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Urban manufacturing and manufacturers play a vital role in delivering circular economy ambitions through processing materials, providing skills and technology for repair or reconditioning goods and the capacity to deliver innovative technology. The transdisciplinary approach of Cities of Making (CoM) puts forward three ways of addressing manufacturing, and by extension, circularity, within urban areas. Central to triangulate the facilitation of urban manufacturing are the perspectives of (1) material flows and technology, (2) spatial design (3) people and networks. The integration of the three pathways requires convergence while retaining the richness of the three perspectives. The challenge is to find a common language that provides a comparable, operative framework for exploring possible solutions. The CoM framework of integration followed three main principles: (1) reducing the complexity of information, (2) reducing the complexity of combinations of possible solutions, and (3), applying an accessible, applicable instrument for the solutions. The resulting pattern language is co-created in a transdisciplinary setting and is also an instrument for the transdisciplinary application. The low threshold accessible system of solutions allows actors from different disciplines to access patterns developed in the context of another discipline and laypeople who are affected or interested to co-create.

Advancing circularity in metropolitan areas involves planning, co-designing and implementing spatially explicit interventions with a multitude of stakeholders who are required to work with waste and resource management information. For the stakeholders, understanding information on these flows of resources and materials, and the spatial implications of these flows across the territory, is crucial when proposing new interventions and assessing the effects of these interventions. Spatial decision support systems constitute potential tools for supporting groups of stakeholders involved in the collaborative process of shaping the future of urban areas while achieving sustainability and increased circularity. This chapter focuses on the digital representation and portrayal, and the use of different types of information in a digital spatial decision support tool aimed at helping decision-makers through stages of the collaborative process that starts at problem identification and status quo understanding, and finishes at the proposed circular economy strategies for a metropolitan area. The way in which information is modeled and presented in the tool is largely based on the geodesign methodology, and is specific to individual stages of the planning process. The tool presents information relevant to a peri-urban area through different mediums: web maps and charts to describe the study area, Sankey diagrams linked with dynamic flow maps to portray its resource flow streams, and the integration of the above to portray and assess the scenarios developed jointly by the stakeholders. The tool was implemented in an interactive web application and applied to the collaborative process of developing spatial strategies for advancing circularity in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. A series of interconnected workshops were held with stakeholders, who used the tool to guide them through the stages of the co-development of the strategies. Stakeholders were presented with spatial information about the study area’s current resource and waste management situation in the form of web maps and the spatial distribution and dynamics of resource flows. This chapter describes how all this information was portrayed, presented, and used within the interactive web application at the collaborative workshops.

The study of the city as a living organism in constant transformation is especially linked to the investigation of its metabolic flows and their impacts on urban systems. The interplay of urban metabolic flows with the natural and anthropic landscape, including the built environment and its discarded parts, is connected in various ways. Urban Metabolism has been mainly studied by environmentalists and engineers so far, but it is recently acquiring growing significance also for urban planners, architects, and policymakers to determine and evaluate the impacts of human transformation on the human-natural ecosystem. Considering the urban landscape and the metabolism of its resources as an integrated system requires the recognition of which materials, methods, approaches, and general issues should be considered in planning and design for the transition toward a Circular Metabolic Urban Landscape. The process of transition to circular cities should necessarily involve actors from different research fields. Thus, this study aims at systematizing the recent and constantly evolving knowledge on this topic. This chapter presents a Systematic Review of the recent scientific literature by analyzing the production of the last 10 years on Urban Metabolism and Circular Economy in the context of spatial design and planning. The criteria set as a guide were made explicit through the coding of the selected papers by employing ATLAS.ti and grouping the subjects coded in five main clusters: theoretical issues, UM-specific topics, planning and design research, interdisciplinary studies and research and applications, and open issues. A semantic network links the cross-disciplinarity topics. The challenges and research topics to consider for a Circular Metabolic Urban Landscape are then considered as a set of links in the recent scientific literature selected.

