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Author ORCID Identifier
N/A
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Environmental Conservation
Year Degree Awarded
2016
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Simi T. Hoque
Second Advisor
Benjamin S. Weil
Third Advisor
Robert L. Ryan
Subject Categories
Construction Engineering and Management | Environmental Engineering | Urban, Community and Regional Planning
Abstract
A number of tools are available today for simulating different aspects of urban activity, but these efforts are fragmented and do not effectively reflect the interrelationships between very diverse groups of urban sectors and resource flows. There is a critical need for robust and reliable urban metabolism analysis tools that integrate socio-economic elements of urbanization and physicality of the built environment into evaluating sustainability in cities. This dissertation outlines the development of an Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool (IUMAT) that dynamically measures the environmental impacts of land cover, transportation, and consumption of energy, water and materials employing a holistic framework. It includes examination of the existing scholarship on urban metabolism as well as description of the calculative framework for IUMAT. The scope of work is establishment of the Residential Energy Model that would serve as a template for the larger Energy, Water and Materials (EWM) Model. The EWM model takes a bottom-up approach to generate spatial resource demand profiles based on building and neighborhood characteristics. Finally, Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) 2009 data is used to explain how the proposed framework makes use of actual data to find determinants of resources’ demand and unravel correlations between environmental consequences and myriad of urban variables. Quantile regression is explored as a robust method for large-scale energy modeling that is a prototype for resource use projection within other urban sectors.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/9058786.0
Recommended Citation
Mostafavi, Nariman, "Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool (IUMAT)" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 756.
https://doi.org/10.7275/9058786.0
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/756
Included in
Construction Engineering and Management Commons, Environmental Engineering Commons, Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons