Abstracts Archive

Dozens of cities around the world have already envisioned a circular built environment by establishing a variety of sectorial policies, strategies, and roadmaps, among other policy documents. As circularity is introduced in the making and operation of the built environment, caveats have been raised ...

With ever more people living in cities worldwide, it becomes increasingly important to understand and improve the impact of the urban habitat on health behaviours and health outcomes. However, implementing interventions that tackle the Exposome in complex urban systems can be costly, has long-term i...

We present a smart charging bidding framework that submits an optimal bid to the day-ahead electricity market by harnessing the flexibility of electric vehicles. Its optimization objective is to minimize the charging costs of the total EV fleet. The bidding framework consists of a forecasting module...

Delivery drivers on bikes and vans are a considerable amount of traffic in city centers. Reducing their amount while satisfying residents' needs is a challenge many modern cities face. The new trend of flash-deliveries, where customers order and get their goods within minutes started to contribute t...

The Strategic Energy Transition (SET) Plan from JPI Urban Europe proposes the creation of 100 Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) in Europe by 2025 with a stated goal of urban decarbonization. These are highly energy efficient residential urban areas that are powered entirely through renewables. PED cr...

In recent years, implementing a circular economy at the regional scale has been proposed by policy makers as a potential solution for achieving sustainability. In order to understand circularity of regions, a greater understanding is needed for the location of secondary resource flows. Currently, th...

The massive adhesion of new technology on the consumer side as electrical heating, solar PV and electrical vehicles are causing a structural change in electricity consumption patterns and taking the grid capacity to its limit, especially in densely populated urban areas. As a result, it is becoming ...

The city of Almere increasingly steps to the plate to steer food policy towards more sustainable goals. One way they do this is through Almere Oosterwold, a green neighborhood where inhabitants must use 50% of their plot for urban agriculture. The municipality formulated an ambition that over time, ...

Urban regions face multiple societal challenges. Public organizations aim to face these challenges and create societal value. This may be achieved through open innovation. Stimulating circular economy is, amongst others, one of the policy goals associated with societal value. Yet, organizational cap...

Cities have a distinct different weather and climate than the countryside, best known as the urban heat island effect which can have negative effects on the human health, labour productivity, and energy demand. In addition, cities are vulnerable to flooding after peak-showers, and are major sources ...

Food systems are linked with various health, social, economic, and environmental outcomes. As a result, food systems transformations are at the heart of solutions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and combat climate change. The problems in food systems range from ensuring food security fo...

The City of Amsterdam has the ambition to offer its citizens independent and equal participation as much as possible. However, people with disabilities encounter a high variety of barriers when moving around or participating in the city. We believe recent advancements in artificial intelligence can ...

Household investment decisions regarding energy-efficiency measures, such as insulation, heating system renewal, or solar panel installation, have an untapped potential for reducing global energy consumption and carbon emissions. The literature has shown a growing number of studies on energy-related...

The city is a complex socio-technical system, where stakeholders with very different needs and values live together. Usually, when developing urban interventions, policymakers consider as stakeholders citizens grouped by different characteristics such as income, cultural background, or age, dependin...

On one hand, the European Commission calls for 100 “Positive Energy Districts” (PEDs) to be in the phase between planning and termination by 2025. A PED is a neighbourhood that annually exports more energy than it imports [1]. On the other hand, many urban regions’ electricity distribution gri...

In light of climate adaptation, rooftops of intensive urban areas are undergoing a transformation, as what is happening in the Dutch capital city – Amsterdam. Extensive Green Roofs (EGRs), Photovoltaic Panels (PV), and the combined system (CS) are more and more considered to apply on the rooftops ...

The energy supply sector is the largest contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. Within that figure, households account for 29% of the consumption. On top of that, the average building wastes 30% of the energy because of inefficiencies. We consider that the main challenge is to increase our e...

Sustainable mobility could reduce environmental impacts, improve social mobility, and promote sustainable and liveable cities. Disruptive innovations, such as automated minibuses (AM), are poised to reshape urban mobility and achieve sustainable mobility goals. Therefore, it is important to study AM...

Free-floating carsharing schemes, where members can pick-up and return cars anywhere within a certain city zone, have increasingly become more popular. Although, no significant reduction in mileage might be expected from free-floating carsharing members, research has evidenced CO2 savings due to eff...

The amount and dynamics of urban water storage play an important role in mitigating urban flooding and heat. The storage capacity serves on one hand as a buffer to prevent flooding during heavy rainfall. On the other hand, in absence of rain, it provides the water needed for evaporation to cool the ...

Urbanization as a global phenomenon is a multifaceted process, affecting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in and around urban areas. Here we do the first global attempt to characterize the complexity of urbanization from 1975 to 2015 in terms of population, built-up structure, and greenness,...

Smart city projects are increasingly important for the energy transition in Europe, but there are concerns about its fairness and how to include the most vulnerable sections of society. Their inclusion is also vital to increasing social acceptance of new energy practices and infrastructures. There a...

Green infrastructure (GI) is increasingly addressed in urban planning and research to enhance urban sustainability and resilience through the provisioning of ecosystem services (ES). Yet, few applications exist of planning models for multifunctional GI in high spatial and thematic detail that simult...

The eHUBs project is one of the main projects within the Smart Mobility Programme of the municipality of Amsterdam. EHUBS are on-street locations that bring together e-bikes, e-cargo bikes, e-scooters and/or e-cars, offering users a wide range of options to experiment and use in various situations. ...

Nowadays, circular economy has gained increasing attention in built environment research. The Dutch social housing sector is facing challenges when transforming the existing building stock in a circular approach. It calls for a transformation of traditional supply chains to a circular one. However, ...

Metropolitan areas are undergoing an energy transition of their own. Technologies such as rooftop solar PV and batteries, electric vehicles, electric heat pumps, and electric boilers transforming the urban energy landscape. In many areas, district heating is supplying cheap and reliable heat to resi...

Food loss and waste (FLW) quantification provide the basis for city policymakers to develop intervention strategies to valorize the FLW in a city for circularity purposes. The current knowledge on the amount of FLW in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area (AMA) is still quite limited. Therefore, in this r...

Urban canals and canalized rivers are being used for many different human uses. We investigated current and future use in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and Toronto (Canada)*. Our results show that demand for most use functions will increase by 2040. This increase is most prominent for transportation, ...

Integrated monitoring of urban renewal is essential to realize a futureproof neighbourhood. In a sustainable and futureproof neighbourhood, circular use of materials is needed but also a generation proof apartment with safe and inclusive building surroundings in the public space. What is needed is t...

Increasingly, space for remanufacturing is seen as the most valuable resource to achieve circular economy (CE) policy goals, in particular for cities. However, in many cities, industrial urban areas are increasingly subject of – mostly circular designed - residential redevelopment. The proposition...