Matching Items (71)
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- All Subjects: Choruses
- All Subjects: Sustainability
- Creators: Recital Chorale
- Status: Published
Description
Defines the concept of the arcology as conceived by architect Paolo Soleri. Arcology combines "architecture" and "ecology" and explores a visionary notion of a self-contained urban community that has agricultural, commercial, and residential facilities under one roof. Two real-world examples of these projects are explored: Arcosanti, AZ and Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Key aspects of the arcology that could be applied to an existing urban fabric are identified, such as urban design fostering social interaction, reduction of automobile dependency, and a development pattern that combats sprawl. Through interviews with local representatives, a holistic approach to applying arcology concepts to the Phoenix Metro Area is devised.
ContributorsSpencer, Sarah Anne (Author) / Manuel-Navarrete, David (Thesis director) / Salon, Deborah (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Current policies subsidizing or accelerating deployment of photovoltaics (PV) are typically motivated by claims of environmental benefit, such as the reduction of CO2 emissions generated by the fossil-fuel fired power plants that PV is intended to displace. Existing practice is to assess these environmental benefits on a net life-cycle basis, where CO2 benefits occurring during use of the PV panels is found to exceed emissions generated during the PV manufacturing phase including materials extraction and manufacture of the PV panels prior to installation. However, this approach neglects to recognize that the environmental costs of CO2 release during manufacture are incurred early, while environmental benefits accrue later. Thus, where specific policy targets suggest meeting CO2 reduction targets established by a certain date, rapid PV deployment may have counter-intuitive, albeit temporary, undesired consequences. Thus, on a cumulative radiative forcing (CRF) basis, the environmental improvements attributable to PV might be realized much later than is currently understood. This phenomenon is particularly acute when PV manufacture occurs in areas using CO2 intensive energy sources (e.g., coal), but deployment occurs in areas with less CO2 intensive electricity sources (e.g., hydro). This thesis builds a dynamic Cumulative Radiative Forcing (CRF) model to examine the inter-temporal warming impacts of PV deployments in three locations: California, Wyoming and Arizona. The model includes the following factors that impact CRF: PV deployment rate, choice of PV technology, pace of PV technology improvements, and CO2 intensity in the electricity mix at manufacturing and deployment locations. Wyoming and California show the highest and lowest CRF benefits as they have the most and least CO2 intensive grids, respectively. CRF payback times are longer than CO2 payback times in all cases. Thin film, CdTe PV technologies have the lowest manufacturing CO2 emissions and therefore the shortest CRF payback times. This model can inform policies intended to fulfill time-sensitive CO2 mitigation goals while minimizing short term radiative forcing.
ContributorsTriplican Ravikumar, Dwarakanath (Author) / Seager, Thomas P (Thesis advisor) / Fraser, Matthew P (Thesis advisor) / Chester, Mikhail V (Committee member) / Sinha, Parikhit (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Residential Choice’s Impact on Sustainable Transportation Options: A Study in the Phoenix Metro Area
Description
This study adds to the literature about residential choice and sustainable transportation. Through the interviews and the personal stories gathered, there was diversity shown in the residential location choice process. We also noticed that “commute” means different things to different households, and that many people did not consider their commute to work to be a primary factor determining their final home location. Moreover, many people were willing to increase their commute time, or trade access to desirable amenities for a longer commute. Commuting time to work was one example of the tradeoffs that homeowners make when choosing a home, but there were also others such as architectural type and access to neighborhood amenities. Lastly, time constraints proved to be a very significant factor in the home buying process. Several of our households had such strict time constraints that limited their search to a point of excluding whole areas. Overall, our study sheds light on transportation’s role in residential choice and underscores the complexity of the location choice process.
ContributorsKats, Elyse Nicole (Author) / Salon, Deborah (Thesis director) / Kuminoff, Nicolai (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / School of Community Resources and Development (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters that investigate the rapid adoption and complex implementation of city commitments to transition to 100% renewable energy (100RE). The first paper uses a two-stage, mixed methods approach to examine 100RE commitments across the US, combining a multivariate regression of demographic, institutional, and policy factors in adoption and six interview-based state case studies to discuss implementation. Adoption of this non-binding commitment progressed rapidly for city councils around the US. Results show that many cities passed 100RE commitments with no implementation plan and minimal understanding of implementation challenges. This analysis highlights that many cities will need new institutions and administrative capacities for successful implementation of these ambitious new policies. While many cities abandoned the commitment soon after adoption, collaboration allowed cities in a few states to break through and pursue implementation, examined further in the next two studies. The second paper is a qualitative case study examining policymaking for the Utah Community Renewable Energy Act. Process tracing methods are used to identify causal factors in enacting this legislation at the state level and complementary resolutions at the local level. This Act was passed through the leadership and financial backing of major cities and committed the investor-owned utility to fulfill any city 100RE resolutions passed through 2019. Finally, the third paper is a mixed-methods, descriptive case study of the benefits of Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) in California, which many cities are using to fulfill their 100RE commitments. Cities have adopted CCAs to increase their local voice in the energy process, while fulfilling climate and energy goals. Overall, this research shows that change in the investor-owned utility electricity system is in fact possible from the city scale, though many cities will need institutional innovation to implement these policies and achieve the change they desire. While cities with greater resources are better positioned to make an impact, smaller cities can collaborate to similarly influence the energy system. Communities are interested in lowering energy costs for customers where possible, but the central motivations in these cases were the pursuit of sustainability and increasing local voice in energy decision-making.
