Environmental Design Commons^™

Historic Downtown Streetscape Plan Price City, Utah, Patricia Beckert

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The idea of a small-town Main Street has profound meaning within the American culture that has prevailed for the past two centuries. Historically, Main Street serves as the beating heart of a community, a place where economic, social, cultural, and civic activities are centered (Francaviglia, 1996; Main Street America, n.d.). Since the beginning of the 19th century, many factors have led to the decline of Main Streets, and despite a variety of efforts from different stakeholders, that decline has only intensified in recent decades (Isenberg, 2008; Orvell, 2014 Howard, 2015). In 1980, after a three-year project conducted by the National …

Properties Of Cement Mortar Containing Recycled High-Density Polyethylene (Hdpe), Amany G. Micheal Prof., Esraa Torky, Merna Amir

Centre for Advanced Materials

Millions of tones of plastic waste are generated globally and only less than 10 per cent has been recycled. It is crucial to segregate and circulate plastic waste and repurposing it for countless other uses. There are many ways to repurpose and reuse these discarded plastics. One use that can be examined is the use of plastic as partial sand replacement in mortar. To contribute to this important and valid discourse, the research studies the mechanical and thermal properties of recycled HDPE mortar as an active way of integrating plastic waste into the construction industry to partially eliminate some of …

Plural Communities: A Cultural Mapping Project + A Framework Plan For Cherokee Village, Arkansas, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

What do urban designers do with culture? How might we redevelop a mid-century modern planned community through the mapping of cultural influences that shaped it? We explored memory and heritage central to cultural mapping and its participatory-based forms of public inquiry. 54 drawings integrate maps, folklore materials, archived media, photographs, and new drawings into five synchronic cultural frameworks that shaped Cherokee Village—Native American heritage, Ozark pioneer and folk heritage, camping and scouting, midcentury planned communities, and regional modernism in design and planning.

Cherokee Village was developed within a mid-twentieth century planning ethos that valued uniformity …

Reduction Of Embodied Carbon In Buildings Through Use Of Low Carbon Strategies And Standardization And Enforcement Of Life Cycle Assessment, Bhargavi Sai Sudhakar

Master's Projects and Capstones

The building and construction industry is energy intensive and as of 2021, this industry is responsible for 37% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions. In previous studies of conventional buildings, the operational energy of a building contributed to 80% and the embodied energy contributed to 20% of the total life cycle energy. With increase in policies and standards that focus on reducing the operational energy, low energy and certified green buildings have emerged where the operational energy has considerably reduced. The relative and absolute share of embodied energy in these energy efficient buildings have increased due to excessive use …

Energy Efficiency Retrofit And Decarbonization Of Old And Historic Buildings In California, Daria Nikolaeva

Master's Projects and Capstones

Buildings are responsible for almost 40% of total global greenhouse gas emissions and the retrofitting of existing buildings is an essential part of solving the problem. About 75% of buildings in Californian were constructed before the first energy-efficiency building code was adopted in 1978. Old buildings are inefficient, responsible for large carbon footprints and must be retrofitted to stay on track with the state's climate targets. However, current policies do not require substantial changes and tend to favor historic preservation over energy efficiency, missing improvement opportunities. Recognizing the significance of carbon intensity, the 2019 California Energy Efficiency Action Plan shifted …

Rainwater Catchment System Designed For California Polytechnic State University Building 34, Jonah S. Aere

Construction Management

California Polytechnic State University currently receives its water supply from either Whale Rock Reservoir, for distilled water, or pumped from six ground wells, for agricultural use. Although the university’s Agricultural College requires a certain amount of water to grow crops, these demands are often not met due to the lack of water within these underground wells. A rainwater capture system could be constructed to ease the water supply burden which is already depleting, reduce wasted drainage, and maintain a sustainable agricultural water source without being dependent on other locations. This would benefit the institution by reducing imported water thereby saving …

Use Of Precious Plastic Method Of Bricks For The Construction Of Tiny Homes, Haylie E. Tallon

Architectural Engineering

Precious Plastics, a Netherlands based company, created an open source project that can be used to create different objects from recycled plastics. The San Luis Obispo area has a large amount of recyclable plastic that is being treated as trash, adding to the pollution of the ocean and the air. This project is to determine the necessary steps to create plastic building blocks, using the Precious Plastic process, as a construction material for low-income, temporary housing. This report covers the process that was used to build two of the machines that will be used to create the bricks. This requires …

Travel Behavior Change And Economic Transition In Gentrified Neighborhoods, Maryam Izadi

