Browsing by Subject "Sustainable Development"
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Item An Empirical Test of the Relationship between Sustainability and Urban Form Based on Indicator Comparisons using Sustainlane Sustainable City Rankings(2011-02-22) Kim, Bo AhSustainable development is one of the greatest challenges to urban planning in the 21st century. Current patterns of urban development, called byspecially sprawl, and human activity have led to environmental degradation and created a serious threat to continued human existence and sustainability of life on earth. The United States, concerns over consequences of urban sprawl have led to increased advocacy for more compact and traditional urban development. The compact city is now widely accepted as the most effective solution to sustainable urban form. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between sustainability and urban form. In order to achieve the aims of this study, 50 cities in the United States are analyzed and compared with the 2008 sustainable city rankings from the organization SustainLane, using four categories of urban form indicators: densities, mode of commute to work, mean travel time to work & traffic congestion cost, and planning & land use. This research is based on the hypothesis that a sustainable city has a compact city form. According to the SustainLane 2008 US sustainable city ranking high ranked cities were considered more sustainable cities and low ranked cities were regarded as less sustainable cities. Using SPSS?s correlation analysis tool, I studied the relationship between overall city ranking and four categories of urban form the indicators. The overall finding of the analysis of the relationship between each indicator and urban form yields mixed results. The result of this research found that that sustainable city and urban form has several correlations; densities, mode of commute to work, and planning and land use have a strong positive correlation with sustainable city; however, mean travel time to work and traffic congestion cost have a negative correlation with SustainLane?s sustainable city ranking. These results mean that sustainable cities which were high ranked cities in the SustainLane 2008 US sustainable city ranking have a high density, sustainable mode of commute to work, and strong planning and land use. Particularly, when a mixed land use, centeredness, and street connectivity were combined, the planning and land use category of indicators shows stronger correlation with sustainability. According to this result, these findings suggest that when the planning and land use indicators are combined synergistically compact urban form can be an indicator of a more sustainable city.Item Awareness of sustainable development: why did the Saemangeum Tideland Reclamation Project lead to the first national controversy over sustainable development in South Korea?(2009-06-02) Choi, In HuckIn this thesis, a list of aspects or characteristics of sustainable development awareness in a society was made from a literature review of the history of sustainable development, theories and practices on sustainable development, and sustainable development in anthropology. An historical review of tideland reclamation in Korea and key informant interviews about the Saemangeum Tideland Reclamation Project were conducted. It was an effort to show that the Saemangeum Project became the first national controversy over sustainable development in South Korea by applying the list of aspects or characteristics of sustainable development awareness. This study was carried out in an attempt to seek a way of studying sustainable development from an anthropological point of view. The results of this study indicated that the majority of aspects or characteristics of sustainable development awareness had emerged in the early and middle 1990s when the Saemangeum Project became a national controversy over the environment versus development. Broadening the research area of sustainable development by focusing on a human behavior, awareness, is the main contribution of this study to the anthropological study of development. The thesis concludes with the possibility of a comparative study between countries where mud-flats are a significant natural resource to deepen understanding sustainable development.Item Engineering for sustainable development for bio-diesel production(2009-05-15) Narayanan, DivyaEngineering for Sustainable Development (ESD) is an integrated systems approach, which aims at developing a balance between the requirements of the current stakeholders without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their needs. This is a multi-criteria decision-making process that involves the identification of the most optimal sustainable process, which satisfies economic, ecological and social criteria as well as safety and health requirements. Certain difficulties are encountered when ESD is applied, such as ill-defined criteria, scarcity of information, lack of process-specific data, metrics, and the need to satisfy multiple decision makers. To overcome these difficulties, ESD can be broken down into three major steps, starting with the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the process, followed by generation of non-dominating alternatives, and finally selecting the most sustainable process by employing an analytic hierarchical selection process. This methodology starts with the prioritization of the sustainability metrics (health and safety, economic, ecological and social components). The alternatives are then subjected to a pair-wise comparison with respect to each Sustainable Development (SD) indicator and prioritized depending on their performance. The SD indicator priority score and each individual alternative?s performance score together are used to determine the most sustainable alternative. The proposed methodology for ESD is applied for bio-diesel production in this thesis. The results obtained for bio-diesel production using the proposed methodology are similar to the alternatives that are considered to be economically and environmentally favorable by both researchers and commercial manufacturers; hence the proposed methodology can be considered to be accurate. The proposed methodology will also find wide range of application as it is flexible and can be used for the sustainable development of a number of systems similar to the bio-diesel production system; it is also user friendly and can be customized with ease. Due to these benefits, the proposed methodology can be considered to be a useful tool for decision making for sustainable development of chemical processes.