David Jacome Polit

• Universidad de Las Américas

The Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda require building resilience and effective risk management in order to achieve a better possible future. It is also true that no urban sustainability is possible without taking into account the risk dimension. In this sense, indices are increasingly important for emergency and sustainable de...

This article presents a review of the most relevant literature on resilience, from a practical point of view, and proposes a synthesis to provide a fresh perspective on the concept. The objective is to position the concept of resilience and its practices, or “resilience thinking,” as a multidisciplinary undertaking that can give rise to transversal...

The impact of private automobile in the city goes beyond carbon emissions. The land used within the city for service purposes (not only roads but also other types of services such as dealership, parking lots or buildings and auto repair and mechanic services) reshapes the urban morphology by taking away enormous area of underused land, hence eviden...

This paper sets out to review the recent legislation that was put into place for eco-efficient design in Quito, the capital city of Ecuador. It is argued that the resolution for Quito is better suited to ecological building design parameters than using international certifications imported from abroad, such as LEED or BREEAM. The background of the...

Over the last decades, a number of new environmental policies have been designed to improve waste management. Among them, extended producer responsibility (EPR) has introduced a mechanism to shift the environmental and financial burden of end‐of‐life products from public management to producers. Recently, EPR has been adopted by a growing number of...

The city is where important exchanges of resources occur, but where what is received from the environment differs greatly from what is returned to it. Energy, water, materials and food are received, yet other waste energy, wastewater, waste materials and organic waste are returned. In nature waste equals food, where circular metabolisms enable reso...

The impact of the car in the city goes beyond carbon emissions; the amount of land taken by roads or the fact that it is the least efficient way to move people. Additional services related to parking spaces or maintenance also requires land and become an important source of underused land within the city. Therefore, this paper will try to establish...

Ecuador is undergoing through important changes in its electrical generation system. According to the Ecuadorian Government, by 2017 the country will leap from 53% to 86% hydro-electrical power generation by incorporating new plants, becoming a country almost carbon neutral. This also changes how we look at other electricity generating systems that...

Every year around 3 million of new tires are sold in Ecuador, 60% imported from abroad and 40% produced internally. Despite government initiatives to have tires upcycled at the end of their life and a specific legislative framework on End-of-Life Tires (ELTs) issued in 2013 (AM 020/2013), a large part of this residue still ends up in landfills or i...

Can used tires be an integral part of a value chain in the construction industry, for risk mitigation in vulnerable urban populations?