Dear Friend of SMART:
Welcome to Issue #8 of SMART’s e-NEWS briefs. In this issue we share upcoming events and we’ll also catch you up on some of the latest SMART news. To learn more about SMART’s mission and activities and how to get involved, please go to um-SMART.org.
We’d also like to hear from you. Please send your comments, questions, related research, favorite innovations, case studies, and collaboration ideas to me, Susan Zielinski, Managing Director of SMART at susanz@umich.edu. For past issues of SMART e-NEWS, go to:
Issue 1
Issue 2
Issue 3
Issue 4
Issue 5
Issue 6
Issue 7
SMART upcoming events
October 15. Dr. Johan Joubert, University of Pretoria
11:30–1:00 pm. 2nd Floor Lecture Hall, Room 2104
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 200 Bonisteel, Ann Arbor
Network Design and Evaluation in South Africa (including Multi-Modal): When Only the State-of-the-Art Will Do
Even after nearly 15 years of democracy, issues of land use and deregulated transport still hamper development in South Africa. In this presentation Johan Joubert will provide a brief introduction to the unique challenges facing transport planning in South Africa. In an effort to ensure that authorities make better decisions both from a commuter perspective and regarding investment in transport infrastructure, the Optimisation Group is developing an agent-based transport simulator. Joubert will present the initial results of a large-scale implementation in Gauteng, the economic hub of South Africa responsible for generating approximately 35% of the country’s GDP. Whereas the multi-agent transport simulator is useful to evaluate various transport initiatives, network redesign is also required. The second part of the presentation deals with the multi-modal network design results for the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality. The optimization procedure places bus stops during the first phase, after which the stops are sequenced onto routes and assigned to one of four modes.
Johan Joubert is an African whose ancestry dates back to 1688 when Pierre Jaubert landed in the Cape of Good Hope as a French Huguenot. Although Pierre was illiterate, Johan had the privilege of finishing his Masters and PhD in Industrial Engineering at the University of Pretoria, albeit more than 300 years later. Johan’s PhD focused on developing self-regulating and intelligent algorithms embedded in heuristics to solve Vehicle Routing and Scheduling variants. After a few years in the production environment and consulting, he currently heads up the Optimization Group within the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He is also appointed as contract researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. His objective is to ensure that models, although being wrong most of the time, are useful to decision makers, and reliable in supporting decision making.
October 23, 3–7 pm -TechKnow Forum 2008:
Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV) and the Smart Grid
TechKnow Forum 2008 is a unique opportunity to discuss the impact of the coming PLUG-IN HYBRIDS and the SMART GRID required to power them in Michigan. Topics include:
• Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles, Transforming Michigan
• Financing and Investment Required
• Inside a Consumer’s Mind: Purchase and Usage Decisions
• Strategic Advantages and Disadvantages for Michigan
• From the Legislative Corner: The Laws & Regulations that Will Help or Hinder
• Michigan’s Green Movement: Advancing the Necessary Changes
• The Future of Michigan Business: An Investor’s Perspective
Panelists include:
Richard Curtin, Director, Surveys of Consumers, Institute of Social Research, University of Michigan
Nancy Gioia, Director, Sustainable Mobility Technology and Hybrid Vehicle Programs, Ford Motor Company
Knut Simonsen, President of DTE Energy Ventures
Rolan Kibler, Senior VP of New Market Development, Next Energy
Doug Parks, Senior VP of New Market Development, Michigan Economic Development Corporation
Gary Was, Director, Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute, University of Michigan
… and more…
Attendees will leave with the latest information on the coming challenges and opportunities as well as a clear set of action steps required, making these new technologies one path to renewed prosperity and reduced green house gases for Michigan.
Learn more at: www.TechKnowForum.org.
Note: SMART Learning Community members receive preferred pricing and seating as well as the opportunity to attend the pre-event networking session.
October 29: Dr. Douglas Kelbaugh, former Dean of Taubman College
12:00–1:30 pm. Lecture Hall, Room 2104
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 200 Bonisteel, Ann Arbor
Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism in Northern Europe
Dr. Douglas Kelbaugh will join the SMART Distinguished speakers roster and present his thoughts and images on a half dozen new green neighborhoods and towns that he just visited in Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden. These projects are seamlessly walkable, bike-friendly, and transit-oriented. They are full of energy efficient buildings that are contemporary in architectural language and well integrated into their urban landscapes. He will also include some recent architectural projects of note in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stuttgart and Berlin.
October 30: What’s Your Vision for Sustainability in Detroit?
The American Institute of Architects has selected Detroit for its
Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) program.
The SDAT will design a roadmap for improving Detroit’s sustainability. In partnership with the community, architects, planners, economic development specialists, and others will assess current systems and suggest ways to improve Detroit’s sustainability—the community’s ability to meet the environmental, economic, and social equity needs of today without reducing the ability of future generations to do so.
The SDAT will hold a three-day charrette October 30th - November 1st. The charrette will begin with a Community Town Hall Meeting on Thursday, October 30th, 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Discussion will center on:
Detroit’s Next Economy | Energy Systems | Transportation | Land Use
Participants in the Detroit SDAT include: The Kresge Foundation, American Institute of Architects Detroit: Emerging Professionals Committee, Architectural Salvage Warehouse Detroit, Archive DS, Bridging Communities, Inc., City of Detroit Planning Commission, Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, Detroit Science Center, Eastern Market Corporation, Greater Corktown Development Corporation, Great Lakes Capital Fund, Greening of Detroit, Hamilton Anderson Associates, The Luella Hanna Memorial Foundation, Lawrence Tech University, Michigan Environmental Council, Model D – Metromode, Neumann Smith Architects, New Center Council, Rebuild Michigan, Shore Bank, Southeast Michigan Sustainable Business Forum, Southwest Detroit Business Assoc., Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision, University Cultural Center Association, University of Detroit Mercy DCDC, University of Michigan SMART program, Warm Training Center, Zachary & Associates.
