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MOOC
Humanity faces an immense challenge: providing abundant energy to everyone without wrecking the planet. If we want a high-energy future while protecting the natural world for our children, we must consider the environmental consequences of energy production and use. But money matters too: energy solutions that ignore economic costs are not realistic, particularly in a world where billions of people currently can’t afford access to basic energy services. How can we proceed? Energy Within Environmental Constraints won’t give you the answer. Instead, we will teach you how to ask the right questions and estimate the consequences of different choices. This course is rich in details of real devices and light on theory. You won’t find any electrodynamics here, but you will find enough about modern commercial solar panels to estimate if they would be profitable to install in a given location. We emphasizes costs: the cascade of capital and operating costs from energy extraction all the way through end uses. We also emphasize quantitative comparisons and tradeoffs: how much more expensive is electricity from solar panels than from coal plants, and how much pollution does it prevent? Is solar power as cost-effective an environmental investment as nuclear power or energy efficiency? And how do we include considerations other than cost? This course is intended for a diverse audience. Whether you are a student, an activist, a policymaker, a business owner, or a concerned citizen, this course will help you start to think carefully about our current energy system and how we can improve its environmental performance.
- Subjects:
- Environmental Engineering, Building Services Engineering, and Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Environmental protection Environmental management Renewable energy sources Power resources
- Resource Type:
- MOOC
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Courseware
The course addresses the following topics: • Overview • The subsoil (basics) • Safety and risk management • Basics of various kinds of tunnels • Basements • Special constructions • Small infrastructures, trenchless technology • Subsurface planning • Contracts and use of underground space • Legal aspects • Decision making process • Multiple use of land • Site visit major (relevant) project
- Subjects:
- Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Underground construction Underground areas Tunneling
- Resource Type:
- Courseware
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Courseware
Underestimating project complexity is widely accepted as one of the major causes of project failure. Based on international benchmarking activities (Merrow, 2010), we know that an average of 40% of projects do not deliver what they promised; for megaprojects in the oil and gas industry this figure is even worse (Ernst&Young, 2014). As with most external factors, many of the causes and consequences of complexity are difficult to avoid or control. When dealing with complexity, standard practices in the field of project management often overlook the inherent uncertainties linked to the length and scale of engineering and infrastructure projects and their constantly changing environments. The situation is exacerbated by rapidly evolving technologies and social change. Attempts to overcome these challenges by simply trying to reduce their causes is not enough. In this course, you will learn our approach to mastering complexity, focused on front-end development and teamwork, which will help you develop the skills you need to make timely actions in order to tackle complexities and improve your chances of project success. You will learn how to enhance your own capacities and capabilities by ensuring you have the necessary balance of complementary skills in your team. Project success starts with recognizing the main drivers of complexity, which can be highly subjective and highly dynamic. In this course, you will learn to identify what makes a project complex and how to perform a complexity assessment. Examining the elements of a project (such as interfaces, stakeholders, cultures, environment, technology, etc.) and their intricate interactions is key to mastering complexity. You will analyze these elements in the context of your own project. Then, based on our complexity framework, you will identify the complexity footprint of your project and use it to adapt your management processes. With personalized guidance and feedback from our world-class instructors, you will learn how to recognize what competencies you need to develop and how to adapt your management style accordingly, not only to improve project performance but also to enhance your decision-making capacity. This course has been designed by TU Delft’s international experts on Project Complexity, and is based on more than 60 years of practical experience as well as relevant research in the field. “We see projects still fail and there is a need to do things differently. That’s what this course is about: delivering the best practices for project execution based on our state-of-the-art research.” – Professor Hans Bakker.
- Subjects:
- Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Construction industry -- Management Complexity (Philosophy) Project management
- Resource Type:
- Courseware
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Courseware
Did you know that cities take up less than 3% of the earth’s land surface, but more than 50% of the world’s population live in them? And, cities generate more than 70% of the global emissions? Large cities and their hinterlands (jointly called metropolitan regions) greatly contribute to global urbanization and sustainability challenges, yet are also key to resolving these same challenges. If you are interested in the challenges of the 21st century metropolitan regions and how these can be solved from within the city and by its inhabitants, then this Sustainable Urban Development course is for you! There are no simple solutions to these grand challenges! Rather the challenges cities face today require a holistic, systemic and transdisciplinary approach that spans different fields of expertise and disciplines such as urban planning, urban design, urban engineering, systems analysis, policy making, social sciences and entrepreneurship. This MOOC is all about this integration of different fields of knowledge within the metropolitan context. The course is set up in a unique matrix format that lets you pursue your line of interest along a specific metropolitan challenge or a specific theme. Because we are all part of the challenges as well as the solutions, we encourage you to participate actively! You will have the opportunity to explore the living conditions in your own city and compare your living environment with that of the global community. You will discover possible solutions for your city’s challenges and what it takes to implement these solutions. Your participation will also contribute to wider research into metropolitan regions as complex systems. We invite you to take the first steps in understanding the principles that will be essential to transform metropolitan regions into just, prosperous and sustainable places to live in!
