Skip to main content

Joanne M Leach

University of Birmingham, Civil Engineering, Post-Doc

Followers

54

Following

18

Co-authors

13

Public Views

You can view my staff profile at
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/civil/leach-joanne.aspx
Phone: +44 (0)121 414 3544; +44 (0) 7785 792 187
Address: Department of Civil Engineering, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

less

C. Michael Hall

University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha

Molde University College

Alfonso Montuori

California Institute of Integral Studies

Independent Researcher

EHESS-Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales

Perdita Phillips

Independent Researcher

Teresa Marat-Mendes

ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL)

University of Oxford

Universitat de València

Jennifer Gidley

University of Technology Sydney

InterestsView All (28)

Uploads

Papers by Joanne M Leach

Birmingham's services evidence map dataset

Birmingham Services Data Mapping Dataset

Measuring city performance and diagnosing city challenges: a decision-making framework for policymaking and urban design

A regional approach to COVID-19 recovery: lessons from the West Midlands

Town Planning Review, 2022

Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified... more Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of 'fair dealing' under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

Birmingham's services evidence map dataset

This spreadsheet catalogues studies about the city of Birmingham, UK, that were used in an eviden... more This spreadsheet catalogues studies about the city of Birmingham, UK, that were used in an evidence mapping analysis. Studies have been selected based upon the following criteria. 1. Take as their subject area all or part of the city of Birmingham UK. 2. Are relevant to the delivery of the city's services, with particular attention paid to those services delivered in all or part by Birmingham City Council (either directly or indicrectly by a third party). This spreadsheet has been prepared by Joanne Leach, j.leach@bham.ac.uk, joanne@joanneleach.co.uk, 07785 792 187, The School of Engineering, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT. The spreadsheet has been prepared as part of the EPSRC-funded Urban Living Birmingham (ULB) research project, grant number EP/P002021/1, http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/P002021/1.

A regional approach to COVID-19 recovery: lessons from the West Midlands

Town Planning Review, 2022

Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified... more Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of 'fair dealing' under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

A comparison of energy systems in Birmingham, UK, with Masdar City, an embryonic city in Abu Dhabi Emirate

Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, Nov 1, 2016

Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified... more Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. • Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. • Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. • User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of 'fair dealing' under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) • Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

Briefing: Resource scarcity and resource security – a suppressed civil engineering challenge

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, May 1, 2017

While natural and manufactured resources provide the raw materials with which civil engineers wor... more While natural and manufactured resources provide the raw materials with which civil engineers work, the term 'resources' should always be considered in its wider interpretation and then in the context that resources are in many cases limited. That they should be used wisely (resource efficiency) is beyond contentionwe do this as a matter of courseyet considerations of where and how resources are obtained and refined for use are far less likely to feature in a civil engineer's psyche. Similarly, considerations of resource availability for others now, and importantly in the future, and the vulnerability of these resources to future supply disruption (e.g. for geopolitical reasons) are likely not to be in the forefront of our thinking when conducting our routine business. The ICE Research, Development & Innovation towards Engineering Excellence panel has chosen this topic as one of pressing importance across all the sectors that comprise civil engineering. Accordingly, the panel is promoting this topic for Research & Development Enabling Fund (R&DEF) proposals. This briefing note describes the prior work of the panel in exploring the extent of this issue, along with insights from current research, to raise awareness, encourage R&DEF proposals and prime debates on this topic.

The Liveable Cities Method: establishing the case for transformative change for a UK metro

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Feb 1, 2020

There is currently great interest in the creation of sustainable and liveable cities, both in the... more There is currently great interest in the creation of sustainable and liveable cities, both in the UK and globally. While it can be argued that good progress is being made in thinking about the needs of future cities, meeting these needs and aspirations in practice poses major challenges of understanding and measurement (what is meant by these terms and how can progress towards their achievement be measured?), complexity (cities are complex systems of systems with many interacting parts) and resilience (will interventions made today be relevant and effective in the future?). The Liveable Cities research programme created a systematic decision-making method for improving urban sustainability and liveability: the Liveable Cities Method (LCM). The LCM prioritises four criteriaindividual and societal well-being, resource security, resource efficiency and carbon dioxide emissions as a proxy for environmental harmin an interconnected framework and assesses the need for, and the resilience of, interventions designed to move cities towards improved sustainability and liveability. This paper illustrates the LCM through an example intervention made to the city of Birmingham, UK, and highlights how addressing sustainability and liveability in this way offers unique opportunities for the UK civil engineering profession to lead thinking among urban professionals. 8 Cite this article Leach JM, Rogers CDF, Ortegon-Sanchez A and Tyler N (2020) The Liveable Cities Method: establishing the case for transformative change for a UK metro.

The urban futures methodology applied to urban regeneration

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Mar 1, 2012

Making cities more sustainable is a top priority-for national governments, for cities and for the... more Making cities more sustainable is a top priority-for national governments, for cities and for the people who live, work and visit urban areas. The past decade has seen a concerted UK effort to develop, apply and assess sustainability solutions for the present and near future; however, little has been done to test urban regeneration solutions beyond that. This paper describes a methodology that has developed future scenarios for the year 2050 against which to test the robustness of current engineering solutions, thereby providing unique insights into the potential impacts of present urban planning and design decisions, and thus financial investments. If a proposed solution delivers a positive legacy, regardless of the future against which it is tested, then it can be adopted with confidence. When there are very different outcomes depending on the future, the solution can either be modified to create an improved outcome regardless of the future or implemented in the knowledge of the likely impacts if the future develops in different ways. The urban futures methodology has been applied to the Lancaster Luneside East regeneration site, for which contextual information is described along with a justification for its use as a case study to trial the methodology.

