SMART

The University of Cape Town’s Department of Civil Engineering offers an undergraduate BScEng degree programme in civil engineering, and hosts a number of research groups which form the locus of research activity and postgraduate teaching in the Department. More information on the Department’s teaching and research activities can be found at www.civil.uct.ac.za. One of the Department’s research groups is the Centre for Transport Studies. The Centre undertakes research and postgraduate teaching activities in the broad field of urban passenger transport systems. Particular current research interests range across public transport systems and paratransit regulation, non-motorised transportation, travel behaviour change, intelligent transport systems, land use-transport system relationships, travel surveys and transport modelling, and project evaluation. An important current source of research funding is through the Centre’s the involvement in ACET (African Centre of Excellence for Studies in Public and Non-motorised Transport), a CoE funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations. More information on the Centre and its involvement in international research networks can be found at www.cfts.uct.ac.za and www.acet.uct.ac.za.

For more information, contact Roger Behrens at Roger.Behrens@uct.ac.za.

The Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship will be awarded annually to an emerging designer whose work articulates the potential for landscape as a medium of design in the public realm. The Kiley Fellow will be appointed Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for the 2012-13 academic year. While the Kiley Fellowship will be awarded competitively on an annual basis, successful Fellows are eligible to have their academic appointments renewed for a second year at the rank of Lecturer, dependent upon review of their teaching, research and creative practice.

This initiative is intended to recognize and foster emerging design educators whose work embodies the potential for landscape as a medium of design in the public realm. The Daniel Urban Kiley Fellowship builds upon the history of pedagogic innovation at the GSD as well as the century of leadership in landscape education within the Department of Landscape Architecture.

The state advocacy organizer builds, strengthens and maintains a state network of diverse organizations, public agencies and partners to achieve the following three main policy objectives:

1. Leverage funding for bicycle and pedestrian construction projects, including the award and obligation of federal Safe Routes to School and Transportation Enhancements funds.
2. Facilitate additional street-scale improvements through the adoption of Complete Streets policies, design guidelines that support active transportation, and other mechanisms at state, regional and local levels.
3. Advance joint-use agreements through state level policies and agreements between cities and school districts.

All policies must benefit lower-income communities and are intended to improve the built environment and increase physical activity to help reverse childhood obesity.

The organizer will possess strong skills in recruiting and organizing network partners and building action teams to achieve the three main policy objectives. He or she will also be responsible for ensuring sustainability of the project and position by securing on-going funding for 2014 and beyond.

For more information, see http://www.saferoutespartnership.org/about/contacts/state-advocacy-organizers.

The Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute announces the third round of funding for its Partnerships for Innovation in Sustainable Energy Technologies (PISET) program.

Proposals are due Feb. 15, 2012.
The PISET program supports multidisciplinary research programs in sustainable energy science, technology, and policy with funding for a Phoenix Energy Institute Research Fellow.  Successful proposals combine innovative team (two or more PIs) research plans that include concrete timelines for establishing independent funding.

Five winning proposals from the first two PISET funding rounds have focused on multimodal transportation, biofuels, lithium-ion batteries, and cyber-discovery related to CO₂ capture materials.

Read more about the PISET program and its application requirements.

The Furthermore program is concerned with nonfiction book publishing about the city; natural and historic resources; art, architecture, and design; cultural history; and civil liberties and other public issues of the day. Our grants apply to writing, research, editing, design, indexing, photography, illustration, and printing and binding.

We look for work that appeals to an informed general audience; gives evidence of high standards in editing, design, and production; promises a reasonable shelf life; might not otherwise achieve top quality or even come into being; and represents a contribution without which we would be the poorer. Book proposals to which a university press or trade publisher is already committed and for which there is a feasible distribution plan are usually preferred. In geographical reach we are drawn— but in no way limited— to New York City and to New York State and its Hudson Valley.

For more information, see http://www.furthermore.org.

Anyone scanning Disney Hall’s debut calendar in the fall of 2003 would have noticed the size of that first season’s schedule, 128 shows in all. That’s a weighty number for a new hall—one might have assumed it was chosen by venue management wanting the gravitas of a world-class chamber’s arrival or perhaps seeking a broad spectrum of music that could reflect the diverse city. Those guesses would have been wrong. Disney Hall had been built atop Parcel K, a county-owned square of land on Bunker Hill that long had sat empty, awaiting development. For decades Parcel K served a prosaic function: It was a parking lot. Commercial landowners like parking lots; they generate cash until better economic conditions arrive, and blank space can be converted into a more profitable moneymaking device—typically a building. The practice is called “land banking.”

Yet before an auditorium could be raised on K, a six-floor subterranean garage capable of holding 2,188 cars needed to be sunk below it at a cost of $110 million—money raised from county bonds. Parking spaces can be amazingly expensive to fabricate. In aboveground structures they cost as much as $40,000 apiece. Belowground, all that excavating and shoring may run a developer $140,000 per space. The debt on Disney Hall’s garage would have to be paid off for decades to come, and as it turned out, a minimum schedule of 128 annual shows would be enough to cover the bill. The figure “128” was even written into the L.A. Philharmonic’s lease. In 2003, Esa-Pekka Salonen opened Frank Gehry’s masterpiece to a packed house with Mahler’s Resurrection, and in the years since, concertgoers—who lay out $9 to enter the garage—have steadily funded performances that exist to cover the true price of their parking.

Read the full story at http://www.lamag.com/features/Story.aspx?ID=1568281.