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Harlem’s historic Sugar Hill neighborhood possesses several public parks and cemeteries used by African and Afro-Caribbean Diaspora communities for religious activities. In my research, I have identified and mapped sites of religious activities and conducted interviews with community members, revealing how practitioners of Santería, Vodou, and Yoruba traditions have adapted to their urban home via the use of public space. The religious traditions explored here require interaction with nature and the physical land. Therefore, I argue that public space serves as critical infrastructure for facilitating the practice of these religious traditions. I build on the views of Erika Svendsen, Lindsay Campbell, and Heather McMillen that practitioners who engage in this use of public space derive a psycho-social-spiritual benefit from those spaces, while simultaneously contributing to the diversity and democracy of these public spaces as Frederick Law Olmsted and others have theorized.

In this chapter we introduce the central problem of innovation in a slow-growth economy, which is a tendency to prioritize economic returns over other values, and to downplay or ignore ecological limitations. Drawing from established but alternative economic theories, we suggest that the unexamined fourth quadrant of the innovation matrix, responsible stagnation (RS), provides an opportunity to also consider how innovation outside the market is pointing to more viable ways of sustaining social progress, particularly in developed economies which have passed their productivity peak. The introduction defines these concepts and concludes by introducing RS as a particular configuration of change in which ethics matters and the priorities are restraint, living gently, and the uptake and embedding of new ideas and novel ways of doing things better, regardless of their contribution to GDP.

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Supplemental Material for Service Robots in Long-Term Care: A Consumer-Centric View by Eva Kipnis, Fraser McLeay, Anthony Grimes, Stevienna de Saille and Stephen Potter in Journal of Service Research

WEST is an MA class superconducting, actively cooled, full tungsten (W) tokamak, designed to operate in long pulses up to 1000 s. In support of ITER operation and DEMO conceptual activities, key missions of WEST are: (i) qualification of high heat flux plasma-facing components in integrating both technological and physics aspects in relevant heat and particle exhaust conditions, particularly for the tungsten monoblocks foreseen in ITER divertor; (ii) integrated steady-state operation at high confinement, with a focus on power exhaust issues. During the phase 1 of operation (2017–2020), a set of actively cooled ITER-grade plasma facing unit prototypes was integrated into the inertially cooled W coated startup lower divertor. Up to 8.8 MW of RF power has been coupled to the plasma and divertor heat flux of up to 6 MW m−2 were reached. Long pulse operation was started, using the upper actively cooled divertor, with a discharge of about 1 min achieved. This paper gives an overview of the results achieved in phase 1. Perspectives for phase 2, operating with the full capability of the device with the complete ITER-grade actively cooled lower divertor, are also described.

Body mobilization of high-yielding dairy cows is intense after calving and can generate health and fertility troubles. This study aimed to estimate the genetic correlation between body weight loss during the five first weeks of lactation (BWL) and daily milk production (MY24a) in first (L1) and second (L2) lactations Holstein cows. The dataset included 859,020 MY24a and 570,651 body weight (BW) daily phenotypes from 3,989 L1 cows, and 665,361 MY24a and 449,449 BW daily phenotypes from 3,060 L2 cows, recorded in 36 French commercial farms equipped with milking robots including an automatic weighing platform. The genetic parameters of BW and MY24a in L1 and L2 were estimated using a 4-trait random regression model. Genetic correlations between BWL and MY24a ranged from-0.26 to 0.05 in L1, and varied from-0.11 to 0.10 in L2, suggesting that selecting to reduce early body mobilization while maintaining milk production is possible.

Our final chapter reaffirms how 'responsible stagnation' (RS) can incorporate a different set of values and measures into an a-growth understanding of innovation. It argues for greater circulation of novel ideas to help mitigate the environmental and social damage inevitable if we continue to prioritize GDP-measured growth and suggests that many of these are already in the system. Rather than creating an impediment to the quest for progress, the chapter demonstrates how RS, as an integral component of responsible innovation and not its antithesis, provides a framing mechanism through which assumptions about growth can be made visible and questioned. This opens possibilities for innovation directed at achieving social, ecological and economic equilibrium and for reducing input rather than always seeking to produce more. It concludes by examining the part that both innovation and stagnation will have to play in the transition to a more sustainable, more socially equitable society.

Innovation is generally considered to be the antidote to economic stagnation. But while the coupling of ‘responsible' and 'innovation’ has been much discussed, that of 'responsible stagnation' has gone largely unexplored. In this book, we take this concept seriously as a means to question the political economy of science, technology and innovation, both as policy and as process, and the problems which arise from unquestioned emphasis on innovation as the means to increase GDP. The book argues that examining what 'responsible stagnation' might contribute opens new space in the growing global discussion about RI, incorporating innovation in non-market oriented processes, goods and services which have strong societal benefit but do not necessarily contribute to GDP. It examines the conundrum of diminishing productivity returns and increased environmental and social hazards associated with attempts to increase GDP, and how taking a growth-agnostic approach contributes to recalibrating innovation around responsibility as its focal point. Drawing on insights from ecological and steady state economics, Science and Technology Studies, and social innovation across the world, this interdisciplinary group of scholars questions how the growth paradigm shapes and limits the innovation space, and how decoupling innovation from growth points toward myriad possibilities for facilitating human well-being in more environmentally and socially responsible ways.

Several years after decommissioning, a magnesium dross and mixed waste heap at a former industrial facility is still reactive, as evidenced by the emission of heat, Volatile Organic Carbon (VOCs), acetylene (C2H2), cyanide (HCN) and ammonia (NH3) from deep, discordant, epigenetic fissures. To evaluate the longer-term stability of the waste heap material, four cores were collected to evaluate vertical variations in temperature, moisture, gas composition, geochemistry, and mineralogy. Temperature increased with depth and peaked at around 8 m, reaching in excess of 90 °C. The waste heap was a mixture of unreacted materials (mainly MgO and CaO) and a variety of hydrated secondary reaction products. Formation of the latter could account for the generation of heat and creation of the fissures via thermal and secondary mineral volumetric expansion. With a large inventory of unreacted CaO and MgO and substantial in situ water present, the waste heap will probably remain reactive in the foreseeable future. Importantly, the CaO/MgO ratio of solid materials in the waste heap provides a useful proxy for down hole temperature, pH, and fugitive gas concentrations. Fugitive gases emitted by the waste heap are related to the reaction of co-existing minerals in the heap based on an historical analysis of site waste disposal. These waste materials include calcium carbide (CaC2), magnesium nitride (Mg3N2) and calcium cyanamide (CaCN2). Capping to limit the ingress of additional meteoric water and targeted venting to facilitate cooling and the controlled release and dispersion of gases are recommended to manage the environmental risk.

Genome editing enables very accurate alterations to DNA. It promises profound and potentially disruptive changes in healthcare, agriculture, industry, and the environment. This paper presents a multidisciplinary analysis of the contemporary development of genome editing and the tension between continuity and change. It draws on the idea that actors involved in innovation are guided by “sociotechnical regimes” composed of practices, institutions, norms, and cultural beliefs. The analysis focuses on how genome editing is emerging in different domains and whether this marks continuity or disruption of the established biotechnology regime. In conclusion, it will be argued that genome editing is best understood as a technology platform that is being powerfully shaped by this existing regime but is starting to disrupt the governance of biotechnology. In the longer term is it set to converge with other powerful technology platforms, which together will fundamentally transform the capacity to engineer life.