. The paper concludes by asking whether the Act marks a new era for social housing in England.     

‘New Aging’: Designing Architecture for All Ages

The US is on the brink of demographic transformation, with the bulging generation of baby boomers about to reach retirement. In 2008, New York-based architects Hollwich Kushner (HWKN) anticipated this shift by instigating a ‘New Aging’ initiative that set out to explore imaginative solutions in architecture and urbanism to age-related challenges. Here Matthias Hollwich with Matthew Hoffman of HWKN explain why attitudes and approaches to ageing have to change; and why old age needs to be ‘acknowledged as a state of human existence’ that fully ‘deserves preparation, anticipation and excitement’.     

Do new and relocating firms have different preferences for accessibility?

Accessibility is one of the most important factors in a location choice decision of a firm. However, new and relocated establishments can value accessibility differently. Research papers differences of accessibility preferences between creations and relocations are scarce. In this paper, we examine these differences in an intraurban setting, the Lyon urban area. We rely on discrete choice models and data for more than 43,000 creations and 11,000 relocations during 2005–2011 from eight economic sectors. Results demonstrate that the effect of accessibility differs between creations and relocations of the same economic sector. This difference depends on the type of the economic activity of the sector.     

Defining New Architectural Design Principles with ‘Living’ Inorganic Materials

At the University of Glasgow, Leroy Cronin is leading a group of scientists that are pioneering the engineering of a fundamentally new approach to building materials, which scales up from the nano scale to the micro. Cronin reflects on the possibilities of this new paradigm that gives inorganic cellular materials the potential to be ‘programmed’ to sense environmental changes, generate power, self-repair, shift properties and even compete with other building materials for resources. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Turn to ‘New Regionalism’: South African Reflections

This article analyses critical policy implications for city-regional and national spatial frameworks in South Africa concerning the turn to new regionalism. International debates are reviewed concerning new regionalism, global city regions, the European Spatial Development Perspective and polycentric mega regions. In South Africa, there is a growing policy interest in the writings and implications of new regionalism as a base for rethinking urban and regional development policies. It is argued that the current depth of South African research and debate on issues raised by new regionalism is limited and that strategic planning for the building of Gauteng as a globally competitive city region is the most significant imprint of new regionalism on the South African policy landscape.     

What is the relationship between indoor air quality parameters and airborne microorganisms in hospital environments? A systematic review and meta-analysis

Airborne microorganisms in hospitals have been associated with several hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), and various measures of indoor air quality (IAQ) parameters such as temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide (CO₂), particle mass concentration, and particle size have been linked to pathogen survival or mitigation of pathogen spread. To investigate whether there are quantitative relationships between the concentration of airborne microorganisms and the IAQ in the hospital environment. Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed databases were searched for studies reporting airborne microbial levels and any IAQ parameter(s) in hospital environments, from database inception to October 2020. Pooled effect estimates were determined via random-effects models. Seventeen of 654 studies were eligible for the meta-analysis. The concentration of airborne microbial measured as aerobic colony count (ACC) was significantly correlated with temperature (r = 0.25 [95% CI = 0.06–0.42], p = 0.01), CO₂ concentration (r = 0.53 [95% CI = 0.40–0.64], p ˂ 0.001), particle mass concentration (≤5 µg/m³; r = 0.40 [95% CI = 0.04–0.66], p = 0.03), and particle size (≤5 and ˃5 µm), (r = 0.51 [95% CI = 0.12–0.77], p = 0.01 and r = 0.55 [95% CI = 0.20–0.78], p = 0.003), respectively, while not being significantly correlated with relative humidity or particulate matter of size >5 µm. Conversely, airborne total fungi (TF) were not significantly correlated with temperature, relative humidity, or CO₂ level. However, there was a significant weak correlation between ACC and TF (r = 0.31 [95% CI = 0.07–0.52], p = 0.013). Although significant correlations exist between ACC and IAQ parameters, the relationship is not definitive; the IAQ parameters may affect the microorganisms but are not responsible for the presence of airborne microorganisms. Environmental parameters could be related to the generating source, survival, dispersion, and deposition rate of microorganisms. Future studies should record IAQ parameters and factors such as healthcare worker presence and the activities carried out such as cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfection protocols. Foot traffic would influence both the generation of microorganisms and their deposition rate onto surfaces in the hospital environment. These data would inform models to improve the understanding of the likely concentration of airborne microorganisms and provide an alternative approach for real-time monitoring of the healthcare environment.     

