REGENERATIVE URBAN COMMUNITY DESIGN

INTRODUCTION Global sustainable development is inextricably tied to the development of cities,as accelerating growth in urban populations becomes a major driver of social,environmental and ecological change.Cities are major consumers of natural resources and producers of pollution and waste.Development solutions that can reduce urban environmental impacts,as well as increase urban quality of life,are urgently needed.How to ensure that rampant growth in urban communities follows a regenerative and sustainable path therefore becomes a critical and increasingly relevant question.

Community in the information age： Exploring the social potential of web-based technologies in landscape architecture and community design

Critics have pointed at new technologies as cutprits in the decline of civic life, neighboring and social capital construction in Western societies. When applied to community design and ptanning processes, technologies can empower residents to actively engage in decision-making, foster connections across social groups, with positive consequences on life and sociatization in public spaces. What kind of participation do technotogies foster？ And is it the kind that bridges social and ideotogical divides？ The 2012 community design process for Hawthorne Park in Medford, Oregon illustrates many of the challenges and opportunities connected to the use of new technologies in design. In the process, technologies were instrumental in enlisting a larger-than-usual number of residents to participate in the design of the park. Blogs and online questionnaires were successful in gathering people＇s thoughts on the design choices being made, but also favored a limited, intermittent form of engagement. The results are synthesized in principles for the successful integration of web-based technologies in future community design efforts： adaptability, fuji participation, nuanced participation and the need for links to the physical realm.

COMMUNITY BY DESIGN,BY THE PEOPLE:SOCIAL APPROACH TO DESIGNING AND PLANNING COHOUSING AND ECOVILLAGE COMMUNITIES

Synthesis Studio is an architectural,planning,and design consultancy practice,led by Barbora Baloghova and Gilo Holtzman,who work independently,developing each one’s interests and expertise while collaborating on various projects under the Synthesis Studio Brand.The studio’s mission is to excel in environmentally and socially sustainable building and planning practices,by research,design,and policy advocacy,and through collaboration with other professionals.In creating a community that works in harmony and reciprocity to its natural environment,we approach each site as an ecological system.Thus,the site layout and building design should perform in harmony with its surrounding environment and the needs of its future residents.For example,when planning and designing residential areas and buildings,we use research and implement the appropriate technologies in regard to waste management(grey water,composting,effluent)together with the form,location,orientation,shading,and social needs.Designing and planning places for people is a challenge.On the one hand,if prospective residents are not engaged in shaping their future residence,it means that places are created based on preconceived notions of how people ought to live,or how they should use a place or a space.On the other hand,working with many prospective residents means that an architect also needs to act as a facilitator,navigating through diverse thoughts and ideas and then translating them into physical form.The latter is achieved by prioritizing and understanding the importance of engaging with the community at various levels,from the group process of running meetings and decision-making to planning and design workshops.The overall aim is to demonstrate a range of planning and architectural solutions for progressive residential models both in rural and urban settings.The encouragement of a participatory process means that each participant/stakeholder becomes an important contributor to the planning and design process,and has some role in decision-making and is extremely important in achieving the best design for our immediate home and neighborhood environments.This process has been aptly named‘community by design and by the people’.

Towards applications of genome-scale metabolic model-based approaches in designing synthetic microbial communities

Background:Synthetic microbial communities,with different strains brought together by balancing their nutrition and promoting their interactions,demonstrate great advantages for exploring complex performance of communities and for further biotechnology applications.The potential of such microbial communities has not been explored,due to our limited knowledge of the extremely complex microbial interactions that are involved in designing and controlling effective and stable communities.Results:Genome-scale metabolic models(GEM)have been demonstrated as an effective tool for predicting and guiding the investigation and design of microbial communities,since they can explicitly and efficiently predict the phenotype of organisms from their genotypic data and can be used to explore the molecular mechanisms of microbehabitats and microbe-microbe interactions.In this work,we reviewed two main categories of GEM-based approaches and three uses related to design of synthetic microbial communities:predicting multi-species interactions,exploring environmental impacts on microbial phenotypes,and optimizing community-level performance.Conclusions:Although at the infancy stage,GEM-based approaches exhibit an increasing scope of applications in designing synthetic microbial communities.Compared to other methods,especially the use of laboratory cultures,GEM-based approaches can greatly decrease the trial-and-error cost of various procedures for designing synthetic communities and improving their functionality,such as identifying community members,determining media composition,evaluating microbial interaction potential or selecting the best community configuration.Future efforts should be made to overcome the limitations of the approaches,ranging from quality control of GEM reconstructions to community-level modeling algorithms,so that more applications of GEMs in studying phenotypes of microbial communities can be expected.

Promoting Functional Upgrading Through Spatial Renovation: An Exploration on the Design Methods of Old Community Renewal

As urban renewal shifts to more routine community renewal, the design methods of community renewal are faced with new challenges. Considering the existing dilemma faced by old communities and based on the practice of community renewal of different scales in recent years, this paper proposes that the design for community renewal should consider not only the spatial structure of communities at the macro level, but also the needs of daily life at the micro level. It can help efficiently transform the existing space into public space that encourages residents’ participation and promote community vitality, to achieve a humanistic value beyond the physical environment.