Search results for "resilience"
showing 10 items of 623 documents
Planning the Neocosmopolitan Habitat
2021
Reflecting on cosmopolitanism is a philosophical activity before it is a political, social or—as far as we are concerned—urban planning action. It requires a deep reflection on the meaning of being connected to a place and also to the whole world, of being individuals and also related to a planetary community and to the consequences of our inhabitation of the Earth (and the Cosmos). Nature, like us humans, is not made up of things in and of themselves, but of an entanglement of relationships and events, of evolutionary processes that take place in time and space. And even our cities do not escape this universal law: everything is correlation, flow, openness, vibration. In short, cosmopolita…
The Resilience Revolution
2018
In the Anthropocene Age the world population is growing at a considerable rate. How long nature will be able to keep us with this growth is the main challenge for us, as citizens and planners. Climate change, water scarcity, pollution, broken urban cycles, and rising prices for resources show at an increasing rate that nature’s abilities are not inexhaustible. A resilience-oriented city, therefore, must have insight into its own metabolism. When we look at planning and managing cities as organism with their own metabolisms it becomes clear that city and nature are not separate entities. Cities use nature as their supplier of fuel, food, resource materials, and water, and nature also absorbs…
Reimagining Urbanism. Creative, Smart and Green Cities for the Changing Times
2014
We live in a world of cities, where more than half of the population lives and works in urban settlements, whether dense or sprawled, metropolitan or networked, expanding or shrinking. The city plays a major role in the Urban Age as habitat – the U.S. and Europe are close to 80% – not only as development growth machine, driver of communities’ evolution and dynamism, but bearing the responsibility to generate innovative lifestyles, more sustainable smart and creative, and to be the reformer of its own development pattern. The exhibition curated by Richard Burdett in 2007 at the Tate Modern on Global Cities showed us a world where cities produce more than 50% of global GDP, consume 90% of glo…
Urban resilience. The ad-ap(c)tive city. Blue and green infrastructures and cities. A pathway towards resilience
2017
The paper focuses on the theme of urban resilience, not only as an intrinsic characteristic of cities and communities, but as a project paradigm, investigating whether a resilience-oriented approach is influencing urban planning theory and practice.
Co-creative Communities and Resilience Accelerators. Sicani Hills in Sicily
2022
The contribution asks for a change of perspective, addressing inner areas as motors of innovation and test-fields for new dynamics of development and more adaptive processes, looking at co-creative communities and the potentials and resources specifically connected to space, settlements, and landscapes. The reactivation of small towns can catalyze tourism and community’s resilience through targeted transformations of built heritage and unused building stock, social innovation initiatives, and new forms of production. In order to return to inhabit inner areas, new infrastructures and basic services are needed, but also new perspectives and projects able to radically change production, consum…
New rur-urban alliances: Experiments of social innovation in Terre Sicane Inland Area in Sicily
2018
"Rural" and "Urban" are not terms of a dichotomic opposition but they become elements of a necessary alliance that enfold an actualized view of the territory development and the transformation of rural economies and communities. New types of rural-urban interaction, recovering the value of a territorial vision, can put in value, in original forms, creative, innovative potential of new relations between urban and rural areas. In this framework, the Italian national strategy named "Strategia Nazionale Aree Interne" (SNAI) represents an existing and emerging governance approach looking at official authorities but also at informal governance groups to overcome the classic opposition between rur…
Graph Comparison and Artificial Models for Simulating Real Criminal Networks
2021
Network Science is an active research field, with numerous applications in areas like computer science, economics, or sociology. Criminal networks, in particular, possess specific topologies which allow them to exhibit strong resilience to disruption. Starting from a dataset related to meetings between members of a Mafia organization which operated in Sicily during 2000s, we here aim to create artificial models with similar properties. To this end, we use specific tools of Social Network Analysis, including network models (Barabási-Albert identified to be the most promising) and metrics which allow us to quantify the similarity between two networks. To the best of our knowledge, the DeltaCo…
Passive components for reducing environmental impacts of buildings:analysis of an experimental green roof
2020
The reduction of the environmental impacts related to the building sector is a matter of outmost importance concerning the sustainable utilization of resources related to human activities. Such sector is in fact responsible for about 40% of both release of pollutants in the atmosphere and energy consumption. When trying to reduce buildings’ environmental impacts, as well as to limit their energy consumption, building envelope passive systems can be used. Amongst these, green roofs have been gaining global attention due to their benefits in terms of resilience and sustainability, in order to mitigate the unfavourable urbanization effects. Research on the green roof has been indeed increasing…
Predictions in Resilient Hybrid AC/DC Grids Leveraged by an Interoperable and Secure ICT Platform
2022
Power systems are undergoing a significant change and the main elements to address the new challenges is the new key-role played by the distribution grid and its transformation into a smart grid. While the distribution grid has traditionally operated with alternating current (AC), nowadays most devices operate with DC internally, and most distributed renewable resources generate power in DC. Furthermore, storage components, such as batteries and supercapacitors, have a DC character. DC seems to be the one of the most promising candidates to avoid stranded investments and to guarantee incredible saving for the community in Europe, making the transition to a fully decarbonised energy system a…
Resilient hexapod robot
2017
In this paper, we present a method of learning desired behaviour of the specific robotic system and transfer of the existing knowledge in the event of partial system failure. Six-legged robot (hexapod) built on top of the Bioloid platform is used for the method verification. We use genetic algorithms to optimize the hexapod's gait, after which we simulate physical damage caused to the robot. The goal of this method is to optimize the gait in accordance with the actual robot morphology, instead of the assumed one. Also, knowledge that was previously gained will be transferred in order to improve the results. Nonstandard genetic algorithm with the specific mixed population is used for this.