Sustainable infrastructure: sustainable buildings
In: Delivering sustainable infrastructure series
In: Delivering sustainable infrastructure series
This report is based on 'Sustainable communities : building for the future' by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2003). ; 'Sustainable communities : building for the future' was drawn up by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in order to tackle serious housing shortages, a crisis of affordability for many ordinary households, and the decline of low income urban neighbourhoods across the country. This review gives a brief overview of the plan, its connection with sustainable development and sustainable communities and debates the major problems of the plan for the advancement of our economic and social and environmental well-being. ; Publisher PDF
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A summary of a one-day deliberative workshop that brought together fifty-six sustainability experts from the retail sector, government, academia and civil society organisations. ; Publisher PDF
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This document is the Sustainable Development Commissions response to inform the 'Code for sustainable homes'. ; The Government is developing the 'Code for sustainable homes' as a component of its sustainable communities agenda. Key environmental challenges, including climate change, water stress, materials use and waste, must be tackled if the proposed step change in housing supply is to be realised sustainably. ; Publisher PDF
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In: KU Leuven Discussion Paper Series DPS14.17
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Working paper
In: Management of sustainable development, Band 6, Heft 2, S. 15-24
ISSN: 2247-0220
Abstract
The issue of sustainable development (SD) is increasingly present among the concerns of the international academic community. However, the depth of our unsustainable practices suggests that insufficient progress has been made to move from an unsustainable lifestyle to sustainable development. By sharing ideas, concepts, tools, experiences learned in different contexts, it is anticipated that we will all learn many things that will help us to help our academic communities and companies to develop the skills to make progress towards sustainable development.
In response to increasing concerns of society about environmental degradation and increasing demands for a transition to a more sustainable society, the business companies are increasingly active in aligning their processes and services with a sustainability agenda. A good management of environmental services has now become the focus of many business strategies tending to the aspiration of 'greening' their infrastructures and product deliveries. The growing demand for "green" products has created major new markets in which visionary entrepreneurs reap the rewards of approaching sustainability. Hence, by adopting sustainable practices, companies can gain competitive advantage, increase market share and boost shareholder value. The sustainable university can be am model for the organizations that want to embark in the process of transition towards sustainability. This paper presents a model of the sustainable university and the steps that the management of such an organization should follow in order to transform their institution into a green one.
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In: International social science journal: ISSJ, Band 45, S. 35-54
ISSN: 0020-8701
The new paradigm of sustainable development (SD) is examined, focusing on its consequence for European cities & the prospects for knowledge-based development. It is argued that the old model of industrial growth gave undue emphasis to science & technology, & that the paradigm of SD offers a policy framework for democratizing & humanizing science. It is further contended that the potential of the SD model will not be realized unless cities reassert their role as civilizing forces, which can be best accomplished by integrating local & global knowledge at the city & regional level. A model of knowledge-based development is presented & applied to the city of Delft, Netherlands. It is concluded that cities must become more responsible for locally-based knowledge, whether organizational or institutional, & that cities need to establish a knowledge infrastructure roundtable to identify & formulate strategies for strengthening their knowledge cultures. 2 Tables, 11 References. W. Howard
Occasionally an academic term becomes a meme in broader media and popular discourse. Among such terms are "stagflation", "globalization", and the concept that this chapter and volume addresses: "sustainable development". Like many other such terms, this concept implies an important subject and broad outlines of research programs and policy initiatives. Yet while provoking consideration of important and often uneasy issues, such a term can also mystify or deflects attention from other related issues. Given the clear evidence of global warming trends and the costs of environmental degradation, the eventuality of peak oil and increasing demand for increasingly scarce fossil fuels (temporarily delayed through the recent recession and discovery of Marcellus Shale deposits of natural gas), and the increasing appeal of more radical ideologies to the losers of globalization (which is starting to include the American and European middle classes), then making sense of environmentally and socially sustainable development is one of the most important issues of our day and years to come. The alternative is the risk of authoritarian politics and military adventure to guarantee control over scarce resources and to control popular outrage over inequality and unmet expectations. Because space limitations make impossible a thorough overview of scholarship and popular discourse related to this totem, this essay has more modest goals: to provide a suggestive (and likely contentious) overview of the nature of this concept and its scholarship, and to provide some critical (and likely contentious) comments regarding how this concept has developed and how scholars (especially economists) have treated it. I focus on social science discourse and the social and political dimensions of sustainable development policies (or lack there of), First, scholarship in the natural sciences is sufficiently technical and often bordering or beyond the boundaries of my own competence. As well, the technical side to debates in the natural sciences about sustainable development is more objective, relative to discourse in the social science and the public sphere and to political decision-making1. Second, the politics of sustainable development policies has dynamics that I could disentangle only in a book-length manuscript, although I will briefly refer to the more general tendencies in the policies of various countries and global institutions. Further, social science discourse is linked to political interests and ideologies, even if indirectly; for example, scholars in the tradition of mainstream economics have vested personal, professional, and likely ideological interests in demonstrating that (relatively) free markets are an optimal way to organize economic activity, and that parsimony of mathematically oriented economic theory, with its reliance on utility maximization and instrumental rationality, remains uncluttered with such complicating variables as environmental costs (externalities), political pluralism and deliberation over "social justice,' and the like.
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In: One Report, S. 115-143
In: International social science journal: ISSJ, Band 45, Heft 1, S. 35
ISSN: 0020-8701
In: International social science journal: ISSJ, Band 45, Heft 1 (135)
ISSN: 0020-8701
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