The process will be led by Alan Mallach, Research Director of the National Housing Institute and expert on community development and the reutilization of vacant land in urban areas. For more information: www.zacharyandassociates.com or www.aia.org/liv_sdat or call Zachary & Associates at 313.831.6100
Case study briefs
New Additions to INSPIREMOBILITY, SMART’s OnLine Innovations Library and Blog
Back in September, SMART launched the Inspire Mobility Blog - a case-based library of innovations related to sustainable transportation. The roster has been growing ever since. Innovation categories now include: Bikes, Goods Movement/Freight, Green Energy, Hub Networks, IT Solutions, Marine/ Air, Mobility Resources, Parking, Personal Vehicles, Taxis, Trains, Transit, Vehicle Sharing / Pooling, and Walking. Find the blog at http://www.inspiremobility.blogspot.com. If you’d like to contribute innovations you know about to the blog, please E-mail the URL to inspiremobility@gmail.com and your submission will be posted within 48 hours.
And in case you missed the launch in the last e-News, INSPIREMOBILITY is a place where you can FIND AND SEND links to the latest sustainable transportation innovations from around the world.
Here’s how it works: You’re sitting at your computer and you receive one of those emails from a friend or colleague, linking you to an inspiring sustainable transportation innovation. It seems a shame not to share it. So it’s great that it’s so easy. Just forward the link to inspiremobility@gmail.com.
When it gets to us, we’ll give it a title, and post it in the INSPIREMOBILITY library / blog for anyone to see, and you will have done your good deed for the day. Meanwhile, months from now when you forget where you filed that interesting and useful link, just visit INSPIREMOBILITY (accessible from the SMART home page at um-SMART.org) and find it waiting for you, along with myriad other new and inspiring innovation links.
For now we’re just posting innovations as they come and making them searchable by general category. One day we may get ambitious and try to make them even more searchable and accessible. And because the success of INSPIREMOBILITY depends on your contributions, one day, we might even single out and reward particularly good and frequent contributors (with your permission of course). So please do visit INSPIREMOBILITY, and please do forward us your innovation links and stories (to INSPIREMOBILITY@gmail.com). Note: the innovations you send must already be deployed somewhere in the world, not just an interesting idea!
SMART news
SMART Member Moira Zellner Publishes Collaborative Paper on Transportation and Decision Making
A New Framework for Urban Sustainability Assessments: Linking Complexity, Information, and Policy.
Zellner, M. L., T. L. Theis, A. T. Karunanithi, A. S. Garmestani, and H. Cabezas. In press. A New Framework for Urban Sustainability Assessments: Linking Complexity, Information and Policy. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Special Issue on Geocomputation.
Urban systems emerge as distinct entities from the complex interactions among social, economic and cultural attributes, and information, energy and material stocks and flows that operate on different temporal and spatial scales. Such complexity poses a challenge to identify the causes of urban environmental problems and how to address them without causing greater deterioration. Planning has traditionally focused on regulating the location and intensity of urban activities to avoid environmental degradation, often based on assumptions that are rarely revisited and producing ambiguous effects. The key intellectual challenge for urban policy-makers is a fuller understanding of the complexity of urban systems and their environment. We address this challenge by developing an assessment framework with two main components: (1) a simple agent-based model of a hypothetical urbanizing area that integrates data on spatial economic and policy decisions, energy and fuel use, air pollution emissions and assimilation, to test how residential and policy decisions affect urban form, consumption and pollution; (2) an information index to define the degree of order and sustainability of the hypothetical urban system in the different scenarios, to determine whether specific policy and individual decisions contribute to the sustainability of the entire urban system or to its collapse.
To access the article, link to:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2008.08.003
Other SMART News
Since our last e-News in September, SMART has been busy learning, building its global learning community, advancing research and projects, and developing its New Mobility business network. We’ve been honoured to participate in “Beyond Oil: Transforming Transportation” in Seattle, and in the very moving Clinton Global Initiative Meeting in New York City. Krista Gullo has been moving ahead, developing the global research collaborative, and SMART and Ford have been stepping up the pace of projects in India and South Africa in preparation for a visit and a pilot New Mobility Hub Network launch (respectively) in early November. Closer to home, we’ve had a second “public private innovation” meeting with planning and business leaders in Washington DC geared at forging a set of New Mobility solutions there. To help all this happen, SMART is very pleased to welcome a vibrant student work study team. Team members include: Wasay Ahmad, Christopher Ash, Ryan Jones, Kyle Lawson, Jessica Simoncelli, and Mike Tuori. Next on the agenda, we’re looking forward to a number of project-specific meetings, one of which will be focused on mobility and design, in collaboration with the Art Centre College of Design in Passadena. SMART is also working with the EPA in Ann Arbor on an invitation-only industry meeting focused on sustainable goods movement in December (SMARTway - http://www.epa.gov/smartway/). Further on into the future we’re looking forward to our next SMART summit and panel, slated for June 2008. Watch future e-News editions for more details.
About SMART
Visit um-smart.org to learn about SMART.
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