- Subjects:
- Environmental Engineering, Building Services Engineering, and Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Sustainable urban development City planning
- Resource Type:
- Courseware
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Courseware
Around the world, major challenges of our time such as population growth and climate change are being addressed in cities. Here, citizens play an important role amidst governments, companies, NGOs and researchers in creating social, technological and political innovations for achieving sustainability. Citizens can be co-creators of sustainable cities when they engage in city politics or in the design of the urban environment and its technologies and infrastructure. In addition, citizens influence and are influenced by the technologies and systems that they use every day. Sustainability is thus a result of the interplay between technology, policy and people’s daily lives. Understanding this interplay is essential for creating sustainable cities. In this MOOC, we zoom in on Amsterdam, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Nairobi, Kampala and Suzhou as living labs for exploring the dynamics of co-creation for sustainable cities worldwide. We will address topics such as participative democracy and legitimacy, ICTs and big data, infrastructure and technology, and SMART technologies in daily life. This global scope will be used to illustrate why specific forms of co-creation are preferred in specific urban contexts. Moreover, we will investigate and compare these cities on three themes that have a vast effect on city life: - Water and waste - Energy, air, food and mobility - Green spaces and food This MOOC will teach you about the dynamics of co-creation and the key principles of citizens interacting with service providing companies, technology and infrastructure developers, policy makers and researchers. You will gain an understanding of major types of co-creation and their interdependency with their socio-technical and political contexts. You will become equipped to indicate how you can use co-creation to develop innovative technologies, policy arrangements or social practices for a sustainable city in your own community. You will demonstrate this by developing an action plan, research proposal or project idea. Basic knowledge of sustainability in urban settings, urban environmental technology and urban management is assumed.
- Subjects:
- Environmental Engineering, Building Services Engineering, and Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Sustainable development Sustainable development -- Citizen participation City planning
- Resource Type:
- Courseware
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MOOC
Building construction is one of the most waste producing sectors. In the European Union, construction alone accounts for approximately 30% of the raw material input. In addition, the different life-cycle stages of buildings, from construction to end-of-life, cause a significant environmental impact related to energy consumption, waste generation and direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions. The Circular Economy model offers guidelines and principles for promoting more sustainable building construction and reducing the impact on our environment. If you are interested in taking your first steps in transitioning to a more sustainable manner of construction, then this course is for you! In this course you will become familiar with circularity as a systemic, multi-disciplinary approach, concerned with the different scale, from material to product, building, city, and region. Some aspects of circularity that will be included in this course are maximizing reuse and recycle levels by closing the material loops. You will also learn how the Circular Economy can help to realign business incentives in supply chains, and how consumers can be engaged and contribute to the transition through new business models enabling circular design, reuse, repair, remanufacturing and recycling of building components. In addition, you will learn how architecture and urban design can be adapted according to the principles of the Circular Economy and ensure that construction is more sustainable. You will also learn from case studies how companies already profitably incorporate this new theory into the design, construction and operation of the built environment.
- Subjects:
- Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Construction industry -- Environmental aspects Building materials -- Recycling Sustainable construction
- Resource Type:
- MOOC
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MOOC
Cities are becoming the predominant living and working environment of humanity, and for this reason, livability or quality of life in the city has become crucial. This urban planning course will focus on four areas that directly affect livability in a city: Urban energy, urban climate, urban ecology and urban mobility. The course begins by presenting measurable criteria for the assessment of livability, and how to positively influence the design of cities towards greater livability. We will focus on this basic topic of the human habitat in a holistic way, and introduce possibilities of participatory urban design by citizens, leading towards the development of a citizen design science. You will be able to share your experiences with the other participants in the course and also with the experts from the teaching team. In completing this course, you will better understand how to make a city more livable by going beyond the physical appearance and by focusing on different properties and impact factors of the urban system. Livability in Future Cities is the second course in a series of MOOCs under the title “Future Cities.” This series aims to bring the latest research on planning, managing and transforming cities to places where this knowledge has the highest benefit for its citizens. “Future Cities” provided an overview, and this course will focus on livability in existing and new cities.
