With over 80% of the UK population now living in urban areas and an ever increasing number of people choosing to live in towns and cities, the planning of future cities is increasingly important to ensure sustained economic growth and improved quality of life.
Integration across urban buildings and services is increasingly recognised as a way forward to ensure cities become more resilient to climate change and are able to reduce their impact on the environment. Engineers and designers are working with policymakers and planners to ensure the multiple and complex systems that make up a city are integrated to promote sustainable urban environments.
Research projects
- ARCADIA – understanding the inter-relationships between climate impacts, urban economy, land use, transport and the built environment to help design cities that are more resilient and adaptable.
- CLUES – assessing the development of decentralised energy systems in urban areas in the light of national decarbonisation and urban sustainability goals.
- iBUILD – new approaches to infrastructure business models, particularly focusing at the local and city scale.
- Liveable Cities – developing a method of designing and engineering low carbon, resource secure, wellbeing maximised UK cities.
- Retrofit2050 – understanding urban scale retrofitting to promote managed socio-technical transitions in built environment and urban infrastructure.
- SECURE – enabling integration of resource-supply-demand-waste systems across city-to-regional scales to create integrated policies and planning.
- 4M – investigating the urban carbon footprint of a city (Leicester).
Outputs in action
- ARCC network research project contributions to Defra/EA meeting with Core Cities, November 2012.