‘Ma and Pa’ Landlords and the ‘Risky’ Tenant: Discourses in the New Zealand Private Rental Sector

Social constructions of what it means to let and rent housing are revealed in language and are intimately tied to housing outcomes for both landlords and tenants. This paper is concerned with the socially constructed identities of landlords and tenants in the private rental sector and how these are revealed in language. Fairclough's methods of discourse analysis coupled with Habermas' ideal speech situation and theory of communicative action are used to form an analytical framework for examining public debate and discourse on the private rental sector in New Zealand. It is argued that current discourses about tenants and landlords are the result of public debate and stereotypes that have failed to incorporate the experiences of tenants, and further that these stereotypes conceal the multiplicity of identities and motivations for behaviour of both landlords and tenants.     

‘Great Rides’ on New Zealand’s new national cycleway: pursuing mobility capital

New Zealand has long claimed itself as ‘adventure capital of the world’, a place to engage in a wide range of adventurous activities. The backdrop: extensive areas of grand landscape. A new form of access to this landscape has been developed with the extensive new cycle trails. To date 19 dedicated routes in diverse scenic locations constitute Nga Haerenga, the national cycleway system. The $60 million enterprise, co-sponsored by national and local government, is a strategy to encourage both domestic and international tourism. Through riding these trails, cyclists of every level of experience and skill expand their own mobility capital. New Zealand’s well-established brand as a place of glorious landscape is the significant motif in this project. These Great Rides are the newest agents in this ongoing promotion exercise. The seduction of pretty landscape and the sheer joy of cycling over-ride concerns about local eco-politics.     

Do indoor pollutants and thermal conditions in schools influence student performance? A critical review of the literature

To assess whether school environments can adversely affect academic performance, we review scientific evidence relating indoor pollutants and thermal conditions, in schools or other indoor environments, to human performance or attendance. We critically review evidence for direct associations between these aspects of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and performance or attendance. Secondarily, we summarize, without critique, evidence on indirect connections potentially linking IEQ to performance or attendance. Regarding direct associations, little strongly designed research was available. Persuasive evidence links higher indoor concentrations of NO(2) to reduced school attendance, and suggestive evidence links low ventilation rates to reduced performance. Regarding indirect associations, many studies link indoor dampness and microbiologic pollutants (primarily in homes) to asthma exacerbations and respiratory infections, which in turn have been related to reduced performance and attendance. Also, much evidence links poor IEQ (e.g. low ventilation rate, excess moisture, or formaldehyde) with adverse health effects in children and adults and documents dampness problems and inadequate ventilation as common in schools. Overall, evidence suggests that poor IEQ in schools is common and adversely influences the performance and attendance of students, primarily through health effects from indoor pollutants. Evidence is available to justify (i) immediate actions to assess and improve IEQ in schools and (ii) focused research to guide IEQ improvements in schools. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: There is more justification now for improving IEQ in schools to reduce health risks to students than to reduce performance or attendance risks. However, as IEQ-performance links are likely to operate largely through effects of IEQ on health, IEQ improvements that benefit the health of students are likely to have performance and attendance benefits as well. Immediate actions are warranted in schools to prevent dampness problems, inadequate ventilation, and excess indoor exposures to substances such as NO(2) and formaldehyde. Also, siting of new schools in areas with lower outdoor pollutant levels is preferable.