Author: akiyhh

A new article is published here.

Although numerous planning and design guidelines have been developed to guide landscape implementation in urban areas, there is scant information on how they are validated before their application. Validation, defined in this study as the process of assessing the applicability and readiness for adoption of guidelines, is seldom reported but is essential if landscapes are to meet the diverse needs of stakeholders. This study focused on the validation of design guidelines for neighborhood landscapes by using a transdisciplinary process to integrate the opinions of the researchers who develop the guidelines, the policy makers who adopt the guidelines as landscape policies, the design practitioners who use the guidelines in design, and the residents who use the neighborhood landscapes once they are implemented. Three design schemes were developed based on the guidelines, and six surveys were conducted to understand the opinions of the four stakeholder groups. The transdisciplinarity of the validation process was assessed using three criteria: credibility, legitimacy, and saliency. The study found that (1) these three criteria can be used to assess the outcomes of the validation process, although each criterion was met to different degrees; (2) the overall assessment of the design schemes produced by following the design guidelines was favorable, but residents and policy makers placed different emphases on the assessment areas; (3) the perceived importance of particular ecosystem services in design schemes, such as heat and flood hazard mitigation, was relatively high, but maintenance of soil quality was less visible and less emphasized; and (4) all groups perceived particular ecosystem services, such as recreation and mosquito control, as highly applicable to neighborhood landscapes, while the importance of noise reduction, soil improvement, and stormwater treatment functions was more variable across the groups. The study yields insights that could be used to validate other guidelines.

 

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• It took decades to achieve significant improvements In the water quality of the once biologically-dead Pasig River. It’s still far from being fully revived, and in the process, dumps wastes into Manila Bay.
• The Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission (PRRC) monitors 14 stations along the river, all of which failed their parameters as of end of 2018.
• The PRRC envisions a fully-rehabilitated Pasig River by 2032, or 13 years from now.

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Informal housing, be it in the barrio, tugurio, favela, bidonville, gecekondu or kampung, supports the majority of rapidly urbanizing populations in cities of the global South. Yet, many city planners and housing policymakers still regard such urban vernaculars primarily as evidence of backwardness, social malaise, economic involution and planning failure. When lumped together as “slums”, they are seen as a threat to the wider project of sustainable and resilient city development – a problem that must be overcome.

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The severe flooding in the American midwest is set to only be a prelude to “unprecedented” levels of flooding across the US in the coming months that will imperil 200 million people, federal government scientists have warned. Nearly two-thirds of the lower 48 states will have a heightened risk of flooding until May, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) forecast. See the full article here.

What started out as an isolated incident of illegally dumping chemicals into a Johor river has escalated into a wave of methane poisoning cases, with more than 2,700 people taken ill. Read more at channelnewsasia.

 

A hands-on sandbox exhibit combined with 3D visualization applications created by researchers at UC Davis. Simply mold the sand by hand and the landscape comes to life! The sand is augmented in real-time with an elevation color map, topographic contour lines, and simulated water. See details here

If there is an agriculture miracle in the ASEAN in the past two decades, it is Vietnam. It is not hard to compare Vietnam with the Philippines. They have similarities in terms of land area, population, agricultural area, and, I guess, farm sizes. But there are also divergences: fertilizer use, mechanization, terrain and irrigated land. First, fertilizer use is much higher in Vietnam. Second, farm operations are more mechanized. Third, irrigated land is almost four times bigger in Vietnam. Read more in this article. 

The Indonesian capital of Jakarta is home to 10 million people but it is also one of the fastest-sinking cities in the world. If this goes unchecked, parts of the megacity could be entirely submerged by 200, say researchers. Is it too late? See the article