‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

This chapter explores the ecology of human development, those forces in the person's environment that affect and influence development. Urie Bronfenbrenner's model of the human ecosystem guides the discussion, making connections between children in families and in communities and the larger society that surrounds them. The human ecosystem model is much like the study of the natural ecology, focusing on the interactions between subjects at various levels of the environment as they affect each other. The interaction between individual and environment forms the basis of an ecological approach to human development. This view sees the process of development as the expansion of the child's conception of the world and the child's ability to act on that world. Risks to development can come from both direct threats and the absence of opportunities for development. Sociocultural risk refers to the impoverishment in the child's world of essential experiences and relationships.

The Ecology of Human Development

A new public administration movement is emerging to move beyond traditional public administration and New Public Management. The new movement is a response to the challenges of a networked, multisector, no-one-wholly-in-charge world and to the shortcomings of previous public administration approaches. In the new approach, values beyond efficiency and effectiveness—and especially democratic values—are prominent. Government has a special role to play as a guarantor of public values, but citizens as well as businesses and nonprofit organizations are also important as active public problem solvers. The article highlights value-related issues in the new approach and presents an agenda for research and action to be pursued if the new approach is to fulfill its promise.

Public Value Governance: Moving Beyond Traditional Public Administration and the New Public Management

Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and its effect on occupant well-being and comfort is an important area of study. This paper presents a state of the art study through extensive review of the literature, by establishing links between IEQs and occupant well-being and comfort. A range of issues such as sick building syndrome, indoor air quality thermal comfort, visual comfort and acoustic comfort are considered in this paper. The complexity of the relationship between occupant comfort and well-being parameters with IEQ are further exacerbated due to relationships that these parameters have with each other as well. Based on the review of literature in these areas it is established that design of buildings needs to consider occupant well-being parameters right at the beginning. Some good practices in all these different areas have also been highlighted and documented in this paper. The knowledge established as part of this paper would be helpful for researchers, designer, engineers and facilities maintenance engineers. This paper will also be of great benefit to researchers who endeavour to undertake research in this area and could act as a good starting point for them.

Impact of indoor environmental quality on occupant well-being and comfort: A review of the literature

We contribute to the literature on institutional and organizational change by integrating two related areas of study: the theory and methods of analysis informed by the research on institutional logics and historical-event sequencing. Institutional logics provide the theory to understand how the content of culture influences organizational change; historical-event sequencing reveals the underlying patterns of cultural transformation. We apply this dual perspective to the cases of institutional stability and change in organizational governance in three industries: accounting, architecture, and higher-education publishing. Research on governance has focused on changes in organizational design between markets, hierarchies, and networks. Missing from this research is an understanding of how institutions at the wider societal level motivate organizations to adopt one of these governance forms over another. We examine how the governance of firms in these industries has been influenced by the institutional logics of the professions, the market, the state, and the corporation by focusing on three mechanisms – institutional entrepreneurs, structural overlap, and historical-event sequencing. Overall, our findings reveal how accounting was influenced by state regulation producing a punctuated equilibrium model, architecture by professional duality producing a cyclical model, and publishing by market rationalization producing an evolutionary model of institutional change in organizational governance.

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Institutional Logics and Institutional Change in Organizations: Transformation in Accounting, Architecture, and Publishing

Is Public Space a Public Good

THE CLASSROOM HAS LONG BEEN a basic unit of education, an essential space without which a school is not a school, but given the changes occurring in how educators teach and students learn we need to ask whether we need classrooms anymore. Has the classroom become more of an obstacle to effective education in the digital age? A brief history of the classroom can help us answer that question. Educational spaces reflect the societies and economies in which they sit. As the first industrial revolution and the mechanization of hand labor evolved in the 19th-century United States, classrooms became places in which students "learned how to learn" in highly regulated ways. Rows of desks faced the teacher and pupils engaged in the same lessons, often learning in rote-like ways. However much we find that classroom environment odd today, it did prepare students for an economy increasingly characterized by repetitive tasks in mills, factories, and farms. That changed in the 20th century. With the second industrial revolution, ushered in by Henry Ford's development of the assembly line and an economy based on mass production and mass consumption, classrooms began to change accordingly. Learning spaces started to offer lighter weight and more flexible furniture to prepare college-bound students for the white-collar roles that awaited them and vocational education rooms that increasingly looked like blue-collar workplaces. In the 21st century, with the emergence of a new economy in which collaboration, innovation, and creativity have become increasingly important, the classroom as traditionally conceived seems decidedly out-of-date. Students can now call up information faster and more accurately on their smart phones than a teacher can give it, so why should they sit still and listen to the person at the front of the classroom? Students need to learn how to develop collaboration skills if they hope to thrive as adults, so why should they all face the same direction and not talk to each other? And students must acquire the ability to innovate and create at a pace commensurate with what they will face in their work lives, so why do we still largely grade their work on its correctness as opposed to its creativity? Active learning spaces and flipped classrooms have emerged in response to new economic demands. These environments allow students to sit around tables or in clustered seating to work on group projects, with the teacher facilitating discussion and giving feedback on the students' collaborative work. And they put a premium on the development of innovative ideas and the presentation of creative insights, with group work open for discussion by all and mobile devices and digital projectors allowing students to readily gather information and report on their work. These classrooms, though, represent a transition phase, still holding on to the idea that students need to come to a room and learn under the guidance of a teacher, much as they have for the last two centuries. To see where learning environments will likely go, look at what the new economy has done to the office. The demand for traditional offices with rooms along corridors or cubicles arrayed across an office floor has declined. Instead, workers have begun to flock to informal environments that look more like living rooms or art studios, with comfortable furniture in diverse arrangements and a minimum of closed rooms enabling workers to collaborate and innovate more effectively. Educational environments will almost certainly follow suit. Rather than offer the same kind of space to everyone, regardless of the content conveyed there, schools need to provide a much wider range of learning places suited to the diverse intelligences of students in order to maximize their creative potential. Universities already have this variety of spaces. Active learning classrooms may fit the needs of STEM fields, like math and science, in which students' interactions with computers may matter as much as their interactions with each other. …

Do We Need Classrooms Anymore

Left, Right, and Wrong

No Cure-Alls for K-12.

A small amount of campus walkability research has considered facility layout and environmental quality. The aim of this paper is to use a Walk Score and Urban Design Quality to assess campus walkability and investigate the impact of a campus Walk Score, environmental quality and other streetscape features on walking activity. This paper optimizes the Walk Score method based on the frequency, variety, and distance of students’ walking to and from public facilities. A total of 157 campus street segments from the Weijin Road Campus of Tianjin University in China were selected to assess campus Walk Scores and environmental quality through the use of GIS and field audits. The effect of campus walkability and environmental features on pedestrian volume was examined by negative binomial regression. We found that Walk Score, transparency, street furniture, the number of buildings and noise level have a positive effect on walking activity, while enclosure and building basic color show a negative relationship with pedestrian volume. The results will be used to propose strategies to improve campus walkability and promote walking activity.

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Thomas R Fisher

Papers

Is Public Space a Public Good

Do We Need Classrooms Anymore

Left, Right, and Wrong

No Cure-Alls for K-12.

Walk Score, Environmental Quality and Walking in a Campus Setting