Build4People

The Build4People team is proud to confirm that one of leading property developers of Cambodia, the Overseas Cambodian Investment Corporation (OCIC), has agreed to jointly conduct the Build4People Ecocity Transition Lab (ECTL). As a highly innovative alliance between the private sector, local and international academia and Phnom Penh Capital Hall (PPCH), it will take place in spring 2024.

The selected case study will be Norea City currently being developed by OCIC on 125 ha of reclamation land along Mekong River with a total budget of more than $2.5 billion. The site is located opposite of Diamond Island at Sangkat Nirouth, Khan Chbar Ampov, Phnom Penh.

The Build4People Ecocity Transition Lab (ECTL) is a transformative process-oriented approach involving and integrating multi-stakeholders in a transdisciplinary way. Among others, by means of co-design and a series of planning workshops, Build4People will develop alternative planning visions of urban sustainability away from business as usual. In addition, the ECTL will serve to test our design guidelines and our sustainable neighbourhood planning criteria.

As a final result of the ECTL process, OCIC will get hopefully inspired to create a model case and demonstration project for a cutting-edge sustainable neighborhood development in Cambodia.

OCIC has recently received the prestigious award “Best Developer 2023” at the Property Guru Awards held in Phnom Penh in August 2023.

#build4people #OCIC #NoreaCity #PPCH #BMBF_SUREregions

On 22 November 2023, the Build4People got represented during a conference about the topic of “gender-sensitive building in development cooperation” at the seat of the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in Berlin.

Our presentation with the title “a gender-equitable building in Cambodia: Experiences from the Build4People project” had been jointly prepared by the Build4People consortium leader Dr. Michael Waibel (Hamburg University), Dr. Anke Blöbaum (Magdeburg University), leader of the Build4People Work Package “Behaviour Change”, and by Christina Karagianni (Technical School of Applied Sciences, Lübeck), research associate of the Build4People Work Package “Sustainable Building”.

Due to the sick leave of Michael, Christina jumped in and presented our findings to a large audience with representatives from municipal governments, civil society networks, academia, and from select donor organisations.

Among others, we explained that our transformative events have already empowered women in Cambodian’s construction sector to organise their own community (W.A.E.) and that the Build4People team will actively support this, in the future.

Moreover, we presented arguments from our survey pointing towards the direction of a design that allows more flexibility in the use of rooms in order to include Cambodian women’s needs more systematically and explicitly in the planning, something that Mrs. Eva Kail , an expert for gender-equitable building and planning from the city of Wien, also presented during her keynote speech.

From a scientific viewpoint, we pointed out the need of research on gender-related behaviour constraints instead of a simple dichotomous view on gender-differences.

Concluding, we have to say that the gender analysis in the context of presentation preparation raised our gender-based awareness, particularly in the context of upcoming project activities and that our team is very open to receive proposals to foster gender mainstreaming in Cambodia’s construction sector, e.g. in regard of B4P implementation phase (2025-2027).

Last but not least, the Build4People team would like to particularly thank Ms. Esther Moltie from the Policy Advice Sector Programme „Cities“ of the “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit“ (GIZ). Esther invited us to become part of this exciting event and who was always very helpful, professional and swift in her communication with us.

From 09-10 November 2023, the annual meeting of the German Build4People team took place at Eberswalde University of Sustainable Development (HNEE), the seat of the BuildPeople Work Package “Urban Green Infrastructures” led by Prof. Dr. Jan-Peter Mund.

This year, the main focus was on the further conceptualization of urban quality of life and the development of the so-called Build4People Citizen Science App. This was presented by Prof. Jan-Peter Mund, Dr. Anke Blöbaum and Gulam Mohiuddin, and then intensively discussed among the workshop participants.

In addition, the team discussed the preparation of the Build4People Ecocity Transition Lab 2024 and the organisation of various science workshop activities in the context of the upcoming project team stay in Phnom Phnom in spring 2024.

The 2nd day started with an online presentation of a toolbox approach to foster ecosystem services of the SURE project IMECOGIP by its representative Prof. Harald Zepp, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

After Prof. Zepp’s presentation, there was a discussion about the development of more tangible products such as the Build4People Transformation Toolbox and of the Build4People Handbook for Green Housing and Urban Quality of Life.

After all, it was a very fruitful event, a melting pot of ideas, and the synergy among the participants was truly inspiring.

The Build4People team members would like to express their deep gratitude to Prof. Dr. Jan-Peter Mund and to Gulam Mohiuddin for preparing and hosting it.

We are happy to announce that the paper “Spatiotemporal Analysis of Land Surface Temperature in Response to Land Use and Land Cover Changes: A Remote Sensing Approach” has been accepted for presentation and publication at the 5th International Electronic Conference on Remote Sensing.

The paper has been written by Gulam Mohiuddin, as corresponding author, and by Jan-Peter Mund, both from Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development, Germany. Mohi and Jan are members of the Build4People Work Package #4 “Urban Green Infrastructures”.

Link to the paper, poster and presentation: https://sciforum.net/paper/view/15836

DOI-Link of the paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/ECRS2023-15836