Regulating Green Buildings

Green buildings are becoming the new fixation for the building industry because of the impact they have on the carbon footprint and the cost savings they offer for utility costs. Governments have begun to produce policies and regulations that implement and mandate green buildings due to these successes. However, the policies are having troubles increasing the popularity and quantities of green buildings. There is a need for a way to produce better policies and regulations that will increase both the amount of green buildings their popularity. A decision-making tool, such as a decision tree, should be created to help policymakers who do not have the backgrounds to produce well thought out regulations. By researching the green building industry and its current status, key points can be graphed out in a decision tool that will provide the needed education for policy makers to produce better green building regulations.

Power laws, Discontinuities and Regional City Size Distributions

Urban systems are manifestations of human adaptation to the natural environment. City size distributions are the expression of hierarchical processes acting upon urban systems. In this paper, we test the entire city size distributions for the southeastern and southwestern United States (1990), as well as the size classes in these regions for power law behavior. We interpret the differences in the size of the regional city size distributions as the manifestation of variable growth dynamics dependent upon city size. Size classics in the city size distributions are snapshots of stable states within urban systems in flux.