Architecture

Urban resilience is not only the flip-side of specific vulnerabilities.Urban resilience should be aligned within urban sustainability agenda and goals.Transformational resilience can foster people empowerment and quality of life.The main barriers to this are political, not technical.The impacts of climate change and decreasing local resources are increasingly threatening the resilience and sustainable management of urban areas and infrastructures worldwide. To cope with such threads and vulnerabilities, urban sustainability and resilience oriented plans have been developed. Accordingly, policy makers need to learn how to properly integrate urban sustainability with urban resilience principles and practices in the re-shaping of urban agendas. In order to highlight the future potential of integrating transformative resilience principles into the general sustainability approach, this paper provides a critical review of a recent and successful urban regeneration and development plan, the “Mexico City Green Plan”. This paper also discusses a feasibility study for urban redevelopment and transition towards resilience in Mexico City, in order to illustrate the necessity and potential of urban resilience for the improvement of the life prospects of disadvantaged inhabitant groups. The Valle del Chalco neighborhood in Mexico City is presented as an example, whereby resilient and sustainable urban transformation was achieved through an integrated and sustainable decentralized water management and infrastructure plan. In practice, the terms ‘Sustainability’ and ‘Resilience’ can be exploited to justify conventional, non-sustainable urban development practices. The results discussed in this paper demonstrate the necessity of the integration of transformative resilience principles within sustainable urban redevelopment and regeneration. The main findings are i) Policy makers underestimate the potential of urban resilience in shaping more sustainable urban futures, since they only understand resilience as the flipside of specific vulnerabilities, ii) The building of urban resilience within sustainable urban transitions and redevelopment can effectively foster people empowerment, particularly in combination with the decentralization of resources management systems, and iii) The main challenge for the implementation and execution of transitions processes towards urban resilience and sustainability is the elimination of political barriers.

Decentralized rainwater management measures can be taken to develop and restore sustainability in rural and urban areas. Examples carried out in densely populated urban areas with water-impermeable soils showed that to decentralize rainwater management is possible. At present this type of decentralized management primarily contributes to a failure-free function of mixed sewer systems and wastewater treatment plants. So far none of the examples observed in existing urban housing in densely populated areas has avoided the connection to urban sewers in favor of environmentally sound integrated systems for decentralized rainwater and domestic sewage water management. The author examined the degree to which the introduction of such systems can contribute to sustainable sewage management and ensure safe drinking water resources in cities worldwide. Different systems in housing estates in Hamburg, Germany, and Seoul, South Korea were examined. The necessary measures can be adopted with rel...

ABSTRACT Abstract and Full Paper available at: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/5/5071 HTML Version: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/5/5071/html PDF Version: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/5/5071/pdf Sustainability 2015, 7(5), 5071-5093; doi:10.3390/su7055071, Impact Factor 1.077

This study aims to analyze the green strategies of laboratory buildings in the U.S. developed by LABS21 and LEED of USGBC. To achieve this goal, the paper analyzed the design process of green laboratories and the sustainable planning strategies. Laboratories, as a building type, have specific requirments stipulated by NIH. Chemical restive measures and biosafety level measures needed to be met in laboratory buildings prior to meeting green measures. Obama Admistration's Executive Order 13514 in mind, the paper has mainly focused on the five areas of green planning strategies in the laboratory buildings; site, energy, water, indoor environment, and materials. The study informed that the current green certification program needs to expand into the particular building types in order to; first, provide more realistic energy-saving benchmarking data, and second, provide building-type-specific green strategies.

Since 2000 country region developmental policy has been to integrate not only the improvement of physical living environment but also various subjects on ecology, environment, scenery, local culture, and green tourism. This study has recently established a decentralized Rainwater Management plan in order to provide an hydrology cycle system to the eco-village being planned by Seocheon-gun as a part of the garden village development business promoted by the ministry of agriculture and forestry. Hydraulic conductivity of the subject area is measured at , and a flowerbed-type rainwater Infiltration system capable of controlling a non-point pollution source that stems from the development-caused impermeable surface has been applied. In the case of rainwater flowing out from the main entrance way and parking lot within the complex being treated in the flowerbed-type rainwater infiltration system, natural purification effects via soil and plants as well as natural water cycling effects th...