Browsing by Subject "Infrastructure"
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Item À qui le soleil : how Morocco’s developing solar capacities have altered urban infrastructural provisions(2015-12) Rowlinson, Thomas Edmond; Liedl, Petra, 1976-; Wilson, Patricia AnnThe creation of a sustainable, solar-based energy sector in Morocco involves changes to both its domestic energy infrastructure as well as the surrounding political and financial arrangements. This research shows that such changes affect Morocco’s most vulnerable urban citizens, specifically those without current grid service, or hacked grid service: those who live in bidonvilles, or shantytowns and slums. I trace such changes in Morocco’s solar energy to the perpetuation of neocolonial narratives of European energy and historical uses of infrastructure in urban manifestations of colonialism. With a focus on domestic large-scale solar energy generation systems like the publicly-operated MASEN, as well as international, public-private enterprises such as Desertec (a German-Moroccan partnership that is mega-regional in scope), this thesis assesses the level of access afforded to bidonville citizens in Morocco’s biggest city, Casablanca. I offer some ideas on how the flexibility and accessibility in the scale and operation of solar can provide generation capacities to urban citizens living in informal communities.Item An infrastructure for interactive environmentsDo, Dat QuocItem Design of an electromagnetic vibration energy harvester for structural health monitoring of bridges employing wireless sensor networks(2011-08) Dierks, Eric Carl; Wood, Kristin L.; Crawford, Richard H.Energy harvesting is playing an increasingly important role in supplying power to monitoring and automation systems such as structural health monitoring using wireless sensor networks. This importance is most notable when the structures to be monitored are in rural, hazardous, or limited access environments such as busy highway bridges where traffic would be greatly disrupted during maintenance, inspection, or battery replacement. This thesis provides an overview of energy harvesting technologies and details the design, prototyping, testing, and simulation of an energy harvester which converts the vibrations of steel highway bridges into stored electrical energy through the use of a translational electromagnetic generator, to power a wireless sensor network for bridge structural health monitoring. An analysis of bridge vibrations, the use of nonlinear and linear harvester compliance, resonant frequency tuning, and bandwidth widening to maximize the energy harvested is presented. The design approach follows broad and focused background research, functional analysis, broad and focused concept generation and selection, early prototyping, parametric modeling and simulation, rapid prototyping with selective laser sintering, and laboratory testing with replicated bridge vibration. The key outcomes of the work are: a breadth of conceptual designs, extensive literature review, a prototype which harvests an average of 80µW under bridge vibration, a prototype which provides quick assembly, mounting and tuning, and the conclusion that a linear harvester out performs a nonlinear harvester with stiffening magnetic compliance for aperiodic vibrations such as those from highway bridges.Item Developing an infrastructure informed walkshed and bikeshed(2013-12) Necessary, Mallory Suzanne; Boyles, Stephen David, 1982-In this thesis, an infrastructure informed index is developed for pedestrians and bicyclists to relate the natural and built environment with its impact on perceived travel distance and time. The objective is to develop an easy to use metric for use at all levels, allowing transportation planners to make better informed decisions when planning or redeveloping a city or area. Building off of similar research efforts, attributes are determined and weighted to capture the characteristics of a link, then summed to create the infrastructure informed index for pedestrians and bicyclists, respectively. These indices are then visualized using ArcGIS mapping tools, creating a service area around specific origin or destination points to see the effective area a pedestrian or bicyclist can travel taking into account the effects of the infrastructure along the route.Item Learning displacement: self-building, educational infrastructure, and the politics of development in Brazilian informal settlements(2015-08) Stiphany, Kristine Marie; Moore, Steven A., 1945-; Ward, Peter M.; Oden, Michael; Dooling, Sarah E.; Lara, Fernando L.; Wegmann, JacobIn the wake of mid-twentieth century mass urbanization and the inequitable access to education that ensued, people in consolidated informal settlements in São Paulo, Brazil united to self-build educational institutions and programs in their communities. Initially constructed to address severe gaps in educational access, the social and physical networks that advanced an educational agenda evolved to address a range of power and equity issues. While some charge that any form of