An extension of Mohring’s model for land rent distribution

In an early paper Herbert Mohring (J. Poi Et on , 49 (1961)) presented a model for land rent distribution yielding the well-known result that the price of land must fall with the distance from the city center to offset transportation costs. Our paper is an extension of Mohring's model in which we relax some of his drastic simplifying assumptions. This extended model has been incorporated in a method for economic evaluation of city master plans which has been applied to a Swedish city. In this method the interdependence among housing, heating, and transportation, the dura-bility of urban structures, and the uncertainty of future demand are explicitly considered within a cost-benefit approach. Some empirical results from this pilot study concerning land rent distributions are also presented here.

Energy rehabilitation of social housing for rent, as demonstrator in the LIFE 'New4Old' Project

The main goal of the cofounded by the European Commission LIFE Project, New4Old (LIFE10 ENV/ES/439), is to define the most appropriate method and the best available practice in social housing rehabilitation with energy and environmental sustainability criteria, as well as to apply innovative technologies in the fight against climate change through an efficient use of resources and energy. The institutions involved in the Project are the Technological Centre AITEMIN, Madrid Polytechnic University (UPM), Portugal Technological Centre for Ceramics and Glass (CTCV) and the Zaragoza City Housing Society (SMZV). The demonstrator project consists in the energy rehabilitation of a rental social housing building located in Zaragoza?s historic quarter, according to the conclusions and strategies developed for the LIFE project. In actions taken in households of this nature passive design strategies are essential due to the limited income of owners, who often cannot afford energy bills. Therefore, the proposed actions will help improve the building?s passive performance and reach a higher thermal comfort, without increasing the economic cost linked to energy consumption.