ContributorsKunkel, Leah Christine (Author) / Breetz, Hanna L (Thesis advisor) / Parker, Nathan (Committee member) / Salon, Deborah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Traditional infrastructure design approaches were born with industrialization. During this time the relatively stable environments allowed infrastructure systems to reliably provide service with networks designed to precise parameters and organizations fixated on maximizing efficiency. Now, infrastructure systems face the challenge of operating in the Anthropocene, an era of complexity. The environments in which infrastructure systems operate are changing more rapidly than the technologies and governance systems of infrastructure. Infrastructure systems will need to be resilient to navigate stability and instability and avoid obsolescence. This dissertation addresses how infrastructure systems could be designed for the Anthropocene, assessing technologies able to operate with uncertainty, rethinking the principles of technology design, and restructuring infrastructure governance. Resilience, in engineering, has often been defined as resistance to known disturbances with a focus on infrastructure assets. Resilience, more broadly reviewed, includes resistance, adaptation, and transformation across physical and governance domains. This dissertation constructs a foundation for resilient infrastructure through an assessment of resilience paradigms in engineering, complexity and deep uncertainty (Chapter 2), ecology (Chapter 3), and organizational change and leadership (Chapter 4). The second chapter reconciles frameworks of complexity and deep uncertainty to help infrastructure managers navigate the instability infrastructure systems face, with a focus on climate change. The third chapter identifies competencies of resilience in infrastructure theory and practice and compares those competencies with ‘Life’s Principles’ in ecology, presenting opportunities for growth and innovation in infrastructure resilience and highlighting the need for satisficed (to satisfy and suffice) solutions. The fourth chapter navigates pressures of exploitation and exploration that infrastructure institutions face during periods of stability and instability, proposing leadership capabilities to enhance institutional resilience. Finally, the dissertation is concluded with a chapter synthesizing the previous chapters, providing guidance for alternative design approaches for advancing resilient infrastructure. Combined, the work challenges the basic mental models used by engineers when approaching infrastructure design and recommends new ways of doing and thinking for the accelerating and increasingly uncertain conditions of the future.
ContributorsHelmrich, Alysha Marie (Author) / Chester, Mikhail V (Thesis advisor) / Grimm, Nancy B (Committee member) / Garcia, Margaret (Committee member) / Meerow, Sara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, continue to disrupt critical infrastructure like energy grids that provide lifeline services for urban systems, thus making resilience imperative for stakeholders, infrastructure managers, and community leaders to strategize in the face of 21st-century challenges. In Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, for example, the energy system took over nine months to recover in parts of the island, thousands of lives were lost, and livelihoods were severely impacted. Urban systems consist of interconnected human networks and physical infrastructure, and the subsequent complexity that is increasingly difficult to make sense of toward resilience enhancing efforts. While the resilience paradigm has continued to progress among and between several disciplinary fields, such as social science and engineering, an ongoing challenge is integrating social and technical approaches for resilience research. Misaligned or siloed perspectives can lead to misinformative and inadequate strategies that undercut inherent capacities or ultimately result in maladaptive infrastructure, social hardship, and sunken investments. This dissertation contributes toward integrating the social and technical resilience domains and transitioning established disaster resilience assessments into complexity perspectives by asking the overarching question: How can a multiplicity of resilience assessments be integrated by geographic and network mapping approaches to better capture the complexity of urban systems, using Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico as a case study? The first chapter demonstrates how social metrics can be used in a socio-technical network modeling framework for a large-scale electrical system, presents a novel framing of social hardship due to disasters, and proposes a method for developing a social hardship metric using a treatment-effect approach. A second chapter presents a conceptual analysis of disaster resilience indicators from a complexity perspective and links socio-ecological systems resilience principles to tenets of complexity. A third chapter presents a novel methodology for integrating social complexity with performance-based metrics by leveraging distributed ethnographies and a thick mapping approach. Lastly, a concluding chapter synthesizes the previous chapters to discuss a broad framing for socio-technical resilience assessments, the role of space and place as anchors for multiple framings of a complex system, caveats given ongoing developments in Puerto Rico, and implications for collaborative resilience research.
ContributorsCarvalhaes, Thomaz (Author) / Chester, Mikhail V (Thesis advisor) / Reddy, Agami T (Thesis advisor) / Allenby, Braden R (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
ContributorsCherland, Carl (Performer) / Fuller, Charles L. (Performer) / O'Brien, Robert (Performer) / Hooper, Wm. John (Performer) / Graduate Chorale (Performer) / Recital Chorale (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created1987-10-01
ContributorsYom, Chin-Seup (Performer) / Wagner, Mary Purcell (Performer) / Nicholas, Cynthia (Performer) / Hloucal, Amy (Performer) / Bartschi, Kenneth (Performer) / Wicks, Stanley M. (Performer) / Willis, Dawn O. (Performer) / Graduate Chorale (Performer) / Recital Chorale (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created1987-11-12
ContributorsGreen, Stephen J. (Performer) / Biffle, George (Performer) / Meredith, Steven (Performer) / Fuller, Charles L. (Performer) / Shryock, Darin W. (Performer) / Kelly, Kathleen (Performer) / Graduate Chorale (Performer) / Recital Chorale (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created1988-11-17
ContributorsKlevberg, Janet (Performer) / Krabbe, Tom (Performer) / Peterson, Craig C. (Performer) / Staininger, Lynn (Performer) / Woodrow, Marie (Performer) / Graduate Chorale (Performer) / Recital Chorale (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created1990-10-11