In this work we numerically investigate the flow conditions inside uniform and non-uniform street canyons well within the atmospheric boundary layer. The numerical simulations use the steady RANS method with the near-wall modelling approach to simulate wall roughness at the boundary. With the aim of investigating both flow structure in broad terms, and pedestrian comfort in the street canyon between parallel buildings, we test different canyon configurations with varied street width, building width and building height. Turbulent conditions are broadly expected to hold within the physically-realistic range of Reynolds number of order 10 6 considered here, where we take the building height to be a characteristic length scale, and the free stream velocity as the characteristic velocity. In addition to discussing the features of the canyon and wake flow, we investigate the effects of canyon geometry on pedestrian comfort by using the Extended Land Beaufort Scale for this purpose. We present and compare pedestrian comfort "maps" for each of our geometries.

Improving the sustainability of New Zealand’s housing stock is a significant challenge. Economic, indoor climate and energy use data indicates the affordability, healthiness and environmental impacts of new and existing houses in New Zealand are relatively poor compared with other OECD countries. Poor performance is largely due to the building energy and environmental performance requirements prescribed by regulations, which are low in New Zealand compared with other jurisdictions. Building performance requirements will need to be raised in order to improve the sustainability of housing. A wellbeing approach to determining public benefits from raising building performance requirements in regulations is outlined in this paper. This approach draws on the Living Standards Framework (LSF) developed by The New Zealand Treasury. This framework links 12 domains of wellbeing to each other and to 4 capital stocks, including housing, that underpin future wellbeing. The LSF is used to assess the impacts of raising building performance requirements on community wellbeing. Results indicate better knowledge of the relationships between the domains of wellbeing and the underpinning capital stocks is needed to improve the identification and analysis of preferred regulatory settings.

This paper reviews three digitalisation projects in the Building Innovation Partnership, an industry-led research and innovation initiative based at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, focussed on improving the transfer of infrastructure information within and between organisations. The BIM to BAM project focuses on the use of client-facing information managers and asset information specification tools to improve information transfer between building designers, contractors and facility / asset managers. The Infrastructure Asset Data project focuses on the use of metadata standards to federate and analyse data on three waters pipe networks managed by different councils. The BIM-Based Building Consenting project focuses on using BIM data to automate the assessment of building designs against the requirements of digitised building regulations and standards. Case studies associated with the three projects show that the capability of industry to transfer digital information needs to be lifted, in order to exploit the benefits of digital information, processes and technologies in the construction and infrastructure sectors.

Water infrastructure world-wide is facing a number of pressures including increasing demand due to population growth and urbanisation, increasing legislative requirements, climate change, and ageing infrastructure. Supporting growth and prosperity across the country require smarter investment decisions to deliver cost-effective and innovative solutions. The focus on investment planning is moving away from the simple economic or risk-based decision to community wellbeing. The New Zealand Treasury has developed a wellbeing framework to guide policy and investment that focuses on improved community outcomes for the nation. The purpose of this framework is to track changes to the wellbeing outcomes over time and improve public policy making, with the ultimate goal of lifting living standards and improving intergenerational wellbeing. This framework, largely based on the OECD wellbeing framework, was adapted for New Zealand (NZ) and includes a stock model to simulate the inter-relationship between investment and wellbeing outcomes. This framework focuses more on providing guidelines around the domains of wellbeing from a macro policy level decision making level, however their linkages to localized infrastructure development are weak. This paper describes a strategy to develop a holistic decision-making framework for three waters (drinking water, wastewater, & stormwater), which include; finding the impact of investment in three waters on community’s wellbeing, conducting performance analysis, and the development of a mathematical model and trade-off model for such investment. The results have suggested that the existing wellbeing framework provides an excellent monitoring framework for water infrastructure, yet to establish inter-relationships between wellbeing factors on a meso-level, a different model needs to be considered.