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Post-industrial cities in the US have experienced social and economic transitions, mostly in declining downtown neighborhoods. This process, known as gentrification, typically involves revitalization that reverses the decline and disinvestment in inner-city neighborhoods. The industrial shift increased the demand for housing near downtown. The employment of college-educated and high-skill workers has been centralized, while low-skilled jobs continue to decline downtown. While the impacts of gentrification on housing and residential displacement is frequently investigated, little attention has been given to its impact on travel behavior change and economic transition, which is the focus of this research. Change in travel behavior is …

Wastewater-Informed Public Health Intervention Playbook

Sustain Magazine

As the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic quickly spread from country to country and continent to continent in 2020, governments and scientists needed a way to track COVID-19 through populations in order to position public health interventions in the most impactful locations. Having a decision-based risk framework may help to guide policy creation that could minimize or prevent possible outbreaks and surges of infection within communities. The University of Louisville in partnership with Louisville’s Department of Public Health and Wellness tested this strategy in 2021 and 2022. This Wastewater-Informed Public Health Intervention Playbook describes the decisions and actions of that academic and public …

Feasibility Report On Water Recycling And The Housing Crisis, Tally A. Perry

City and Regional Planning

The western United States is experiencing increasing population, a housing shortage, and a drought. These challenges demand creative and unprecedented changes to development. Water recycling is slowly emerging as a viable solution for developers, home owners, and cities as a way to continue much-needed housing development while mitigating unnecessary water depletion. With all change, policy, feasibility, and awareness can be the largest influencers. Drought-ridden western-American states require additional and revised regulatory requirements to promote recycled water in new development. Currently, water reuse is largely used for agricultural and industrial purposes. To motivate and encourage housing development, water recycling needs to …

A Circular Economy Approach To Improve E-Waste Recycling In California: Economic Potential And Policy Options, Kripa Shah

Master's Projects and Capstones

The higher consumption rates of electronic devices along with their short life cycles and few repair options poses a huge challenge for E-waste industries to manage them effectively. E-waste comprises of hazardous materials and toxic constituents that can affect the environment and public health through improper disposal. However, they also contain few valuable materials that, if recovered, can reduce the dependence on virgin raw materials. Circular economy has the potential to utilize these valuable materials and gain environment and socio-economic benefits. The research explains how the adoption of a circular economy approach can help improve the E-waste recycling in California …

Electrochromic Windows: Return On Investment Analysis, Thomas Michael Caprio

Construction Management

In recent years, sustainability in construction has become a topic of undeniable interest. With sustainability certifications becoming more prominent and desirable, members of the construction industry have begun to seek alternatives for standard systems to keep up with market trends. One of the main issues that the construction industry faces is accessibility of technology. While there are new products and technologies being released frequently, members of the construction industry lack knowledge on the specific details and implications of working with newer systems. One piece of technology that was recently introduced is electrochromic glass, or smart glass. Electrochromic windows analyze sunlight …

Using Remote Sensing Technologies In Relocating Lubrak Village And Visualizing Flood Damages, Ronan Wallace

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

As weather patterns change across the world, there are communities impacted by climate change that are left unnoticed. In the Himalayan mountain range, communities have suffered, experiencing an increase in flash flooding and droughts. For Lubrak Village in Lower Mustang, the community faces the threats of flash flooding. Over the last ten years, the amount of flash flooding has increased, occurring more than once each monsoon season. After every flood, concrete-like sediment is left behind, hardening across the riverbed and increasing its elevation. As the riverbed elevation increases, this sediment encroaches on Lu-brak Village’s agricultural fields and ancient mud buildings, …

Strategic Energy Master Planning For Carbon Neutrality, Marie Patterson

CSU Journal of Sustainability and Climate Change

Universities across the United States are generating goals to be more sustainable and carbon neutral. The energy used in existing buildings on campuses amount to a large volume of greenhouse emissions and must be reduced to help achieve neutrality goals. Strategic Energy Master Plans are instrumental to support these goals through the development of recommendations to reduce energy. Calculating the energy use intensity for existing buildings, a main component of a Strategic Energy Master Plan, can help the campus understand where energy is being used the most. With this information the highest energy consuming buildings can be the focus of …

Biking In Indianapolis: An Ethnographic Analysis Of Obstacles And Solutions, Emory Lietz

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Indiana is known as the ""Crossroads of America"" for its historic investment in vehicle infrastructure. This focus on automobiles has shaped Indianapolis's urban landscape, to the dismay of many cyclists. Based on semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders in the Indianapolis cycling community, including urban planners, bike commuters, IndyGo employees, city government officials, and bike advocates, this project identifies and evaluates the current barriers that prevent Indianapolis residents from riding their bikes. These obstacles, which include infrastructural, safety, and social factors, make it more difficult than it ought to be to bike in Indy.

