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Due to their independent structure, piping, and access, townhouses offer great flexibility in floor plan changes and high spatial autonomy, making them the mainstream housing type in Taiwan. This study focuses on row houses and examines 2022 completion cases in Kaohsiung City. It collects floor plans from 14 newly constructed buildings, totaling 227 units, and analyzes spatial dimensions including the facade width, depth, habitable room, staircases, bathrooms, and total floor area for each case. The objective of this study is to examine the spatial layout of row houses in Kaohsiung City, with the aim of providing a reference for the future planning and design of such structures. The study results showed that 81.8% of the row houses analyzed have a total floor area per unit ranging from 136 to 192 m2, a facade width between 4.1 and 6.38 m, and a building depth from 7.67 to 12.68 m. In addition, they showed a low negative correlation between the facade width and total floor area, a high positive correlation between the building depth and total floor area, and a moderate negative correlation between the facade width and building depth. The spatial distribution within these houses includes 78% allocated to habitable room, 13.1% to staircases, and 8.7% to bathrooms. The total area of habitable rooms and bathrooms increases with the total floor area of the building. However, the total area of staircases remains almost constant as the area of habitable rooms increases. Furthermore, the most common location for staircase planning is the rear-right (RB) position, while the least common is the rear-left (LB) position. Among various staircase types, the C-shaped staircase has the largest average area per floor and the highest average proportion. Conversely, the I-shaped staircase has the smallest average area and the lowest average proportion. The U-shaped staircase is the most frequently planned, whereas the C-shaped staircase is the least frequently used. This means that planning of staircase location and type significantly affects the size and layout of habitable rooms and bathrooms in townhouses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Black mothers, as much as water protects, nourishes, and sustains their children's lives, it also restrains, suffocates, and degrades them. The residents of Hartford, Connecticut's Charter Oak Terrace public housing project confronted a water-based ecological catastrophe in the 1960s. A flooding river—channeled by municipal neglect, state divestment, class inequality, and racial segregation—drowned several of their children. The neighborhood's Black mothers forged the Association of Concerned Parents of Charter Oak (ACP) and demanded that the city halt the nearby highway construction that propelled the river's overflow. This article excavates the unwritten history of the Black women–led ACP and chronicles an early rendering of a local environmental justice movement. Importantly, it contends that as their exclusion from citizenship and structural vulnerability forced them to witness the river gather their children, they also witnessed and foretold the onset of climate change and the rising water levels it incited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Planning Education & Research is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

"Dwell Time" by Rosa Lowinger is a memoir that combines the author's personal experiences and professional expertise in conservation. The book explores Lowinger's life and career, including her family's experiences fleeing the Holocaust and the Cuban Revolution. It also delves into her overlapping cultural identities as a Jewish-Cuban-American woman and includes reflections on her successful businesses in cultural heritage conservation. The memoir offers a unique perspective in the field and discusses the changing nature of art and cultural heritage conservation. Lowinger challenges the idea of conservators as neutral and invisible, emphasizing their role in decision-making. The book touches on topics such as professional licensing, climate change, and contemporary practices in outdoor sculpture and the preservation of human remains. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Constelaciones (2340-177X) is the property of Fundacion Universitaria San Pablo - CEU and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Risk assessment of infrastructure exposed to ice-rich permafrost hazards is essential for climate change adaptation in the Arctic. As this process requires up-to-date, comprehensive, high-resolution maps of human-built infrastructure, gaps in such geospatial information and knowledge of the applications required to produce it must be addressed. Therefore, this study highlights the ongoing development of a deep learning approach to efficiently map the Arctic built environment by detecting nine different types of structures (detached houses, row houses, multi-story blocks, non-residential buildings, roads, runways, gravel pads, pipelines, and storage tanks) from recently-acquired Maxar commercial satellite imagery (<1 m resolution). We conducted a multi-objective comparison, focusing on generalization performance and computational cost, of nine different semantic segmentation architectures. K-fold cross validation was used to estimate the average F1-score of each architecture and the Friedman Aligned Ranks test with the Bergmann-Hommel posthoc procedure was applied to test for significant differences in generalization performance. ResNet-50-UNet++ performs significantly better than five out of the other eight candidate architectures; no significant difference was found in the pairwise comparisons of ResNet-50-UNet++ to ResNet-50-MANet, ResNet-101-MANet, and ResNet-101-UNet++. We then conducted a high-performance computing scaling experiment to compare the number of service units and runtime required for model inferencing on a hypothetical pan-Arctic scale dataset. We found that the ResNet-50-UNet++ model could save up to ~ 54% on service unit expenditure, or ~ 18% on runtime, when considering operational deployment of our mapping approach. Our results suggest that ResNet-50-UNet++ could be the most suitable architecture (out of the nine that were examined) for deep learning-enabled Arctic infrastructure mapping efforts. Overall, our findings regarding the differences between the examined CNN architectures and our methodological framework for multi-objective architecture comparison can provide a foundation that may propel future pan-Arctic GeoAI mapping efforts of infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of FinanzRundschau is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study presents an approach to determine the extent of renovation interventions required for existing Dutch dwellings aiming to transition to lower-temperature district heating (DH) systems. The proposed method is applied to a typical intermediate terraced house built before 1945 in the Netherlands, and it consists of two steps: first, assessing the potential of a dwelling to be heated with a lower temperature supply from DH systems and subsequently developing and evaluating alternative renovation solutions if necessary. This study defines a set of criteria for evaluating the readiness of a dwelling for lower-temperature heating (LTH), considering energy efficiency and thermal comfort as non-compensatory criteria. The application of the approach reveals that the case study dwelling is presently unsuitable for a medium-temperature (70/50 °C) and low-temperature (55/35 °C) supply compared to