self-building exploits the city’s most vulnerable, or that self-building operates at a scale too insignificant to impart significant outcomes, proponents assert that self-building in its contemporary form of autogestão (self-development) has galvanized communities through substantial spillover effects. Critically examining these positions, this dissertation analyzes how the social and technical dynamics of self-building have shaped education in three informal settlements and how self-directed efforts of communities to fill gaps in the educational infrastructure might inform current planning and development practice. In a context shaped by the political fluctuations characteristic of Brazil’s emerging democracy over the past twenty-five years, the cases reflect the unevenness wrought by São Paulo’s high levels of urban development and displacement, and contradictions between improved housing conditions and new challenges within informal settlements – from environmental degradation to organized crime. This study draws on data from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008-2014 among residents of informal settlements, community advocates, architects, planners, educators, and policy makers in São Paulo. These investigations reveal how the efficacy of self-building draws from its displacement by citizens from housing to an educational focus. The cases offer key insights into how the translation of self-building into new cultural domains of learning and action has begun to compensate for underdeveloped educational infrastructures provided by the state. These social and technical displacements challenge the centralized logic of planning and development with new forms of infrastructure that increase access to education, expand citizen participation, and contribute to broader urban networks. In the cases of successful displacement, actors have moved beyond the rote adoption of self-help’s in-situ development approach, and suggest how a situated lens might better account for the social contingency, experimentation, and transdisciplinary and inter-generational collaborations that characterize the ongoing planning efforts that communities employ to realize their aspirations.Item Optimization-based decision support for inspection and maintenance of infrastructure networks(2011-12) Li, Gang; Balakrishnan, Anant; Bard, Jonathan; Feng, Qi; Gilbert, Steve; Lasdon, LeonInfrastructure networks that provide basic services such as transportation, telecommunications, electricity distribution, and water supply and drainage are critical for the smooth functioning of a nation’s economy and its society. To provide efficient and uninterrupted services, these infrastructure networks need to be periodically inspected, upgraded, and maintained. However, infrastructure networks are expensive to operate and maintain; many infrastructure service providers allocate more than half of their total capital investments to network maintenance and improvement. With increasing customer expectations, intensifying global competition, and challenging financial environments, the infrastructure service providers need to develop models that can optimize all of the different factors that must be taken into consideration when making important decisions related to infrastructure network inspection and maintenance. This dissertation, which consists of three essays, focuses on some of the key decision issues associated with inspection and maintenance of these large infrastructure networks. Specifically, the first two essays, respectively, address a project management problem to maintain and expand a large-scale network and a periodic network inspection problem. The third essay, motivated by the computational challenges of the first two problems, addresses the network reduction and approximation problem within the same context. These problems are deterministic optimization problems over large-scale networks, which are very difficult to solve, and have not been extensively studied in the literature. In this dissertation, we introduce new optimization models for each problem, develop theoretical and algorithmic strategies that exploit problem structures to effectively solve the problems, and implement and test these methods on actual problems using data provided by an infrastructure service provider.Item Paving the way to a new future : the case of Lomas del Valle(2010-08) Almlie, Peter Christopher; Sletto, Bjørn; Roberts, Bryan R.The challenge of both the public and private sector to provide infrastructure to meet the demand of current and future housing has emerged as a central issue in discussions urbanization in the developing world. Informal settlements, rapidly developing on the outer peripheries of urban areas are straining cities abilities to provide the infrastructure resources necessary for their survival. This thesis is based on a case study of an informal settlement in Tijuana, Mexico named Las Lomas del Valle. This thesis explores the conditions of infrastructure within the colonia, focusing on the condition of the current road network and its interrelationship with