Construction safety and digital design: a review

As digital technologies become widely used in designing buildings and infrastructure, questions arise about their impacts on construction safety. This review explores relationships between construction safety and digital design practices with the aim of fostering and directing further research. It surveys state-of-the-art research on databases, virtual reality, geographic information systems, 4D CAD, building information modeling and sensing technologies, finding various digital tools for addressing safety issues in the construction phase, but few tools to support design for construction safety. It also considers a literature on safety critical, digital and design practices that raises a general concern about ‘mindlessness’ in the use of technologies, and has implications for the emerging research agenda around construction safety and digital design. Bringing these strands of literature together suggests new kinds of interventions, such as the development of tools and processes for using digital models to promote mindfulness through multi-party collaboration on safety

Sustainable building certification and the rent premium: a panel data approach

This paper investigates whether obtaining sustainable building certification entails a rental premium for commercial office buildings and tracks its development over time. To this aim, both a difference-in-differences and a fixed-effects model approach are applied to a large panel dataset of office buildings in the United States in the 2000–2010 period. The results indicate a significant rental premium for both ENERGY STAR and LEED certified buildings. Controlling for confounding factors, this premium is shown to have increased steadily from 2006 to 2008, followed by a moderate decline in the subsequent periods. The results also show a significant positive relationship between ENERGY STAR labeling and building occupancy rates.

The elasticity of demand is about occupancy, not prices: building European demand curves based on occupancy elasticity

The peak congestion of the European grid may create significant impacts on system costs because of the need for higher marginal cost generation, higher cost system balancing and increasing grid reinforcement investment. The use of time of use rates, incentives, real time pricing and other programmes, usually defined as Demand Side Management (DSM), could bring about significant reductions in prices, limit carbon emissions from dirty power plants, and improve the integration of renewable sources of energy. Unlike previous studies on elasticity of residential electricity demand under flat tariffs, the aim of this study is not to investigate the known relatively inelastic relationship between demand and prices. Rather, the aim is to assess how occupancy levels vary in different European countries. This reflects the reality of demand loads, which are predominantly determined by the timing of human activities (e.g. travelling to work, taking children to school) rather than prices. To this end, two types of occupancy elasticity are estimated: baseline occupancy elasticity and peak occupancy elasticity. These represent the intrinsic elasticity associated with human activities of single residential end-users in 15 European countries. This study makes use of occupancy time-series data from the Harmonised European Time Use Survey database to build European occupancy curves; identify peak occupancy periods; draw time use demand curves for video and TV watching activity; and estimate national occupancy elasticity levels of single-occupant households. Findings on occupancy elasticities provide an indication of possible DSM strategies based on occupancy levels and not prices.

Discrete demand side control performance under dynamic building simulation: a heat pump application

This study presents the findings of applying a Discrete Demand Side Control (DDSC) approach to the space heating of two case study buildings. High and low tolerance scenarios are implemented on the space heating controller to assess the impact of DDSC upon buildings with different thermal capacitances, light-weight and heavy-weight construction. Space heating is provided by an electric heat pump powered from a wind turbine, with a back-up electrical network connection in the event of insufficient wind being available when a demand occurs. Findings highlight that thermal comfort is maintained within an acceptable range while the DDSC controller maintains the demand/supply balance. Whilst it is noted that energy demand increases slightly, as this is mostly supplied from the wind turbine, this is of little significance and hence a reduction in operating costs and carbon emissions is still attained.

Building a left coast: the legacy of the California Popular Front and the challenge to Cold War liberalism in the post-world war two era

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.