Exploring co-creation with agri-food smallholders in Vietnam

The food system in Vietnam is changing whilst the middle class is growing. Agrifood smallholders have the strengths of responding to the changing needs of the middle class by offering freshness, proximity and convenience but they also face increasing competition from larger and international firms. At the same time, issues with food safety are...

Cities of the Future: Societal by Nature

The Impact of Blue-Green Infrastructure and Urban Area Densification on the Performance of Real-Time Control of Sewer Networks

Urban areas are constantly developing and thereby affect the local water cycle. Real-time control (RTC) strategies are used to operate urban drainage systems optimally during these transitions. This paper aims to develop a methodology to study the impacts of common gradual changes occurring in the urban environment (densification of the urban...

Co-creative partnerships as catalysts for social change

Mundane cities are challenged to design for unpredictable and rapidly changing futures. In the current work, we refer to thesechallenges as a collaborative design challenge and explore how co-creative partnerships can enable a participatory turn by establishinga new social infrastructure. The corresponding citizen-centred design approach offers...

Ethnic Differences in Returning Home: Explanations From a Life Course Perspective

Ethnic differences in leaving and returning home may reflect varying cultural norms regarding intergenerational coresidence, but also differences in transitions in linked domains, for example, employment and partnership transitions. This study uses Dutch population register data to compare returning home among second-generation Turks, Moroccans,...

Residential electricity consumption in the Netherlands: A model-based policy analysis

Electric appliances are an indispensable part of a household and through their sheer number contribute substantially to its electricity consumption. This paper explores potential reductions in residential appliance electricity consumption in the Netherlands with smart meters, using two perspectives: a bottom up engineering approach and a...

Scripting Transitions: A framework to analyze structural changes in socio-technical systems

A sustainable energy system is paramount if we would like to see our future generations prosper. Changing the energy system towards sustainability implies a transition. The contribution of this research will be to develop an analytical tool that will give insight into possible transitions in energy systems. Dominant views on transition are...

Pathways, Transitions and Backcasting for low-carbon and sustainable lifestyles: Introduction and overview

On 7-8 October, the InContext project, in collaboration with the Low Carbon at Work and the CRISP projects and SCORAI Europe, convened a two-day workshop on Pathways, Transitions, Backacasting for sustainable and low-carbon lifestyles.Workshop proceedings have just become available as SCORAI workshop proceedings on the SCORAI website at http:/...

Erosion at transitions in landward slopes of dikes due to wave overtopping

Destructive wave overtopping tests have been performed at more than 20 dike sections in the Netherlands using the Wave Overtopping Simulator to simulate the overtopping waves. The tests show the combined behaviour of turf and substrate up to mean wave overtopping discharges of 75 ?/s per m, meaning wave volumes up to 5,500 ?/m with flow...

Understanding socio-technical change: A system-network-agent approach

Transitions are processes of change that have always occurred in society: for example, the production of goods changed from handcraft to machine-made. In recent years, these transitions attract more and more attention, mainly because societies now wish to actively bring about certain changes, such as the reduction of the use of fossil fuels –...

Ambitions of residential houses in Dutch cities: the interface of the building as a research object : discussing two highlights of Dutch residential houses and their changes through time

Dwelling in the urban context makes it very necessary to deal with the aspect of privacy next to the public domain. Dwelling is an activity that takes place in both, the private and the public, the interior and the exterior spaces. The interface of the dwelling is the place where the transition from interior to exterior (and vice versa) takes...

The qualities of the Machiya: An architectural research of a traditional house in Japan

The Machiya, a traditional wooden house in the city of Kyoto, were demolished by thousands up to the nineties because of the lack of modern comfort these houses offer. In the last twenty years the consciousness of cultural heritage has grown and the city realizes that these old houses must have had qualities new stacked dwellings never can offer...

Dynamics of railway transition zones in soft soils

Analyzing Transition Dynamics: The Actor-Option Framework for Modelling Socio-Technical Systems

Transition can be characterized as long-term structural changes in the societal systems, through which the way these systems function change significantly. Both the scope and extent of change, and the nature of the societal systems make transition processes a complex dynamic phenomena to understand. This study explores both methodological and...

Innovations in urban water management to reduce the vulnerability of cities: Feasibility, case studies and governance

Climate change, urbanisation and land subsidence increase the vulnerability of urban areas to flooding and droughts. Despite the availability of reliable and cost effective technologies, the actual implementation remains limited to small scale demonstration projects. Part 1 of this thesis describes how innovations in urban water management can...