For my thesis project, I …

Affordable And Sustainable Housing, Brandon Gibson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Due to the current state of the world, families around the world have started to invest in their homes. This change in lifestyle has caused the average cost to build a new home to increase to nearly $300,000, with an additional $35,872 due to the pandemic-related uptick in material costs. Custom homes take an ample amount of planning, construction time, along with excessive amounts of materials. I am looking to put my spin on a recent trend that allows an efficient construction timeline, along with the reduction of materials and waste.

Shipping Containers. Though their history of utilization has solely …

Cruser Place Green Streets Plan, Neal Friedman

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Capstone Projects

Combining green and complete street design techniques leads to multiple environmental, social and economic benefits that often enhance each other's effectiveness. In urban areas confronting increased pressures of sea level rise, green streets, which incorporate landscaped features or vegetative areas to manage stormwater within the right of way, can be crucial pieces of pedestrian oriented urban design and multimodal planning frameworks that consider and plan for diverse, complementary transportation options. This plan works with the Colonial Place and Riverview Civic League as well as the Norfolk Preservation Collective to come up with green street design recommendations in order to strengthen …

Building Performance - Societal Drive, Programme And Symposium, Joseph Little, Patrick Daly

Articles

Society is increasingly looking at the construction industry to mitigate the environmental crisis and solve the housing crisis through wholesale embrace of three broad sets of challenges. The MSc in Building Performance (Energy Efficiency in Design) (MSc BP(EED)) was created in 2017 to provide significant upskilling in the knowledge, skills, and software applications of building design professionals so that they can meet these challenges, while creating compliant, sustainable, super-low energy, new and renovated buildings. The delivery of the programme supports upskilling of employed building design professionals at Masters level, encouraging a minority to develop their capacity and interest in research …

Complete Streets, Jim Speer

2021 Spring Reports (Sullivan)

The City of Sullivan enacted a Quality of Life plan to address multiple improvements to their city, including some of the city’s infrastructure. Mayor Clint Lamb’s goal is to connect the city via roadways and trail systems that are accessible for all transportation methods and attractive for community members and tourists. ENVI460 students provided recommendations based off the city’s need for improvements to road systems and attractiveness. Students recommended a new roadway design for the Main Street section, sustainable infrastructure additions and buffer zones, and green space for attraction sites.

Reasons And Remedies To The Dying Plant Walls, Hayley Q. Mcgough

Construction Management

Sustainability in construction has been increasingly popular and detrimental with the state of the planet and climate change. One of the more popular solutions is the addition of plant façades to a building, which are plants that are put on the vertical of a building. The benefits that come with plant facades include and are not limited to: Reduction of the urban heat island effect, improved air quality, local job creation, improved energy efficiency, building structure protection, noise reduction, increased biodiversity, urban agriculture. These benefits are not reaching their full potential because these plant façades keep dying creating a bigger …

Assessment Of Carbon Dioxide Emission And Its Impact On High-Rise Mixed-Use Buildings In Egypt, Ahmed Salah Hamza

Theses and Dissertations

With Egypt's vision of 2030 focusing on sustainable development with a true emphasis on Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) emission reduction in the newly built cities and high-rise buildings, efforts are exerted on various levels towards accomplishing the vision’s goals. This is achieved through multiple tools and models associated with aiding the reduction of carbon emissions, yet not a clear one was introduced for the mixed-use buildings in Egypt.

Through this work, a significant gap was identified with respect to high-rise buildings carbon emission assessment in Egypt. This was a main driving force for this work in an attempt to …

Unveiling Women’S Needs And Expectations As Users Of Bike Sharing Services: The H2020 Diamond Project, Andrea Gorrini, Rawad Choubassi, Federico Messa, Wafaa Saleh, Augustus Ababio-Donkor, Maria Chiara Leva, Lorraine D'Arcy, Francesco Fabbri, David Laniado, Pablo Aragon

Articles

Within the objectives of the H2020 DIAMOND project, the paper investigates women’s needs and expectations as users of the bike-sharing service managed by Syndicat Mixte Autolib et Velib Métropole in the territory of Paris Region-Petite Couronne (France). The paper presents a thematic literature review focused on gender inclusion in bike-sharing schemes. The proposed methodological approach is based on (i) Geographic Information Systems for the analysis of geolocated open datasets related to land, sociodemographic and mobility characteristics of the areas surrounding each docking stations. This was aimed at identifying a short list of suitable bike-sharing docking stations, which were further characterized …

