Changing paradigm II

These days I have been thinking about my fundamental question, our relationship to nature. The predominant paradigm understands humans and society as a separated body acting from outside and damaging a hopeless nature. That paradigm has its origins in creationist believes, where humans were created as a distinct and special part of the universe. That vision, inherited from religious approaches, still has a subtle influence in the way science shapes its understanding, even though most of the scientific advancement of the XIX and XX centuries has been systematically demonstrating that humans do not have any special place in reality. We …

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Special Issue “Remote Sensing of Urban Form” – Open for submission!

We have recently launched an exciting Special Issue (SI) on “Remote Sensing of Urban Form”. Here you can find the full SI description & scope, the instructions for submissions and other relevant information. Deadline for submission is due April 2020. I am looking forward to receiving your contributions!

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Technomass and cooling demand: a super-linear relationship

In this recently published article we explore the impact of the increasing technomass (TM) on cooling demand in buildings in South America, analising the entangled double nature of the building–environment interrelation in an urban context. Using advanced spatially explicit quantitative methods to select representative samples of the urban environment we quantifed the volumes of TM in four South American cities. Principal component analysis was used to extract representative urban tissue categories and the Urban Weather Generator tool was used to produce the urban weather data used in building performance simulations. Our results confirm a superlinear dependence of the total cooling consumption …

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Six fundamental aspects of urban form

The first week of October 2016 I was kindly invited to attend an exciting workshop at the Arizona State University. The aim was to discuss land use land cover change, from a spatially explicit point of view, looking towards urban form. There were no presentations, only four intensive working days, excellent food and enlightening discussions. As a result of that meeting, we produce a conceptual paper, to propose a systematisation of six relevant aspects defining urban form. It was a hard one year work until getting the final text ready for submission. The article was recently published in Landscape and Urban …

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call for a PhD student in Germany – Food security and urban green

Our research group at the Insitute of Geography, Ruhr-University Bochum is open to receive new PhD applications starting in 2019. The research topics are (1) food security and urban green and (2) urban form and heath. If you are interested in obtaining further information please do not hesitate to contact me any time. There is also the chance to discuss other research topics if they fit within these research lines.

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Double Degree Master Programme “Transformation of urban Landscapes (TuL)”

The Institute of Geography at the Ruhr-University Bochum is receiving applications for the Double Degree Master Programme `Transformation of urban Landscapes (TuL)´. TuL focuses on the present and future challenges in developing sustainable metropolitan regions and facilitates the necessary professional competence to cope with those challenges in both growing and shrinking regions. The Master Programme consists of four semesters and will partly be taught in Shanghai at the Tongji University, College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) (semesters three and four). The course language is English. Deadline for applications is 15 July. If you have further queries, please feel free …

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Changing the paradigm?

I am a great fan of Thomas S. Khun. I genuinely believe that to advancing science, paradigmatic changes are fundamental. We certainly need to revolutionise our conceptual foundations to deepen our understanding of a complex reality in a challenging world. This is a key to face the current ecological crisis. I am a great fan of Leopold as well. I profess that living organisms have the right to live regardless their capacity or potential to benefit humans. They have the ethical right to exist. To my understanding, we humans do not have any tuition/safekeeping on living things or nature, to …

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