- Subjects:
- Building Services Engineering and Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Smart cities Urban ecology (Sociology) Cities towns -- Effect of technological innovations on Quality of life City planning
- Resource Type:
- MOOC
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MOOC
Understanding a city as a whole, its people, components, functions, scales and dynamics, is crucial for the appropriate design and management of the urban system. While the development of cities in different parts of the world is moving in diverse directions, all estimations show that cities worldwide will change and grow strongly in the coming years. Especially in the tropics over the next 3 decades, it is expected that the number of new urban residents will increase by 3 times the population of Europe today. Yet already now, there is an extreme shortage of designers and urban planners able to understand the functioning of a city as a system, and to plan a sustainable and resilient city. To answer questions like: Which methods can contribute to the sustainable performance of a city, and how can we teach this to the next generations, the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore has produced over the last 3 years many necessary research results. “Future Cities” aims to bring these latest results to the places where they are needed most. The only way to better understand the city is by going beyond the physical appearance and by focusing on different representations, properties and impact factors of the urban system. For that reason, in this course we will explore the city as the most complex human-made “organism” with a metabolism that can be modeled in terms of stocks and flows. We will open a holistic view on existing and new cities, with a focus on Asia. Data-driven approaches for the development of the future city will be studied, based on crowdsourcing and sensing. At first, we will give an overview of the components and dynamics of the future cities, and we will show the importance of information and information architecture for the cities of the future. The course will cover the origins, state-of-the-art and applications of information architecture and simulation. “Future Cities” will provide the basis to understand, shape, plan, design, build, manage and continually adapt a city. You will learn to see the consequences of citizen science and the merging of Architecture and information space. You will be up-to-date on the latest research and development on how to better understand, create and manage the future cities for a more resilient urban world.
- Subjects:
- Building Services Engineering and Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Smart cities Cities towns -- Effect of technological innovations on City planning
- Resource Type:
- MOOC
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MOOC
Cities are first and foremost built for people, and in today’s world, people produce large amounts of valuable data, thus contributing to what we call “smart cities." As almost every building and every city is a prototype, these communities are in the early stage of development and require specific attention and expertise as we advance. Smart cities, such as Zurich and Boston, consist of human-made structures or environments that are, in some capacity, monitored, metered, networked and controlled. With this functionality, combined with stationary sensors and mobile devices, data and information have become the new building materials of future cities. Using this data, citizens are now beginning to influence the design of future cities and the re-design of existing ones. In this architecture course, you will learn the basics of information cities and urban science research, as well as how dynamic behavior and citizen-driven learning differentiate the responsive city from the smart city. The cities we present and develop in this course use the stocks and flows of information as the main drivers of change. To deepen your knowledge of smart cities and give a perspective on the future of these cities, we also introduce the concept of citizen design science, a combination of citizen science, urban design, and cognitive design computing. Participants will furthermore have unique access to a design research platform for citizen design science. The intelligent use of data and information is at the core of this course, and these concepts will be the next generation of participatory design and design computing environments.
- Subjects:
- Building Services Engineering and Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Smart cities Cities towns -- Effect of technological innovations on City planning
- Resource Type:
- MOOC
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MOOC
Responsive cities define the future of urbanization. They evolve from smart cities, with a fundamental difference: The citizens move from the center of attention to the center of action. Responsive citizens use smart technology to contribute to planning, design and management of their cities. Responsive cities are about bringing cities back to their citizens. Responsive cities change the way the technology of a smart city is used. The first Smart Cities were technology driven and they produced large amounts of data from fixed or centrally controlled sensors. But by now, the citizens and their mobile phones have taken the leading role in direct data generation. Rather than using data that are centrally collected and stored, you will see platforms on which the citizens place the data and the information they decide to share. With this, your own responsibility becomes a foundation of a Responsive City. Cities evolve from being smart to being responsive. To demonstrate the potential of Responsive Cities, this course will define the concept of Citizen Design Science, a combination of Citizen Design, Citizen Science and Design Science. Experts, citizens and scientists participate in Citizen Design Science. This approach is still in an early stage of development, but with the Responsive Cities Massive Open Online Course, you will be ahead in exploring and defining its possibilities. ‘Responsive cities’ is the fourth edition of the ‘Future Cities’ series on urban MOOCs. The ‘Future Cities’ series is the first and complete series of urban courses dealing with the design, management and transformation of cities for their sustainable and resilient future. With every edition, the series becomes more interactive. It increasingly empowers citizens around the world to become part of the development of their own cities, especially in those places where this knowledge is needed most. Therefore, the course is inclusive for every individual interested in the planning, construction, redevelopment and management of future cities. The course is open to anyone regardless of background, skills, knowledge, or age.
- Subjects:
- Building Services Engineering and Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Smart cities Sustainable development Cities towns -- Effect of technological innovations on City planning
- Resource Type:
- MOOC