Seeing the People’s Republic of China through the Eyes of Montesquieu: Why Sino-European Collaboration on Eco City Development Suffers from European Misinterpretations of “Good Governance”

China faces a number of impressive challenges in dealing with climate change: rising energy use, growing emission levels of greenhouse gases, dangerous levels of air pollution over cities and low resilience against flood and drought. Sustainable urbanization has been adopted as a keyword in handling these challenges. The Chinese central...

Financing Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City: What lessons can be drawn for other large-scale sustainable city-projects?

Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City (SSTEC) is currently the best-known and arguably the most successful large-scale sustainable new town development project in China; as such, experiences gathered there are of significant importance for the development of other eco-cities in China and elsewhere. This article focuses on a thus far relatively...

Economic City Branding in China: the Multi-Level Governance of Municipal Self-Promotion in the Greater Pearl River Delta

In the urban development policy in China, city brands play an important role in setting targets for Chinese cities. These economic city brands, however, are not produced in an institutional vacuum: they are embedded in the visions national, provincial and municipal governments have for these cities, i.e., on multi-level governance. In this paper...

Towards Credible City Branding Practices: How Do Iran’s Largest Cities Face Ecological Modernization?

City branding is not only increasingly practiced in cities in established economies, but also among municipal governments in countries, until quite recently, rather closed off from the outside world. One country with a strong drive to engage in urban (re)development in the post-oil era through enhancing its ‘ecological modernization’ is Iran....

Immobilization of Prunus amygdalus Hydroxynitrile Lyase on Celite

The hydroxynitrile lyase from Prunus amygdalus was immobilized on Celite R-633. The immobilized enzyme could successfully be utilized in buffer saturated MTBE and excellent conversions of benzaldehyde to R-mandelonitrile were observed. No leaching occurred. To achieve high enantioselectivities, the suppression of the undesired background...

Sensitive capacitive pressure sensors based on graphene membrane arrays

The high flexibility, impermeability and strength of graphene membranes are key properties that can enable the next generation of nanomechanical sensors. However, for capacitive pressure sensors, the sensitivity offered by a single suspended graphene membrane is too small to compete with commercial sensors. Here, we realize highly sensitive...

Mechanical overtone frequency combs

Mechanical frequency combs are poised to bring the applications and utility of optical frequency combs into the mechanical domain. So far, their main challenge has been strict requirements on drive frequencies and power, which complicate operation. We demonstrate a straightforward mechanism to create a frequency comb consisting of mechanical...

A multibody kinematic system approach for the design of shape-morphing mechanism-based metamaterials

Shape-morphing structures have the ability to adapt to various target shapes, offering significant advantages for many applications. However, predicting their behavior presents challenges. Here, we present a method to assess the shape-matching behavior of shape-morphing structures using a multibody systems approach wherein the structure is...