The refugee crisis is one of the major challenges of modern society. The influxes of refugees are usually sudden and the refugees are in sheer need of services such as health care, education and safety. Planning public services under an imminent humanitarian crisis requires simultaneous strategic and operational decisions. Inspired by a real-world problem that Red Crescent is facing in Southeast Turkey, we study the problem of locating refugee camps and planning transportation of public service providers from their institutions to the located camps.
Background: Car-dependent city planning has resulted in high levels of environmental pollution, sedentary lifestyles and increased vulnerability to the effects of climate change. The Barcelona Superblock model is an innovative urban and transport planning strategy that aims to reclaim public space for people, reduce motorized transport, promote sustainable mobility and active lifestyles, provide urban greening and mitigate effects of climate change. We estimated the health impacts of implementing this urban model across Barcelona.
Over the past decades, detailed individual building energy models (BEM) on the one side and regional and country-level building stock models on the other side have become established modes of analysis for building designers and energy policy makers, respectively. More recently, these two toolsets have begun to merge into hybrid methods that are meant to analyze the energy performance of neighborhoods, i.e. several dozens to thousands of buildings. This paper reviews emerging simulation methods and implementation workflows for such bottom-up urban building energy models (UBEM).
The elevated air temperature of a city, urban heat island (UHI), increases the heat and pollution-related mortality, reduces the habitats' comfort and elevates the mean and peak energy demand of buildings. To countermeasure this unwanted phenomenon, a series of strategies and policies have been proposed and adapted to the cities. Various types of models are developed to evaluate the effectiveness of such strategies in addition to predict the UHI. This paper explains the compatibility of each type of model suitable for various objectives and scales of UHI studies.
