Peter Baccini’s research while affiliated with University of Maryland, College Park and other places

This article describes the participation process for regional development implemented in 1998 in an urbanized region of the Swiss lowlands. The objective was to involve local decision-makers and relevant people to design concrete plans for a sustainable reconstruction of the region in order to provide the region with new impulses for development. The article opens with the purpose of the proceedings, describes the characteristics featuring the process, summarizes the main results with regard to a desirable regional development, compares the project to other participation processes and concludes with a formulation of the necessary requirements involving politics, economy and culture.

After a period of tranquillity, building sites are booming again. What are the motivating factors behind it? The demands of an expanding population can hardly be the reason. However the future of towns is being built, confirming the theory that sustainable urban development requires the continual redevelopment of towns (Oswald 1997). Concern for the future builds the foundation for a method to address urban design issues. In this essay we strive to enlighten the situation, hoping this will allow us in the end to ask the key but unspoken question among urban design today: «How do you feel about the good city?»

The method of material flux analysis is applied as an instrument for the early recognition of environmental problems in an urban region of developing countries. It is shown that, even with poor data quality and quantity, it is possible to apply the method in Tunja, an urban region in Colombia. With sensitivity analysis monitoring points are developed to attain 'early recognition' concerning changes in water quality and quantity in this region. Using the scenario technique it is shown that, owing to the low dilution capacity for sewage in the region, surface water cannot reach the quality of water at a natural state even if technical measures used in industrialized countries are taken.

Forests, from a natural sciences perspective, are long-living ecosystems. After fifty years of intensive environmental research, their crucial role in global and regional carbon and water cycles and in the development of biodiversity is now understood much better; therefore, the political efforts to protect forests have increased. However, if seen in too narrow a way, the paradigm of “protection” endangers the opening towards an integrated approach to urban design in which new and alternative types of forests may play an important role in the evolution of new cultural landscapes. It is a sociopolitical decision that is still to come.

A dynamic model for wood and energy flows is used to analyze regional timber management. The model combines a sitequality‐dependent forest‐growth module with modules for the timber industry, timber products use, waste management, and energy supply. The model is calibrated with data of a Swiss lowland region for the period of 1900–1997. Scenarios are developed for the period until 2100 in order to discuss possible future roles of domestic timber. Model simulations show that, with present strategies, timber overproduction will further increase in the twenty‐first century because of an increase in forest site quality in the second half of the twentieth century, among other reasons. The increase in building gross floor area of the region by a factor of 5 during the twentieth century coincides with a reduction of timber use in building construction by a factor of 4.5, from 90 kg/m2 to 20 kg/m2. Increasing timber density in buildings could address overproduction; however, a strategy of timber construction could not be accomplished with domestic timber alone. A balance of production and consumption on the present level could also be achieved in a scenario in which the present building stock is gradually exchanged during the twenty‐first century with buildings that exclusively use a combination of solar panels on roofs and domestic firewood and used wood as heat‐energy sources. These replacement buildings would have density typical of late twentieth‐century buildings, and they would need to perform on a low‐energy standard of not more than 130 MJ/m2/yr.

In the 20th century a dramatic change occurred in urban development. From a physiological point of view the large scale exploitation of fossil energy and the technical inventions and innovations in the transport infrastructure allowed on one hand a rapid liberation from the limits of renewable biomass and on the other hand a rapid exchange of mass goods over large distances. From a morphological point of view the same factors led to a ‘dilution’ of urban settlement from dense centres into a network, of highly variable nodes and connections (the Netzstadt). The distinct separation of rural and urban segments within a cultural landscape disappeared. This new urbanity is a relatively young phenomenon. According to the criteria of a ‘Sustainable Development’, such a culture is not apt to survive on a long-term and global scale. It follows then that the urban systems of the 20th century have to be reconstructed. ‘Designing the Urban: Discovering a Transdisciplinary Method’ describes the research process of two groups, rooted in very different academic cultures: one in architecture and urban planning, the other in environmental sciences and engineering. At the beginning (in 1993) there was neither a clear concept of how to tackle the methodological problems in order to investigate this new phenomenon nor a reflected concept of transdisciplinary work. The case study presented in the following chapter gives first, a report on ‘identifying and answering questions’ connected with urbanity and second, some illustrations of the answers found ten years later as a result of the transdisciplinary approach.

Die Zeit der ersten Stadtkulturen in den großen Flusstälern des Orients fällt, archäologisch betrachtet, zusammen mit der Erfindung und der Anwendung neuer Techniken wie Getreidebau, Töpferscheibe, Segelboot, Kupferverarbeitung (Metallurgie), astronomische Kalender (Zeitmessung) und Schrift. Urbanes Leben erfand auch neue Institutionen für das menschliche Zusammenleben in Siedlungen hoher Populationsdichten. Die frühgeschichtliche Stadt begann als Sammlung von Arbeitskräften unter fester, einheitlicher und selbstbewusster Führung und war in erster Linie ein Instrument, mit dem man Menschen reglementieren, die Natur überwältigen und das Gemeinwesen zum Dienst für die Götter anhalten konnte (Mumford 1963).

With the rapid development of computer technology, numerous simulation models have been developed for agricultural systems and farms. Nevertheless, most of them are rather appropriate for developed countries as they have considerable data requirements and often aim at optimizing farm resources, excluding the farmer’s household from the system. Yet, the latter is crucial for the understanding of semi-subsistence systems such as those found in developing countries.We present a dynamic model of an agricultural system in the Central Highlands of Nicaragua. It aims at giving a deeper insight into the functioning of the system and the constraints the latter is subject to. Such an approach helps to explain why farmers make certain choices. Although for the study area few data are available, a robust model with a one-day resolution could be designed.For simulation two groups of scenarios were chosen:(a) Minimum farm sizes for the production of a certain food supply (e.g. basic staples) were assessed and the impact of increased fertilizer use was estimated. (b) Monoculture farms were simulated with the main crops of the region. The production of calories, protein and added value were chosen as indicators.We determined the labour requirements for both groups of scenarios.Simulation results show that the latter is a limiting factor. This is true even for farming systems aiming at covering minimum needs (food, elemental health care and schooling) only. We can show that farmers’ strategies (e.g. crop mix, fertilizer application) are crucial for the system. Last but not least, we produce some evidence for the advantage of the current crop mix in the study region.

In the following article, we introduce a method called economically extended material flow analysis (EE-MFA), which aims at studying causal relationships between economically motivated human behaviour and resource consumption. For this purpose, we expand MFA with economic information. This method is evaluated by applying it in a case study on resource efficiency in the food production chain. EE-MFA reduces the shortcomings of a technically oriented MFA by including a description of the inputs and outputs in money units without changing the system structure. This benefit is shown in the status quo analysis of “to nourish” where data from various sources could be compiled to set up a consistent model of material, energy and money flows. A further value addition of the method is that it creates a basis for a multi-criteria evaluation of strategies to improve resource efficiency on a regional scale. One result of this multi-criteria evaluation is a classification of strategies according to their influence on the materials, energy and money flows.