Adaptive places

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 important to ensure sustained economic growth and improved quality of life.

Integration across urban buildings and services is increasingly recognised as a way 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 into sustainable urban environments

ARCC and cities

Our Feeling good in public spaces programme examined how people’s senses can be affected by the design of public spaces and building frontages.

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 – delivering global and societal well-being through radical engineering solutions, while adhering to a low-carbon, resource secure future.
• LoHCool – investigating and developing strategies to reduce CO2 emissions from space heating and cooling in typical urban buildings, working in China and the UK.
• 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 Leicester.