Building for a Changing Culture and Climate


Book Description

The author of this book aims to encourage an awareness of sustainability as it is implemented across all areas of planning and design, and the ability to think and act on this knowledge. This book will explore in genuine depth the sustainable strategies that could be applied, along with the practical work of key figures in the built environment, setting these against historical experiences and traditional cultures. It also aimes to revive the discourse around these subjects. Achieving this will require the involvement of architects and structural, energy and environmental engineers, construction businesses and specialists, research institutes and universities. The five chapters and 333 show-cased projects reflect important stages in the architectural and engineering-based design process, stages which need to be addressed when dealing with sustainable strategies in the built environment.




Leveraging the Impact of Culture and Climate


Book Description

Together, culture and climate can make or break your school improvement efforts. Authors Todd Whitaker and Steve Gruenert help educators understand how to leverage culture and climate to drive deep and lasting change. Learn how to assess current culture, address climate issues, combat challenges, and work toward a collaborative school community dedicated to achieving high levels of learning for all. Rely on this book's effective school improvement strategies for creating a collaborative culture in schools: Understand the commonalities and differences between school climate and school culture. Identify the characteristics of specific types of classroom cultures for self-assessment and improvement in creating a positive classroom climate. Learn how to assess the values and beliefs of educators at the classroom and school levels. Discover your school's capacity for culture change using a step-by-step process. Consider how the elements of climate and culture influence school effectiveness and school improvement efforts. Contents: Introduction: How Culture and Climate Can Improve Schools Chapter 1: How to Define School Culture Chapter 2: Differences Between Culture and Climate Chapter 3: Elements of Climate Chapter 4: Classroom Cultures Chapter 5: The Culture Scorecard Chapter 6: The Capacity to Change Chapter 7: How to Assess School Culture Chapter 8: The Necessity of Culture Change Chapter 9: A Closer Look at Values Chapter 10: Not the Perfect Culture, the Right Culture Epilogue References and Resources Index




How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate


Book Description

Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This brief examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Synthesizing evidence from sociology, psychology, and political science, Andrew J. Hoffman lays bare the opposing cultural lenses through which science is interpreted. He then extracts lessons from major cultural shifts in the past to engender a better understanding of the problem and motivate the public to take action. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate makes a powerful case for a more scientifically literate public, a more socially engaged scientific community, and a more thoughtful mode of public discourse.




Culture and Climate Resilience


Book Description

This book addresses the importance of cultural values, local knowledge and identity in building community resilience in place based contexts. There is a growing impetus among policy makers and practitioners to support and empower capacities of communities under changing climatic conditions. Despite this there is little systematic understanding of why approaches work at local levels or not and what makes some communities resilient and others less so. Europe is typically thought to be well equipped for coping with the effects of a changing climate - because of its moderate climate, its manifold urban-industrialized regions, it’s typically highly skilled population, its successes in science and technology and its advanced climate change policies. However, there is a growing need to understand the effects culture has on communal resiliency and for decision makers and planners to pay attention to historical and cultural characteristics and the complexity of contextualized local conditions to enable successful and durable implementation of climate change policies, programs and measures. This book will be a valuable resource for researchers, students, practitioners and policy makers interested in facilitating sustainable, resilient communities.




Climate Change as Class War


Book Description

How to build a movement to confront climate change The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In this ground breaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.




Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change


Book Description

From the bestselling author of Ecohouse, this fully revised edition of Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change provides unique insights into how we can protect our buildings, cities, infra-structures and lifestyles against risks associated with extreme weather and related social, economic and energy events. Three new chapters present evidence of escalating rates of environmental change. The authors explore the growing urgency for mitigation and adaptation responses that deal with the resulting challenges. Theoretical information sits alongside practical design guidelines, so architects, designers and planners can not only see clearly what problems they face, but also find the solutions they need, in order to respond to power and water supply needs. Considers use of materials, structures, site issues and planning in order to provide design solutions. Examines recent climate events in the US and UK and looks at how architecture was successful or not in preventing building damage. Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change is an essential source, not just for architects, engineers and planners facing the challenges of designing our building for a changing climate, but also for everyone involved in their production and use.