Port and city authorities all over Europe and beyond are striving with finding solutions able to combine sustainability with economic growth. Several global urgencies in fact, such as climate change, energy transition, the exponential changes in the scale of ports and ships and last but not least the economic and health shock related to the coronavirus pandemic, are challenging the spaces where ports physically meet their cities, generating processes of caesura within the urban patterns with consequent impacts on the quality of life. In port cities, infrastructures and energy flows overlap with city flows and patterns that change with different rhythms and temporalities. This discrepancy creates abandonment and marginality between port and city. This today is no longer sustainable. New approaches and solutions that look at integration and circularity rather than separation are necessary.Circularity has been widely discussed in the literature. However, the concept still remains very controversial, especially when it comes to port cities where new definitions are needed in particular to better understand the spatial dimension of circularity. The Rotterdam therefore case study stands exemplary. Here, the concept of the circular economy refers mostly to the theme of obsolete industrial buildings and marginal that are reinserted again within the urban metabolism. The case of Rotterdam points out that the competition of the port today goes through the quality of its relationship spaces and the ability of the different actors involved in the planning process to hold together economic growth and environmental sustainability. The areas along the river are in fact the most fascinating places in the city and today they are ready for a different use. In order for the city to become an attractive place to live it is necessary to build new, innovative and sustainable spatial visions. This will lead to scenarios of sustainable coexistence between port and city. Therefore, these two agendas (sustainable port and city attractiveness) came together in the area known as Makers district (M4H) which, together with RDM campus, represents the Rotterdam testing ground for innovation.Therefore, this chapter, by arguing that ports will play a crucial role in the transition towards more circularity investigates how to make it happen and how to transform the challenges of the port into opportunities for a territorial regeneration towards new forms of integration. In order to answer the question, the case of Rotterdam is presented to analyse a model of urban regeneration where different planning agencies—mainly port authority, municipality, universities and private parties—work together at different scales to define a sustainable coexistence of interests. The research, which draws data on existing literature and policy documents analysis, firstly introduces the spatial and governance structures of the city of Rotterdam as part of a bigger metropolitan region. Secondly, it analyses the case of “Stadshavens strategy” as an emblematic example to overcome conflicts and path dependencies at the intersection of land and water. Finally, it concludes by highlighting some limitations and path dependencies that could make the transition to new forms of the circular economy very difficult in the future.

After the identification of SARS-CoV-2 virus in China, it has spread worldwide at a rapid pace. To control novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), there is no particular treatments/immunizations are available yet. However, to avoid the risk of immediate spreading between infected individuals, and healthcare workers, most organizations adopting virtual media devices in order asses the symptomatic behaviour of patient and these services are well known for telehealth services. On other hand, repositioning of drugs can offer a controlling strategy, and several drugs including remdesivir, lopinavir/ritonavir, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and favipiravir were repurposed. The availability of an authenticated vaccine against COVID19 will be hard to produce in the coming days, therefore it is important to propose a pharmacological strategy to combat this disease. In this chapter, the authors present the investigation of controlling and preventing methods by telemedical services during a novel coronavirus outbreak. Besides, it can also report the current drug available information and future developments that need to present new strategies for developing pharmacy facilities. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

This work presents the results of the measurements carried out by the Laboratory of Archaeological and Building Materials of NCSR “Demokritos” in the framework of the Interlaboratory Test (ILT) organized by SARCOS COST action CA15202. The overall aim of ILT was to assess the self-healing properties of concrete with the addition of a self-healing agent. Following the ILT tentative methodology, the concrete samples were initially subjected to controlled cracking after curing for 30 days. Their sealing efficiency−as part of the self-healing process−were assessed by water permeability tests carried out in disk specimens cured for 1, 3 and 6 months under water, as a healing regime. At the same time, crack width of all samples was measured each time, by examination at the stereomicroscope. Besides the measurements regarding the sealing efficiency, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) was also performed, in order to understand the contribution of the healing agent on the sealing mechanism. In this context, samples were collected from the crack face and the secondary healing products inside the cracks were studied by SEM combined with X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) in samples with and without the healing agent. The interpretation of the results suggests that the main methodological parameter affecting the sealing efficiency is the initial crack width. This indicates that during the quantitative evaluation of the sealing results, the initial level of damage attributed to the specimens should always be considered. In addition, SEM examination revealed the composition and the morphology of the healing products that were identified in the fractured surfaces and thus, the relative contribution of both healing agent and cement hydration.

