Marble envelopes represent a relatively common architectural solution used in variety of historic, modern and contemporary building facades. White marble envelopes have been shown to reduce solar heat gains, while improving indoor thermal comfort and energy efficiency in summer time. While marble is useful in this context, the urban atmosphere accelerates the degradation of marble elements. This leads to changes in optical characteristics, hence the aesthetics, and affects the energy efficiency benefits offered by white marble facades. These issues are investigated in order to predict the impact of degradation on energy performance and to the aesthetic value, such as change of color and luminosity. In this study, surface degradation of white marble is analyzed by means of accelerated weathering in the laboratory while examining changes to the optical characteristics of the materials. A dynamic simulation is carried out to assess the energy performance of a building as a case study.

Hurricane Maria left unprecedented impacts on Puerto Rican communities, leaving some without infrastructure services and unable to communicate with family for several months. To understand the forms of community-level resilience that emerged while hard infrastructure systems took time recover, this article (1) abductively explores resilience as an emergent phenomenon of complex adaptive systems; (2) identifies subsequent forms of social capital, local adaptive capacities, and manifestations of quantifiable variables, such as infrastructure performance, in community experiences; and (3) demonstrates a framework to integrate disparate methodologies for resilience assessments via a multiplicity of mappings of space and place. We combine ethnographic and geospatial methods into an interactive GeoApp for analysis using participant-coded narratives and a series of geospatial indicators as a thick map. Thick mapping facilitates quantitative and qualitative data analysis at several scales, while enabling qualitative query of collected narratives. Results highlight local innovation, community bonding and bridging, and nuances in the role of public institutions as emergent elements of resilience. The thick map shows how top-down assessments can be augmented by thick data and how multiple framings can be anchored in the same system or place. These findings are important to inform and integrate community-oriented and technocentric solutions toward resilience-enhancing measures.

Exposure to elevated temperatures in heavily built-up environments, largely caused by impermeable surfaces, artificial heat exhaust, and reduced green spaces, poses serious challenges to urban sustainability and public health. While urban green spaces are recognized for their potential to mitigate such heat island effects through shading, evapotranspiration, and airflow improvement, existing studies often lack systematic quantification of these cooling effects and fail to contextualize them within specific urban environments. This study investigates the contribution of green spaces to lowering the high heat exposure in urban areas, where a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, was used as the lab to carry out measurements and simulations of the constructed and natural environment. Computational simulations were conducted to replicate the urban landscape, including buildings, streets, and vegetation, and to model the effects of vegetation, particularly evapotranspiration, on temperature. Summer temperature, wind speed, and humidity were simulated at a high spatial resolution, and the results were compared with measured data for verification. This approach contributes to the reliability of the predictions and provides localized insights into the cooling potential of green spaces. By addressing gaps in research in this area, the results of this study area aim to inform planning strategies to support climate-resilient urban development.