A team of researchers will test whether cities designed around environmental, social, or economic priorities produce fundamentally different outcomes for people and the planet. This work addresses a gap in urban regeneration: most projects assess current solutions, but few systematically imagine and test alternative long-term futures before construction begins. The researchers will build scenarios based on different starting assumptions—for example, what happens if sustainability is defined primarily by carbon reduction versus social equity—and then model how those choices affect design, infrastructure performance, and community uptake. They will test these ideas on real sites, including a major regeneration area in Birmingham, smaller towns, and international cities. If successful, the project could give planners and policymakers a practical, evidence-based toolkit for choosing among competing visions of a sustainable city, rather than relying on intuition or single-issue metrics. The research is applied and directly aimed at implementation, not fundamental science.
View original technical description
The first phase of the SUE Programme has focused necessarily on the present, assessing current solutions and their application in the near future, thus providing a strong empirical base on which to build. There now exist both the need and a sufficient body of work to extrapolate the findings to establish and test alternative urban futures: to create a variety of scenarios, building on prior and new work, and predicated on different fundamental assumptions and priorities; to assess those scenarios in terms of design, engineering implementation and measurement of performance; to refine them, in terms of mitigation and adaptation measures, incorporating novel solutions; and ultimately to provide alternative solutions with an associated evidence base and strategies for their implementation. This bid seeks to integrate the outputs of three current SUE consortia (Birmingham Eastside, VivaCity 2020 and WaND) and complementary research on the use of trees to mitigate the effects of atmospheric pollution. The team will work across disciplines to envision and establish alternative futures (using extensive literature on this subject and prior WaND consortium work) and construct scenarios that might flow from each alternative future. The various work packages will then focus on testing specific dimensions of each alternative future vis a vis their design, implementation and performance in the context of case history sites. Each project will engage an expert panel of influential stakeholders who will meet six-monthly to test and help shape new ideas, the chairs of each of the expert panels forming the higher level project steering committee. Panel consultation will be followed by interviews of stakeholders on motivations and the decision-making process, and specific empirical research and modelling. The following high level questions will be addressed via this process: - How does the ab initio conceptualization of sustainability influence design outcomes (e.g. form, density)? How would outcomes change if urban renewal were predicated on either environmental or social or economic overriding drivers? - How does development impact on its environs, and vice versa (e.g. is a 'sustainable' site good for the city / region / country and, if so, in what ways?) and is there an optimum development size to yield optimally sustainable outcomes? - Push versus pull to achieve sustainable outcomes. Much of what is done is thought good (for individuals, society, the environment), what might be wanted (push). Thus decisions are made and people must decide whether or not to take ownership. Might more sustainable outcomes follow if those who must take ownership dictate what is created (pull)? Birmingham Eastside will be used both to develop sustainability ideas and to test them on sites at various stages of planning and development (the research team has unparalleled access via its partnerships with key stakeholders involved in Eastside). Lancaster (with Morecambe, population 96k) and Worcester (94k) will be used to test the outcomes at the scale of smaller urban areas (e.g. market towns) but no attempt will be made to build comprehensive databases as at Eastside. Several other UK and international urban areas (including Sao Paulo, Singapore and an urban area in India) will be used to test a sub-set of the project's findings to assess the transferability of the scenarios to a variety of contexts and thus their general applicability.
A. MacKenzie (Co-Investigator)Austin Barber (Co-Investigator)Charles Hewitt (Co-Investigator)Christopher David Foss Rogers (Principal Investigator)David Butler (Co-Investigator)Fayyaz Memon (Co-Investigator)Ian Jefferson (Co-Investigator)James Whyatt (Co-Investigator)John R. Bryson (Co-Investigator)Jon Sadler (Co-Investigator)Ljubomir Jankovic (Co-Investigator)Mark Gaterell (Co-Investigator)Rachel Cooper OBE (Co-Investigator)Richard Coles (Co-Investigator)
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know