Customers’ preferences related to the quality, the change, and the progress of their expectations have turned the quality in an indispensable competitive factor for hotel enterprises. The hotels have to evaluate the customer satisfaction and to assign to each factor a weight, expressing its importance for their customers. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the importance of hotel services. Our analysis involves more than 300 customers that answered to a survey and it takes into account five criteria: Food, Cleanliness, Staff, Price/benefit, and Comfort. To derive the ranking of preferences we used pairwise comparisons. The main issue linked to pairwise comparisons is the consistency of judgements. Transitivity thresholds recently proposed in literature give meaningful information about the reliability of the preferences. Our study shows how the use of ordinal threshold may provide a ranking of services different from that obtained by applying traditional consistency Saaty thresholds.

In the context of the non-iterative procedures for performing a correspondence analysis with linear constraints, a new approach is proposed to impose linear constraints in analyzing a contingency table with one ordered set of categories. At the heart of the approach is the partition of the Taguchi’s statistic which has been introduced in the literature as simple alternative to Pearson’s index for contingency tables with an ordered categorical variable. It considers the cumulative frequency of cells in the contingency tables across the ordered variable. Linear constraints are then included directly in suitable matrices reflecting the most important components, overcoming also the problem of imposing linear constraints based on subjective decisions.

Several extensions of correspondence analysis have been introduced in literature coping with the possible ordinal structure of the variables. They usually obtain a graphical representation of the interdependence between the rows and columns of a contingency table, by using several tools for the dimensionality reduction of the involved spaces. These tools are able to enrich the interpretation of the graphical planes, providing also additional information, with respect to the usual singular value decomposition. The main aim of this paper is to suggest an unified theoretical framework of several methods of correspondence analysis coping with ordinal variables.

Mechanisms governing cerebral aneurysm (CA) formation, progression, and rupture remain incompletely understood. However, understanding such mechanisms is critical to improving treatment for patients harboring CA. In vitro studies facilitate dissecting molecular mechanisms underlying vascular pathology and allow screening of therapies that can be subsequently explored in vivo. Cerebral vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) are an important constituent of the vessel wall, and phenotypic modulation of these cells to a pro-inflammatory, pro-matrix remodeling phenotype appears to be important in CA pathology. We have taken a reductionist approach using cultured cerebral VSMC to further explore CA biology. We describe techniques for culturing cerebral VSMC and outline experimental approaches incorporating these cells to study CA biology.

We show that the set of local maxima of the distance function to a set of points P in the plane, given certain density and packing restrictions, is also dense.

This paper presents two approaches to quantifying and visualizing variation in datasets of trees. The first approach localizes subtrees in which significant population differences are found through hypothesis testing and sparse classifiers on subtree features. The second approach visualizes the global metric structure of datasets through low-distortion embedding into hyperbolic planes in the style of multidimensional scaling. A case study is made on a dataset of airway trees in relation to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

We present a brute-force approach for finding k-nearest neighbors on the GPU for many queries in parallel. Our program takes advantage of recent advances in fundamental GPU computing primitives. We modify a matrix multiplication subroutine in MAGMA libraryi?ź[6] to calculate the squared Euclidean distances between queries and references. The nearest neighbors selection is accomplished by a truncated merge sort built on top of sorting and merging functions in the Modern GPU libraryi?ź[3]. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, our program is faster and it handles larger inputs. For instance, we can find 1000 nearest neighbors among 1 million 64-dimensional reference points at a rate of about 435 queries per second.