the residents of Las Lomas. It explores the current needs of the residents and how their dependency on the road network and its conditions is essential to their well being.Item Reframing Harlem River : Manhattan-Bronx waterfront community design(2014) Yang, Sheng, M. of Architecture; Almy, Dean; Alter, KevinToday a renewed interest in the recreational value of the Harlem River, paired with new real estate pressures that are reshaping East Harlem and the Southern portion of the Bronx, the moment is ripe to rethink the current scalar incongruence between city, mobility corridors and the water edge. Both in the case of Manhattan and the Bronx the expansive geometries of the mobility infrastructure has inscribed, along both edges, a physical and operative footprint that is at odds with the scale of the water's edge and the city. This design is to propose an idea to renovate Harlem waterfront area into interactive and livable place in the densely populated city. The first point is to accommodate a number of people with enough housing units, and then hopefully this area could be a catalyst to increase vitality of nearby area. This is a mixed-use area that includes commercial, residences, offices, athletics and recreations, and a pedestrian bridge connecting to Manhattan.Item The reliability of sustainable water system and infrastructure in Kuwait(2013-12) Alrukaibi, Duaij; McKinney, Daene C.Economic, environmental, and social components form the structure of sustainable development and characterize the positive or negative trends in sustainability, which are a unique sustainable index. The Kuwait water system is considered a case study in this research to develop a methodology for identifying sustainable water systems, especially in terms of the high water demand per capita and high supply of desalinated water. This research provides certain answers to the following issues: 1) the sustainable water system path for Kuwait is unknown; 2) the low price of water for consumers is a reason for the wastefulness in water consumption in Kuwait; 3) there is no sustainable model for the water infrastructure in Kuwait to control and maintain its system; and 4) building a new desalination plant will put pressure on reducing the oil products' revenues that are export to global market. Sustainable water supply systems must be designed and operated so as to accomplish the following: minimize energy use, maximize efficient use of water as a resource, and limit (or even decrease) the associated environmental impacts of water usage. Increasing the production of water and the associated infrastructure are not necessarily sustainable solutions to the challenges of population growth. Consequently, this research provides the following solutions to work together in parallel: 1) Model Urban City (MUC); 2) Sustainable Water System and Infrastructure of Kuwait (SWSIK); 3) Sustainable Kuwait Index (SKI); and 4) reform the current water price policy in Kuwait. This research is dependent on three foundation--MUC, SWSIK, and SKI--to characterize sustainability in Kuwait and to analyze the environmental and economic impacts under three different water price scenarios during the period of 2013-2017. Numerical modeling, Infowater application, is used to connect the data with Arc GIS software to monitor the progress toward sustainability for 78 areas in the country. The Sustainable Water System and Infrastructure of Kuwait (SWSIK) tool is developed in this study and provides a comprehensive tool that analyzes water consumption due to water price policies to determine the energy needed from fossil fuels, the energy costs, and the environmental impacts. The Sustainable Kuwait Index (SKI) is a unique numeric value of 16 indicators. The sustainability indicators for the Kuwait water system are classified into two main categories: environmental and socio-economic, in which the resources, infrastructure, and capacity are components in the environmental category. SKI is determined for urban areas in Kuwait between 2008 and 2012, characterizing the state of sustainability. Population growth and new urban development push decision makers to find alternative solutions--such as reforming water price policies--to reduce wasteful water consumption in both normal and critical times. Two water price policy scenarios were proposed to be implemented, instead of the current water price policy (0.624 per m³). The first scenario involves a constant price charged for water consumption at $1 per m³. The second scenario involves a different structure to schedule water price: free allowance (150 L/C/day) followed by a constant price charged for water consumption over 150 L at $1.6 per m³. The time frame to test both proposal scenarios is between 2013 and 2017. In order to get water for free, the second proposal scenario encourages consumers to consume water wisely. This proposal scenario is acceptable for both consumers and policymakers, and it provides economic and environment benefits for both sides. The second scenario will postpone the need for new desalination plants until 2023. SKI scores are