Variability of metal composition and concentrations in road dust in the urban environment

Urban road dust comprises of a range of potentially toxic metal elements and plays a critical role in degrading urban receiving water quality. Hence, assessing the metal composition and concentration in urban road dust is a high priority. This study investigated the variability of metal composition and concentrations in road dust in 4 different urban land uses in Gold Coast, Australia. Samples from 16 road sites were collected and tested for selected 12 metal species. The data set was analyzed using both univariate and multivariate techniques. Outcomes of the data analysis revealed that the metal concentrations in road dust differ considerably within and between different land uses. Iron, aluminum, magnesium and zinc are the most abundant in urban land uses. It was also noted that metal species such as titanium, nickel, copper and zinc have the highest concentrations in industrial land use. The study outcomes revealed that soil and traffic related sources as key sources of metals deposited on road surfaces.

Urban Food Security, Urban Resilience and Climate Change

The growing importance of logistics in increasingly globalised production and consumption systems strengthens the case for explicit consideration of the climate risks that may impact on the operation of ports in the future, as well as the formulation of adaptation responses that act to enhance their resilience. Within a logistics chain, seaports are functional nodes of significant strategic importance, and are considered as critical gateways linking local and national supply chains to global markets. However, they are more likely to be exposed to vagaries of climate-related extreme events due to their coastal locations. As such, they need to be adaptive and respond to the projected impacts of climate change, in particular extreme weather events. These impacts are especially important in the logistics context as they could result in varying degrees of business interruption; including business closure in the worst case scenario. Since trans-shipment of freight for both the import and export of goods and raw materials has a significant impact on Australia’s sustained economic growth it was considered important to undertake a study of port functional assets, to assess their vulnerability to climate change, to model the potential impacts of climate-related extreme events, and to highlight possible adaptation responses.

Food in the city : urban food movements and the (re)imagining of urban spaces

Ethical food movements are growing in number throughout Australia. Amongst these diverse movements are urban agriculture initiatives, which articulate a multitude of social and environmental values. Yet, despite the long history of production and exchange of food in urban areas, planners (and others) often overlook its significance. To assist in addressing this oversight, we take the case study of Melbourne to examine the ways in which participants in urban agriculture are re-imagining urban spaces and the future of agriculture and food systems in Australia. We demonstrate that urban food advocates' politics and practices both challenge and resist the enclosure of urban spaces. This creates new frontiers that transgress social, political, ecological and economic boundaries and edges. These transgressions or counter-enclosures articulate new visions for secure and just food systems and, in so doing, offer insights to assist planners in ensuring Australian cities support socially just and environmentally responsible food systems.

Cultural flows in an Aboriginal school : deterritorializing textual production through a socially mediated Indigenous heritage

Flows of cultural heritage in textual practices are vital to sustaining Indigenous communities. Indigenous heritage, whether passed on by oral tradition or ubiquitous social media, can be seen as a “conversation between the past and the future” (Fairclough, 2012, xv). Indigenous heritage involves appropriating memories within a cultural flow to pass on a spiritual legacy. This presentation reports ethnographic research of social media practices in a small independent Aboriginal school in Southeast Queensland, Australia that is resided over by the Yugambeh elders and an Aboriginal principal. The purpose was to rupture existing notions of white literacies in schools, and to deterritorialize the uses of digital media by dominant cultures in the public sphere. Examples of learning experiences included the following: i. Integrating Indigenous language and knowledge into media text production; ii. Using conversations with Indigenous elders and material artifacts as an entry point for storytelling; iii. Dadirri – spiritual listening in the yarning circle to develop storytelling (Ungunmerr-Baumann, 2002); and iv. Writing and publicly sharing oral histories through digital scrapbooking shared via social media. The program aligned with the Australian National Curriculum English (ACARA, 2012), which mandates the teaching of multimodal text creation. Data sources included a class set of digital scrapbooks collaboratively created in a multi-age primary classroom. The digital scrapbooks combined digitally encoded words, images of material artifacts, and digital music files. A key feature of the writing and digital design task was to retell and digitally display and archive a cultural narrative of significance to the Indigenous Australian community and its memories and material traces of the past for the future. Data analysis of the students’ digital stories involved the application of key themes of negotiated, material, and digitally mediated forms of heritage practice. It drew on Australian Indigenous research by Keddie et al. (2013) to guard against the homogenizing of culture that can arise from a focus on a static view of culture. The interpretation of findings located Indigenous appropriation of social media within broader racialized politics that enables Indigenous literacy to be understood as a dynamic, negotiated, and transgenerational flows of practice. The findings demonstrate that Indigenous children’s use of media production reflects “shifting and negotiated identities” in response to changing media environments that can function to sustain Indigenous cultural heritages (Appadurai, 1696, xv). It demonstrated how the children’s experiences of culture are layered over time, as successive generations inherit, interweave, and hear others’ cultural stories or maps. It also demonstrated how the children’s production of narratives through multimedia can provide a platform for the flow and reconstruction of performative collective memories and “lived traces of a common past” (Giaccardi, 2012). It disrupts notions of cultural reductionism and racial incommensurability that fix and homogenize Indigenous practices within and against a dominant White norm. Recommendations are provided for an approach to appropriating social media in schools that explicitly attends to the dynamic nature of Indigenous practices, negotiated through intercultural constructions and flows, and opening space for a critical anti-racist approach to multimodal text production.

