City dweller aspirations for cities of the future: How do environmental and personal wellbeing feature?

This paper explores city dweller aspirations for cities of the future in the context of global commitments to radically reduce carbon emissions by 2050; cities contribute the vast majority of these emissions and a growing bulk of theworld's population lives in cities. The particular challenge of creating a carbon reduced future in democratic countries is that the measures proposed must be acceptable to the electorate. Such acceptability is fostered if carbon reduced ways of living are also felt to bewellbeing maximising. Thus the objective of the paper is to explore what kinds of cities people aspire to live in, to ascertain whether these aspirations align with or undermine carbon reduced ways of living, as well as personal wellbeing. Using a novel free associative technique, city aspirations are found to cluster around seven themes, encompassing physical and social aspects. Physically, people aspire to a city with a range of services and facilities, green and blue spaces, efficient transport, beauty and good design. Socially, people aspire to a sense of community and a safe environment. An exploration of these themes reveals that only a minority of the participants' aspirations for cities relate to lowering carbon or environmental wellbeing. Far more consensual is emphasis on, and a particular vision of, aspirations that will bring personal wellbeing. Furthermore, city dweller aspirations align with evidence concerning factors that maximise personal wellbeing but, far less, with those that produce lowcarbonways of living. In order to shape a lower carbon future that city dwellers accept the potential convergence between environmental and personal wellbeing will need to be capitalised on: primarily aversion to pollution and enjoyment of communal green space.

Decolourisation of Acid orange 7 in a microbial fuel cell with a laccase-based biocathode: Influence of mitigating pH changes in the cathode chamber

Biocathodes may be a suitable replacement of platinum in microbial fuel cells (MFCs) if the cost of MFCs is to be reduced. However, the use of enzymes as bio-cathodes is fraught with loss of activity as time progresses. A possible cause of this loss in activity might be pH increase in the cathode as pH gradients in MFCs are well known. This pH increase is however, accompanied by simultaneous increase in salinity; therefore salinity may be a confounding variable. This study investigated various ways of mitigating pH changes in the cathode of MFCs and their effect on laccase activity and decolourisation of a model azo dye Acid orange 7 in the anode chamber. Experiments were run with catholyte pH automatically controlled via feedback control or by using acetate buffers (pH 4.5) of various strength (100 mM and 200 mM), with CMI7000 as the cation exchange membrane. A comparison was also made between use of CMI7000 and Nafion 117 as the transport properties of cations for both membranes (hence their potential effects on pH changes in the cathode) are different.

A World without Causation: Big Data and the Coming of Age of Posthumanism

Advocates of Big Data assert that we are in the midst of an epistemological revolution, promising the displacement of the modernist methodological hegemony of causal analysis and theory generation. It is alleged that the growing ‘deluge’ of digitally generated data, and the development of computational algorithms to analyse them, has enabled new inductive ways of accessing everyday relational interactions through their ‘datafication’. This paper critically engages with these discourses of Big Data and complexity, particularly as they operate in the discipline of International Relations, where it is alleged that Big Data approaches have the potential for developing self-governing societal capacities for resilience and adaptation through the real-time reflexive awareness and management of risks and problems as they arise. The epistemological and ontological assumptions underpinning Big Data are then analysed to suggest that critical and posthumanist approaches have come of age through these discourses, enabling process-based and relational understandings to be translated into policy and governance practices. The paper thus raises some questions for the development of critical approaches to new posthuman forms of governance and knowledge production.