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Life cycle oriented methods are increasingly used for environmental assessments (EAs) of the built environment. However, many assumptions are made in such assessments, potentially influencing the results and making the assessment more ambiguous. To increase the reliability of EAs, consequences of the assumptions made have to be better understood. Since energy use in the operation and maintenance phase is an important factor decisive for the overall environmental performance of a building, the purpose of this study is to investigate how the selection of heat and electricity mix affects the assessed environmental performance of buildings. It also aims to suggest how to choose heat and electricity data in EAs of the built environment in general.

Applying four different modes of electricity production and two different modes of heat production in a case study of three different buildings with different technical solutions for heat and electricity supply, the study show that choices of heat and electricity mix have significant influence on the final results of the EA. Regarding the choice of heat and electricity mix in an EA of buildings and the built environment, it is argued that both average and marginal data on electricity production should be used in general. As for data on district heat production, it is recommended to use data on the average production in the specific, local district heating system in general. Finally, it is argued that consequences of the assumptions made should be explicitly communicated in the EA report, so as to let the decision-makers rather than the analysts make the evaluation.

In Sweden, two LCA-based tools for the built environment have been developed the last years: the "Environmental Load Profile" and "EcoEffect". Both are standing in front of an implementation phase and it is therefore important that they may deliver credible and consistent results to end users and facilitate a transition to more environmentally benign building construction and administration. The present study looked at the differences in results that may appear when using the tools and where they come from. Applying the two tools for assessment of a new building on equal basis created differences in results. However, both tools pointed at energy use in the administration phase of the life cycle being the most significant factor for environmental impact, consistent with other studies. The results indicate that: (i) differences in material grouping and life expectancy for the construction materials used, (ii) differences in LCI-data used and (iii) different classification and characterisation models used, give rise to important differences.

In many heavy industrialized countries such as China and India, the impact of air pollution on respiratory health has been headline news in recent years. Among the risk issues examined, exposure to particulate matter (PM) is cited as the prime contributing factor that causes respiratory diseases, yet it is traceable and controllable. In this paper, we report on an empirical study conducted in Shanghai, based on urban spatial determinants as independent variables to investigate its link to occurrence of lung cancer in their neighborhoods. A survey was conducted on a population of 472 lung cancer patients. After reliability and validity tests, only 156 pairs were included in this report. The questionnaire designed for this survey covers 11 outdoor and 6 indoor factors; these include the building density where they live, proximity to pollution sources, volume of traffic nearby, degree of enclosure by surrounding tall buildings, being residential or commercial with reference to their homes, proximity to parks, measured in terms of the plant type, green space per capita, accessibility to public open spaces for outdoor activities and water body; while parameters inside the house cover the age of the house, bedroom sizes, space per occupant, cooling-off time of taking up residency after renovation, humidity and dust inside the houses. Data collected were classified using random forest classification and further refined with Boruta algorithm for feature selection to identify possible correlation between risk of lung cancer to both outdoor and indoor factors of built environment. The results reveal a strong correlation between lung cancer and the environment where they live, so much so that the finding confirms our long-held belief that urban redevelopment could play an important role in reducing the risk of respiratory disease. Since prevention is better than cure, if by design to relocate pollution sources away from residential areas, provision of good public transportation to cut down vehicles on our streets, creation of green spaces to improve airflow pathway to deduce the concentration of PM in the atmosphere in our neighborhoods, we could perhaps reduce or even prevent lung cancer and a range of other respiratory diseases for the residents we served.

Promoting pedestrian activity has attracted increasing attention as an important strategy for the improvement of public health and urban revitalization. The impact on physical activity underpinned by built environment has been studied substantially; however, few studies had focused on the geographically varying relationships between pedestrian activity and the built environment characteristics. Built upon previous work, this study looks at the spatial patterns of pedestrian counts and the built environment contributors along two major streets in Buffalo, New York using global and local spatial autocorrelation tests and geographically weighted regression. Pedestrian generators, job density and land use mix are included as independent variables in order to study the impact on them due to the characteristics of built environment. Our findings suggest that (1) there are statistically significant clusters of street intersections with high pedestrian counts along the streets selected in our study; (2) there are some optimal sizes of clusters of pedestrian generators, which attract more pedestrians; (3) geographically weighted Poisson model helps to analyze the geographically varying relationships between the built environment and pedestrian activity with a more pronounced goodness of fit. This research contributes to the understanding of the spatial patterns of pedestrian activity and the geographically varying relationship between the built environment and pedestrian counts. Hopefully this research will help to guide and focus the minds of policy makers and urban planners alike to introduce street vitality through the modifications of the built environment, so as to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods.