Exploring pedestrian accessibility and walkability : insight from public place observations in inner-urban higher density Brisbane, Australia

As planners work to create more sustainable and liveable urban environments, a priority is to transition away from prioritising the automobile and towards enhancing the pedestrian experience. Thus, this research explores the experience of pedestrian accessibility in inner-urban higher-density Brisbane in Australia, drawing on findings from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 24 residents and over 100 hours of public place observations in three case-study neighbourhoods. The interviews took place in residents homes and explored their experience of higher density living and their neighbourhood, whilst observations were recorded through a combination of methods including photographs, sketch maps, recordings and field journals. Observation locations included retail and commercial space, roads, parkland and open space, with multiple observations at each location. A thematic analysis identified common themes in both interviews and the observations, with this paper focusing on residents’ lived experience in urban built environments. This analysis revealed that pedestrian accessibility is linked to access to local amenities and direct routes, aesthetics, sense of community, ownership of space and safety. In particular, observations revealed how pedestrian accessibility and route-taking works with, against or in spite of the design features of urban environments, as well as the importance of the social use of the built environment. Residents spoke about although walking quick and preferred for local amenities, the decision to walk was moderated by factors such as time of day and perceived safety. Measures to ensure and improve the pedestrian accessibility of urban areas needs to take into account the propensity for people to prefer and improvise direct routes (often to the detriment of traffic safety considerations), the importance of ongoing maintenance and upgrading of walking infrastructure and the importance of aesthetically pleasing and safe walking environments. By combining interviews and observations, this research highlights the current dominance of the automobile culture in Brisbane and the layers of meaning, experiences and complexity hidden within the pedestrian experience.

Towards consonance in urban form

By presenting the past as a repository of the characteristics of urban formation, urban morphology utilizes a knowledge platform as the basis for interpretation of accordant architectural responses (Levy, 1999). Operating within this framework at the scale of architectural features of individual buildings, and imbued with reference to the intrinsic architectural elements of both preceding and existing building forms, micro-morphology (Larkham, 2006, p. 126) provides the efficacy for new architecture that emerges from such a manner of composition...

Responsibility to protect and women, peace and security : aligning the protection agendas

In Responsibility to Protect and Women, Peace and Security: Aligning the Protection Agendas, editors Davies, Nwokora, Stamnes and Teitt address the intersections of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle and the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Widespread or systematic sexual or gender-based violence is a war crime, a crime against humanity and an act of genocide, all of which are clearly addressed in the R2P principle. The protection of those at risk of widespread sexual violence is therefore not only relative to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, but a fundamental sovereign obligation for all states as part of their commitment to R2P. Contributions from policy-makers and academics consider both the merits and the utility of aligning the protection agendas of R2P and WPS. Ultimately, a number of actionable recommendations are made concerning a unification of the agendas to best support the global empowerment of women and prevention of mass atrocities.

Characteristics of spatial variation, size distribution, formation and growth of particles in urban environments

This thesis is the first comprehensive study of important parameters relating to aerosols' impact on climate and human health, namely spatial variation, particle size distribution and new particle formation. We determined the importance of spatial variation of particle number concentration in microscale environments, developed a method for particle size parameterisation and provided knowledge about the chemistry of new particle formation. This is a significant contribution to our understanding of processes behind the transformation and dynamics of urban aerosols. This PhD project included extensive measurements of air quality parameters using state of the art instrumentation at each of the 25 sites within the Brisbane metropolitan area and advanced statistical analysis.

Medieval knights amid the gum-trees : the experience of European heritage tourism in south-east Queensland, Australia

This paper is interested in the way in which the heritage of another place, time, and culture is repurposed for popular consumption in an experience economy, as well as the way in which the visitors experience their own past and the past of others. We trace the processes of engagement, education and nostalgia that occur when the European heritage is presented in a postcolonial context and an Australian environment. The information presented includes the results of qualitative and quantitative research conducted at the Abbey Museum over the December-Jan. period of 2012-13.