a high-temperature supply (90/70 °C), thus requiring energy renovations. Furthermore, this study indicates that moderate intervention levels are required for the dwelling to be lower-temperature-ready in both supply temperature goals. These interventions include strategies and measures that upgrade the building envelope to the minimum insulation levels stipulated by the Dutch Building Decree, improve airtightness, and replace existing radiators with low-temperature radiators. By systematically narrowing down renovation options, this approach aids in simplifying the decision-making process for selecting renovations for heating dwellings with LTH through DH systems, which could reduce stakeholders' decision paralysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Housing Demonstration Exhibition was one of the last competitions organized by the Housing Corporation (CORVI) before its dissolution in 1976 and one of the first projects managed by its successor, the Housing and Urbanization Service (SERVIU). Marked by the need of the civil-military dictatorship to respond to the housing demand, it was used by officials to explore a model whereby construction companies would take on a set of processes involved in that industry. This was implemented in a small eight-block sector of the Santiago Amengual Neighborhood through a competition that tendered the construction of nine CORVI typologies and the development of one hundred and fifty-six types of semi-detached and terraced housing of different sizes, layouts, and construction techniques. Using information from documents compiled in two research projects associated with the issue and compared against ethnographic observations made in 2022 and 2023 at the same site, it was possible to identify the different project ideas explored for the Santiago Amengual Neighborhood complex, determine variations in their coherence, and identify the Demonstration Exhibition competition as an operation zone, open to the evaluation and speculation of the behavior and performance of the models, techniques, and materialities used in it. The information analyzed also allows proposing that this operation zone facilitated the installation of a new hierarchical relationship between architecture and construction practices, particularly those associated with technical knowledge and capital, and that, in this sense, its extreme heterogeneity showed the tactical willingness to promote the conventions of competition and production practices appropriate to this change and the installation of a social housing market without state participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With Malaysia’s population rising and rapid urbanisation, terraced houses were built to respond to new social and economic needs. The modern terraced house appeals to the demand for high-density development. However, with just two or three façades available for openings on the front and rear façades, these houses, particularly intermediate units, frequently lack natural ventilation, resulting in slow and inefficient air exchange throughout the house. As a result, adjustments on fenestration that functions as passive design solutions are necessary to increase internal thermal comfort and energy savings. This study aims to determine the various forms of fenestration placement in Malaysian terraced buildings and examine how these different types of fenestrations in terraced houses affect energy consumption and conservation. This study employs Revit modelling software to create a set of prototypes of intermediate terrace houses with different fenestration treatments. Building simulation is used to record findings of building energy performance based on the annual and monthly energy consumption of each prototype. This study found that the terraced home façade fenestration design significantly reduces energy consumption. It is anticipated that the finding of this study will benefit architects and designers better understand designing more ecologically conscious terraced houses by addressing internal thermal comfort through passive design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years 2022 and 2023, the Trypillia hilltop settlement of Trinca-La Șanț in northern Moldova was investigated and excavated by the CRC1266 in collaboration with the State University of Moldova. As a result, we unveiled the basic structures of the 25 ha fortified settlement, which, adapted to the topography, combines the principles of linear and concentric rows of houses. Based on the 14C data available to date, it can be assumed that the settlement dates from 3950 to 3650 BCE. Of the 320 houses discovered, up to 100 existed simultaneously, which corresponds to a maximum number of inhabitants of 250–1000 people. δ13C/δ15N isotope values of domestic animals indicate an extensive economy that corresponds to that of other, similarly large or mega-sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of the research is the descriptors (indices/parameters) of sound insulation of construction structures of residential buildings. The work presents a brief overview of modern generally accepted construction technologies in Eastern Europe. The most common sources of noise and the consequences of their impact on people’s health and life have been studied. An analysis of the levels of airborne sound insulation indicators of building structures in European countries and Ukraine was carried out. Partitions for standard types of housing (private houses, townhouses, multi-story residential buildings) are considered. As a result, a great diversity of sound insulation requirements in different European countries was shown. And this leads to an imbalance and worsens the quality of connections in the construction sector, due to possible confusion and can cause certain problems in trade and exchange of experience. It is also shown that the difference between the numerical indicators of the sound insulation levels of air noise is not entirely appropriate within the EU, since the subjective indicators of the sound insulation of the population have approximately the same data. Comfortable conditions for people from different countries should be the same. Examples of descriptors of air noise sound insulation indicators of 35 European countries are given. Numerical norms of sound insulation levels of EU countries are detailed. General characteristics and differences between states are highlighted. The paper also examines the diversity of housing types and the relationship between detached, semi-detached (terrace/terraced) and multi-apartment buildings in many countries. This allows for some approximations to calculate the number of neighbors in these countries with adjoining walls and floors in attached housing. Having data on European countries, a conclusion was made with similar characteristics used in Ukraine. On the basis of the obtained data, the strengths and weaknesses of the Ukrainian noise protection regulations were determined, which consist in a small variety of modern types of housing, taken into account in the building regulations, and in a relatively low general level of requirements for sound insulation of building structures. Finally, the quality of life aspect of building occupants and the importance of good design, construction and control are discussed. We hope that the work gained will be used to achieve the goal of creating European-level housing. The already mentioned topic will be of interest to noise and sound insulation specialists, acoustic engineers, ecologists, urban planners and city planners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]