On The Computational Efficiency Of Les And Hybrid Rans-Les Models In Building Aerodynamics, Aly Mousaad Aly, Faiaz Khaled

Faculty Publications

Large-eddy simulation (LES) has proven to offer superior accuracy in regards to predicting surface pressures compared to the Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) models. However, the primary impediment is the high computational cost associated with LES. The authors attempt to investigate the computational cost and accuracy by employing different sub-grid scale (SGS) models in LES and hybrid RANS-LES models. One of the prerequisites of accurate pressure estimations is to ensure a horizontally homogeneous empty computational domain. This study aims to compare the computational competence qualitatively and quantitatively using an empty domain in regards to the ability to maintain horizontal homogeneity. The …

Cm Member Of Slocoe Peace Conference Center Feasibility Study, Jackson Reynolds

Construction Management

This paper describes the parking design and estimate portion of a whole feasibility study conducted by an interdisciplinary team. The interdisciplinary team consisted of three senior undergraduate industrial engineering students, and one senior undergraduate construction management student. This feasibility study was conducted for the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education (SLOCOE) to determine if it is feasible to construct a new, 400-person conference center on a site in San Luis Obispo, CA. The complete study includes analyses of the following topics: economic, utilities, traffic/road, approval from Chumash Tribe, social/historical, climate, geological, vegetation and wildlife, noise and pollution, parking, mandatory …

On The Computational Efficiency Of Les And Hybrid Rans-Les Models In Building Aerodynamics, Faiaz Khaled, Aly Mousaad Aly

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Spatial Analysis Of Supply-Demand Of Public Transportation In Jefferson County, Kentucky., Nastaran Abdoli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Public transportation is important as it serves individuals, especially the transit-dependent population, by providing a basic mobility service to these people and all others who rely on public transportation. This research utilized estimating public transportation demand and supply to analyze the spatial patterns of public transportation in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The study focuses on the transit-dependent population, and it considers indicators of age, poverty status, vehicle ownership, and foreign-born population with less than five years residency in the United States. This study conducted a public transit supply-demand analysis to identify areas with imbalanced supply and demand in Jefferson County at …

Going Green: A Comparative Analysis Of Green Urbanism In Paris And Shanghai, Jeanne Torp

Honors Theses

As climate change becomes more pressing with each day and as we scramble to slow down the challenges it poses, adapting the means of operation within our cities will become an invaluable tool for reducing humanity’s carbon footprint. This paper seeks to study the ways in which green infrastructure in global cities can be used to do just that—adapting to and mitigating the effects of challenges resulting from climate change. In order to provide a broad overview of the effectiveness of such green infrastructure systems across the globe, this research will focus on two cities that vary greatly in their …

How Green Buildings Effect Both Price And Desire In The Real Estate Housing Market, Bryson Lino

Construction Management

There has been a recent emphasis on green building certification. Unlike other conventional building approaches, green building has emerged as a sustainable way of building in the real estate housing market. As a result of the green building revolution, the real estate developers have been prompted to acknowledge the essence of environmental and social factors on the investment properties’ value. It is through such a paradigm shift that the green building has redefined the real estate business. Given that climate change has emerged as a major global issue, interventions have been made to avert the emission of high levels of …

Comparing The Environmental Impacts Of Using Mass Timber And Structural Steel, Khang Hoang Nguyen, Steelee Knight Morgan

Construction Management

Although mass timber has seen a gradual rise in demand in the past, there has been a lack of extensive research on the environmental impacts of using mass timber as a primary structural framing material. This paper compares structural steel, and mass timber’s total embodied carbon emissions. Accurate estimates were made using plans and specs for different projects retrieved from semi-structured interviews. The estimates were input through the EC3 Calculator to provide extensive total carbon emissions measurements between each construction material. Using structural steel framing increased the project’s overall environmental impact by roughly 84% compared to using mass timber. The …

Generation Of 3d Model Of Downtown Sullivan, Jim Speer

2020 Fall Reports (Sullivan)

The City of Sullivan identified the downtown area as an area for improvement and needed a way to depict areas. In ENVI 610, one graduate student was able to address the agreed upon goals of developing a 3D model of the downtown square. Some recommendations for future use of the 3D model were made for land-use planning, drainage systems, elevation, and more.