The energy demand in building sectors for summer air-conditioning is growing exponentially due to global warming, increased living standards and occupant comfort demands throughout the last decades. Concerns over these environmental changes have begun shifting the emphasis from current cooling...

High-speed rail (HSR) is becoming commonplace throughout the world. Previous attempts to develop HSR in Australia have been unsuccessful. This article applies scenario-based planning to the introduction of HSR so as to achieve more sustainable intercity mobility along Australia's eastern...

Sustainable development represents a major governance challenge of the 21st century. If societal development trajectories are to be realigned on to more sustainable pathways major changes will be required to existing processes and practices of governance. This essay considers the nature of these...

This paper engages with sustainability in higher education, based on working in transformative education with undergraduate engineers and in academic staff development at several Australian universities. It argues that we need to replace 'growth' as our guiding metaphor, with alternatives such...

Interest is growing regarding incorporating sustainability throughout university curricula, but the already full palette of educational requirements means that common tactics of adding new elective courses tend to isolate the concept and pit them against other courses in the curriculum. This...

The sustainability concepts of the "Brundtland-Report" and the "Rio documents" call for a combination of ecological, economic, social and institutional aspects of social development. This paper describes briefly, several models of sustainability and discusses social sustainability as...

This editorial introduces the special issue which aims to clarify, from a theoretical as well as applied point of view, and above all based on a multi-discipline approach (economics, geography, management science, political science, information sciences, psychology and geomatics), the...

Social indicators and sustainable development are usually defined as quantitative tools whose utility lies exclusively in the operationalisation of policies defined as rationally organised collections of instrumental measures and actions designed to solve a well-defined social problem. As there...

Urban journalists and researchers seek performance measures on how one city fares versus another in any dimension. An increasingly important performance measure relates to how well cities advance one important dimension of sustainability – decreased mobile source pollutants and decreased...

Capacity-building is essential to sustainable environmental and natural resources management and fast-paced socio-economic transformation. Capacity-building requires the involved commitment of individuals, community organisations, private businesses, academic institutions, governmental agencies,...