Climate Adaptability of Buildings


Book Description

This book examines bioclimatic design with a focus on the application of climate adaptability in the design of future buildings and renovation of existing energy-efficient buildings. It addresses the challenge of how to construct and renovate buildings so that they maintain desired performance even as the climate changes in future decades. The book is divided into six chapters that guide the reader from basic concepts to discussions on specific aspects of bioclimatic design, including: Why do we construct buildings and why do they matter? Where should we get started with bioclimatic design? The opportunities and potential held by climate for the by bioclimatic architecture and design. How and why should we design bioclimatic buildings to accommodate future climatic conditions? Climatic changes and implications for the bioclimatic design of buildings. The author presents an overview of effective bioclimatic design strategies that enable climate-adaptable buildings. He also addresses the problems of designing with climate, which are relevant for all types of building design—in particular, the implications for bioclimatic buildings that are intrinsically connected to the climate they were adapted to. The book combines representative examples, diagrams, and illustrations, and concludes each chapter by reviewing the most important findings and concepts discussed. The book offers a valuable source of information for researchers and architectural engineers, who will gain essential insights into the process of using the available tools and data to design buildings that can respond to future climate challenges, as well as a general introduction into the field of bioclimatic building design. The book will also be of interest to graduate students and architects, as it approaches bioclimatic design with a particular focus on the analytical design process for such buildings.




The New Carbon Architecture


Book Description

Soak up carbon into beautiful, healthy buildings that heal the climate "Green buildings" that slash energy use and carbon emissions are all the rage, but they aren't enough. The hidden culprit is embodied carbon — the carbon emitted when materials are mined, manufactured, and transported — comprising some 10% of global emissions. With the built environment doubling by 2030, buildings are a carbon juggernaut threatening to overwhelm the climate. It doesn't have to be this way. Like never before in history, buildings can become part of the climate solution. With biomimicry and innovation, we can pull huge amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it up as walls, roofs, foundations, and insulation. We can literally make buildings out of the sky with a massive positive impact. The New Carbon Architecture is a paradigm-shifting tour of the innovations in architecture and construction that are making this happen. Office towers built from advanced wood products; affordable, low-carbon concrete alternatives; plastic cleaned from the oceans and turned into building blocks. We can even grow insulation from mycelium. A tour de force by the leaders in the field, The New Carbon Architecture will fire the imagination of architects, engineers, builders, policy makers, and everyone else captivated by the possibility of architecture to heal the climate and produce safer, healthier, and more beautiful buildings.




The Agile City


Book Description

In a very short time America has realized that global warming poses real challenges to the nation's future. The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it? Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming-and blunt its effects-by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly. Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can't match. Rapidly improving building techniques can readily cut carbon emissions by half, and some can get to zero. These cuts can be affordably achieved in the windshield-shattering heat of the desert and the bone-chilling cold of the north. Intelligently designing our towns could reduce marathon commutes and child chauffeuring to a few miles or eliminate it entirely. Agility, Russell argues, also means learning to adapt to the effects of climate change, which means redesigning the obsolete ways real estate is financed; housing subsidies are distributed; transportation is provided; and water is obtained, distributed and disposed of. These engines of growth have become increasingly more dysfunctional both economically and environmentally. The Agile City highlights tactics that create multiplier effects, which means that ecologically driven change can shore-up economic opportunity, can make more productive workplaces, and can help revive neglected communities. Being able to look at multiple effects and multiple benefits of political choices and private investments is essential to assuring wealth and well-being in the future. Green, Russell writes, grows the future.




Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Urban Cultural Heritage


Book Description

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue titled "Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Urban Cultural Heritage" hosted at the Atmosphere journal. This topic has been chosen in light of cities' ever-growing role and immense potential in the climate adaptation and mitigation discourse and the particular challenges regarding urban heritage making and conservation. It is critical to recognise the complex set of factors governing the physical, social and political future of urban heritage in cityscapes in constant transformation and in an era of planetary urbanisation. The 10 papers (seven research papers, two reviews and one opinion piece) that comprise the issue give a broad cross-section of the issues pertinent to this important topic - accounts on practices and conceptual/methodological improvements in energy retrofit and reuse, risk mapping, urban planning, climate vulnerability assessment, and community engagement by 38 authors from seven countries are used to delineate the implications of current and likely future climates on heritage materials and systems, knowledge and practice gaps, as well as steps that need to be taken to ensure both their safeguarding and their valorisation to achieve climate resiliency.