Significant changes in the urban built environment have occurred due to rapid urbanization and increases in the urban population. Such alterations may produce environmental health-related issues such as urban heat stress, air pollution and traffic noise. This research undertook a field study to collect data including urban design parameters, micro-environmental factors and city climatic information. This work was conducted over a two-year period on three pedestrian streets located in high-density urban areas in Beijing. These areas were selected in order to study the influences of urban street canyon texture within a particular geometric layout, wind flow corridors and variations in air temperature on pedestrian microclimatic comfort. The results will facilitate the work of urban planners by providing them with information for use in improving outdoor thermal comfort through their designs. A total of 60485 samples were organized into training, validation and test sets. We confirmed our hypothesis that internal wind speed ($W_i)$ is attributable mainly to the urban texture coefficient ($U_0)$, air temperature ($T)$ and leading-in wind speed ($W_{\mathrm{\text{cos}}})$. The model was tested using the test data collected onsite, which demonstrated a very accurate goodness-of-fit; the model achieved an R-squared value of 0.82, which meant that $W_i$ as a dependent variable was 82% correlated to the three predictors as independent variables. With this computer simulation, urban planners can now predict and visualize the impact of changes on the built environment in terms of either the direction of solar radiation received or increases in wind speed, in return for the desired thermal comfort level for residents of the neighborhood.

Urban resilience has been a research focus, particularly with the pandemic impact on urban infrastructure, service provision and accessibility to core resources. This paper explores the need for interdisciplinary approaches to the built environment that integrate water, energy, and food resources. The study goes through articles on water, energy and food nexus and urban resilience in the past 10 years. It identifies the key research focus, gaps and needs for future research. Recommendations for future studies include the allocation of funds to ensure vulnerable communities have access to resources, sustainable operation of urban agriculture practices, circular economy and reuse, and engagement of experts, local authorities and communities in decision-making and training. The study recommends using quantitative assessment to identify the impact of urban agriculture and urban water management practices on the environment and include socio-economic aspects in assessment models. Finally, participatory approaches and integrating technology are recommended for promoting sustainable resilient communities.

After independence, early decades in the Indian capital city were marked by ceremonials, demonstrations and politico-religious addresses. The enthusiasm of the nascent state trying to forge a shared public sphere was dampened by voices of dissent from different opposition groups. These voices took the form of demonstrations and sit-ins in New Delhi, especially around the Parliament Street. Thus, challenging elected government’s use of space for functional and ceremonial purposes through such acts. However, the government, in order to contain protesting publics, could not continue to deploy the measures of colonial crowd control, and had to come up with means suitable for its democratic setup. Over years these contestations regarding defining use of public spaces between state and public(s) resulted in the development of guidelines and defining of designated sites of protest. In this view, the purpose of this paper is to contribute toward understanding of New Delhi’s space post-1947 and explain how certain demonstrations led to shaping of the government’s approach regarding protest sites. The same will be done by bridging the gap between spatial and socio-cultural theorists to study the capital city beyond its architectural grandeur and theoretical claims about public space. Overall, the paper is organized into four parts: the first section explores the idea of public space in the national capital with focus on importance of the Parliament House; the second and third sections study specific sites like Boat Club, Ramlila Maidan and Jantar Mantar in association with protests like JP Movement; and the final part looks at the evolution of government guidelines and the emergence of contained protest sites.

The interaction of human cultures and the built environment allows a wide range of interpretations and has been studied inside the domain of many disciplines. This paper discusses three interpretations descending from a systemic approach to the question:

- architecture as an "emergence" of the settlement system;

- place (and space) as an "accumulator" of time and a "flux" of systems;

- landscape as one representation/description of the human settlement.

Architecture emerges as a new physical conformation or layout, or as a change in a specific site, arising from actions and representations of political, religious, economical or social powers, being shaped at all times by the material culture belonging to a specific time and place in the course of human evolution.

Any inhabited space becomes over time a place as well as a landscape, i.e. a representation of the settlement and a relationship between setting and people. Therefore, any place owns a landscape which, in turn, is a system of physical systems; it could be defined as a system of sites that builds up its own structure stemming from the orographical features and the geometry of land surfaces that set out the basic characters of its space.

A century ago, biologist and urbanist Patrick Geddes suggested the idea that cities, and human settlements in general, could be better understood by resorting to the scientific approach of biological sciences. Today, the idea that the built environment is the peculiar eco-system of the human species, is widely acknowledged in theory though still far from being put into general practice. The built environment breaks down when the balance between its natural and human resources and the requirements of its inhabitants has been upset. In such cases, culture fails to play its role in mediating between society and environment, not being able to direct social behaviors as well as the actions of the political and administrative institutions. Human settlements, and cities as a peculiar emergence, are the product of human societies. They have been built and developed by a great number of interacting conscious and unconscious acts over a long time, rather than by purposely single designed acts, as Kevin Lynch and Christopher Alexander pointed out some 40 years ago. Such a point of view generates the idea of an "implicit project" that continuously modifies the built environment as a complex systemic entity, where processes of emergence occur. A few methods and tools, such as building environment evaluation based on performance assessment, which focus on the inhabitants' and users' perceptions of building and places, can help culture to regain such mediating role. This paper describes the early results of a research projects investigating landscape values "as perceived by people", according to the European Landscape Convention.