Ecological consequences of fragmentation and deforestation in an urban landscape : a case study

Landscape change is an ongoing process even within established urban landscapes. Yet, analyses of fragmentation and deforestation have focused primarily on the conversion of non-urban to urban landscapes in rural landscapes and ignored urban landscapes. To determine the ecological effects of continued urbanization in urban landscapes, tree-covered patches were mapped in the Gwynns Falls watershed (17158.6 ha) in Maryland for 1994 and 1999 to document fragmentation, deforestation, and reforestation. The watershed was divided into lower (urban core), middle (older suburbs), and upper (recent suburbs) subsections. Over the entire watershed a net of 264.5 of 4855.5 ha of tree-covered patches were converted to urban land use-125 new tree-covered patches were added through fragmentation, 4 were added through reforestation, 43 were lost through deforestation, and 7 were combined with an adjacent patch. In addition, 180 patches were reduced in size. In the urban core, deforestation continued with conversion to commercial land use. Because of the lack of vegetation, commercial land uses are problematic for both species conservation and derived ecosystem benefits. In the lower subsection, shape complexity increased for tree-covered patches less than 10 ha. Changes in shape resulted from canopy expansion, planted materials, and reforestation of vacant sites. In the middle and upper subsections, the shape index value for tree-covered patches decreased, indicating simplification. Density analyses of the subsections showed no change with respect to patch densities but pointed out the importance of small patches (≤5 ha) as "stepping stone" to link large patches (e. g., ≥100 ha). Using an urban forest effect model, we estimated, for the entire watershed, total carbon loss and pollution removal, from 1994 to 1999, to be 14,235,889.2 kg and 13,011.4 kg, respectively due to urban land-use conversions.

Urban traffic state estimation: Fusing point and zone based data

Loop detectors are the oldest and widely used traffic data source. On urban arterials, they are mainly installed for signal control. Recently state of the art Bluetooth MAC Scanners (BMS) has significantly captured the interest of stakeholders for exploiting it for area wide traffic monitoring. Loop detectors provide flow- a fundamental traffic parameter; whereas BMS provides individual vehicle travel time between BMS stations. Hence, these two data sources complement each other, and if integrated should increase the accuracy and reliability of the traffic state estimation. This paper proposed a model that integrates loops and BMS data for seamless travel time and density estimation for urban signalised network. The proposed model is validated using both real and simulated data and the results indicate that the accuracy of the proposed model is over 90%.

Knowledge and the City : Concepts, Applications and Trends of Knowledge-Based Urban Development

This book underlines the growing importance of knowledge for the competitiveness of cities and their regions. Examining the role of knowledge - in its economic, socio-cultural, spatial and institutional forms - for urban and regional development, identifying the preconditions for innovative use of urban and regional knowledge assets and resources, and developing new methods to evaluate the performance and potential of knowledge-based urban and regional development, the book provides an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of both theoretical and practical aspects of knowledge-based development and its implications and prospects for cities and regions.

Sustainable Urban Water Environment : Climate, Pollution and Adaptation

"This multi-disciplinary book provides practical solutions for safeguarding the sustainability of the urban water environment. Firstly, the importance of the urban water environment is highlighted and the major problems urban water bodies face and strategies to safeguard the water environment are explored. Secondly, the diversity of pollutants entering the water environment through stormwater runoff are discussed and modelling approaches for factoring in climate change and future urban and transport scenarios are proposed. Thirdly, by linking the concepts of sustainable urban ecosystems and sustainable urban and transport development, capabilities of two urban sustainability assessment models are demonstrated."--publisher website

Using biomimicry to inform urban infrastructure design that addresses 21st century needs

The design of society’s major infrastructure systems are generally based on anthropogenic learnings and seldom encapsulate learning from nature. This results from a pervading attitude of superiority of human-designed systems, particularly since the Industrial Revolution. Problems created by such behaviours have previously not been thought to present a serious threat to humanity. However, many built environment professionals are now reconsidering the impact of such systems on the environment and their vulnerability to issues such as climate change. This paper presents an approach to delivering sustainable urban infrastructure that addresses 21st Century needs by emulating natural form, function and process - biomimicry – in infrastructure design. The analysis reveals the context for infrastructure change and the need for sustainable solutions, detailing the current inquiry into biomimicry informed design and highlighting potential applications from literature that demonstrate precedence for nature to inspire the design of urban infrastructure, in particular water and energy systems.