determined for the three water price scenarios during the proposal time (2013-2017) for 78 urban areas in Kuwait. By applying the first scenario ($1.0 per m³), the Kuwait government will save almost 5 million barrels per year from oil products (crude oil, gas oil, and HFO) and reduce natural gas usage by 31% per year. On the other hand, the second scenario can reduce the usage of oil products and natural gas in desalination plants by 26% per year. CO2, SO2, and NO2 emissions under the first and second scenarios were reduced in the range between 26% and 33% per year. Overall, a shortage will occur in 2014 if the Kuwait government does not change the water price structure. The current water price ($0.624 per m³) gives zero economic value to consumers. As a consequence, water bills were not collected effectively due to the low cost. The first scenario, which charges $1 per m³, might be unacceptable for consumers due to the stigma associated with increasing prices. The second scenario, however, satisfies the sustainability conditions, which are: 1) to save the environment; 2) to reduce costs; 3) to be acceptable to society; and 4) to achieve policymakers' goals. The results obtained in this research are intended to promote water system management and provide sustainable indicators to evaluate the development of a sustainable of water infrastructure in Kuwait.Item Rural Texas infrastructure : assessing needs and financing capital improvements(2012-05) Elder, Lucy A.; Oden, MichaelRural communities play a significant role in the State of Texas economy. The economic success of these communities depends heavily on maintaining adequate public infrastructure systems. This report examines the infrastructure needs of 11 rural Texas cities to identify gaps in funding resources available through state and federal grant and loan programs for infrastructure improvements. Primary findings conclude that inadequate funding support for rural infrastructure improvements through state and federal grant and loan programs exists primarily for water and wastewater infrastructure improvements and street and sidewalk improvements. In addition, the report outlines limitations specific to rural communities in obtaining various forms of capital financing that include a limited tax base, limited access to borrowing and lack of economies of scale as well as various demographic characteristics that contribute to these limitations.Item Unruly energies : provocations of renewable energy development in a northern German village(2014-08) Carlson, Jennifer D.; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-This dissertation asks how inhabitants of a sustainable village are living out Germany’s transition from nuclear to renewable energy. The sustainable village remains a locus of optimistic attachments for renewable energy advocates, who argue that a decentralized power grid will enable people to more directly participate in power production and politics as “energy citizens.” Yet while rural areas have become sites of speculation, innovation and growth, few rural-dwellers are enfranchised in (or profiting from) the technoscientific projects in their midst. I draw upon 13 months of fieldwork in a northern German village transformed by wind turbines, photovoltaics and biofuels to consider why, asking what kinds of public life flourish in the absence of democratic engagement with renewable technologies. This ethnography engages the village as multiply constituted across domains of everyday life, including transit, farming, waste management, domestic life, and social gatherings. I found that environmental policy, everyday practices, and the area’s material histories combined to produce ontologies—senses of what exists—that circumscribe citizen participation in the energy sector, affording more formal opportunities to men than to women, and privileging farmers’ interests in plans that impacted the larger community. These findings illuminate how many villagers become ambivalent toward the project of the energy transition and disenfranchised from its implementation. Yet many who were excluded from formal participation also engaged with renewable technologies as they sensed out their worlds, using tropes of sustainable energy and technoscientific materials to place themselves in this emerging energy polity. Their everyday worldmaking brimmed with what I call unruly energies, structures of feeling that registered more as affects than as discourse. In the village, these took form as sensory disturbances, disquiet among neighbors, technoscientific optimism and skepticism toward environmental policy. These affective modes of attention, investment and participation were vital aspects of public life that shaped the transition’s unfolding. They exceeded liberal models of renewable energy citizenship, which presume that socioeconomic interest and environmental commitment are universal among citizens. In this way, unruly energies compel more nuanced attention to the multiple, contingent, site-specific ways in which citizenship takes form in the making of eco-capitalist energy infrastructure.