Do measures of performance constrain creativity and imagination

Planners, architects, urban designers and other built environment professionals engage with a myr... more Planners, architects, urban designers and other built environment professionals engage with a myriad of checkboxes, guidelines, requirements and specifications, all of which potentially compromise creativity and innovation in urban design. Approaches that measure performance are accused of belying the nature of places as messy, plural, organic, accidental and emotive; trying to find a formula that works may tick boxes, but it risks creating soulless spaces, oppressing innovation and incorporation of inappropriate design elements. This paper argues that sustainability assessment methods do have something to contribute to creativity and innovation in urban design precisely because they encourage engagement with challenging and often complex societal priorities. Through interviews with built environment professionals and a critical examination of sustainability assessment methods, the authors suggest that such methods can promote creativity and innovation if they engage competently with sustainability, work at a scale that allows for both breadth and depth (typically greater than the building scale) and incorporate in their design a set of eight key characteristics designed to promote creativity and innovation.

Briefing: Embedding transdisciplinarity in engineering approaches to infrastructure and cities

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Jun 1, 2020

Many of the specialisms on which infrastructure and cities rely for their effective design, const... more Many of the specialisms on which infrastructure and cities rely for their effective design, construction, operation, governance, management and maintenance are underpinned by the principles of certainty, accuracy, precision and prediction. Not least of these is civil engineering. Yet infrastructures and cities are characterised by complexity and emergence. In recent decades, understandings of infrastructures and cities have begun to reflect these properties, and in particular, transdisciplinarity is promoted as critical to advancing these new understandings. However, this presents conceptual and operational challenges for civil engineering, as there is a fundamental mismatch between the certainty, accuracy and precision required by engineers and the complexity and emergence of transdisciplinary research approaches. The forms of value arising from these research approaches are themselves contentious, leaving engineers exposed to competing claims and making them ill prepared to exploit new insights to full advantage. This briefing explores these mismatches and contentions and proposes a set of four principles that underpin successful transdisciplinary research, laying the foundation for transforming research in infrastructure and cities by leveraging emergent, transdisciplinary approaches. Cite this article Leach JM and Rogers CDF (2020) Briefing: Embedding transdisciplinarity in engineering approaches to infrastructure and cities.

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Global Environm

Reading cities: Developing an urban diagnostics approach for identifying integrated urban problems with application to the city of Birmingham, UK

Cities, Mar 1, 2019

Reading cities: developing an urban diagnostics approach for identifying integrated urban problem... more

Do sustainability measures constrain creativity in urban design

Measuring city performance and diagnosing city challenges: a decision-making framework for policymaking and urban design

With the world's population continuing to urbanise, achieving liveable and sustainable cities is ... more With the world's population continuing to urbanise, achieving liveable and sustainable cities is essential for our survival. Liveable sustainability brings together sustainability's long-term, large-scale goals with liveability's more immediate ones. How liveable sustainability is measured and assessed varies by scale, scope, and geography, and there are many methods from which to choose. This confusion inevitably hinders progress against the numerous problems facing cities. Achieved through the development of a bespoke decision-making framework, this research reveals the issues with diagnosing urban challenges and with measuring and assessing urban liveability and sustainability. It exposes how existing methods fall short, largely because of how they use and manage data, and uncovers fundamental flaws in both decision-making based upon existing measurement and assessment methods, and the arising interventions in the urban landscape. The decision-making framework comprises a means of diagnosing urban challenges (the Urban Diagnostic Method), a city analysis method linking liveable sustainability with its measurement, an indicator-based measurement and assessment method (UK City LIFEn: UK City Liveable-sustainability Framework Edition N) for measuring and assessing liveable sustainability at the city scale, and a decision-making process (the Liveable Cities Method) that determines the need for, and resilience of, interventions in the urban landscape.

Briefing: Embedding transdisciplinarity in engineering approaches to infrastructure and cities

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Smart Infrastructure and Construction, 2020

Many of the specialisms on which infrastructure and cities rely for their effective design, const... more Many of the specialisms on which infrastructure and cities rely for their effective design, construction, operation, governance, management and maintenance are underpinned by the principles of certainty, accuracy, precision and prediction. Not least of these is civil engineering. Yet infrastructures and cities are characterised by complexity and emergence. In recent decades, understandings of infrastructures and cities have begun to reflect these properties, and in particular, transdisciplinarity is promoted as critical to advancing these new understandings. However, this presents conceptual and operational challenges for civil engineering, as there is a fundamental mismatch between the certainty, accuracy and precision required by engineers and the complexity and emergence of transdisciplinary research approaches. The forms of value arising from these research approaches are themselves contentious, leaving engineers exposed to competing claims and making them ill prepared to exploi...

Improving city-scale measures of livable sustainability: A study of urban measurement and assessment through application to the city of Birmingham, UK

Cities, 2017

A comparison of energy systems in Birmingham, UK, with Masdar City, an embryonic city in Abu Dhabi Emirate

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2016

Adapting design management tools and techniques to meet the needs of a small charity

Birmingham's services evidence map dataset

Birmingham Services Data Mapping Dataset

Measuring city performance and diagnosing city challenges: a decision-making framework for policymaking and urban design

A regional approach to COVID-19 recovery: lessons from the West Midlands

Town Planning Review, 2022

Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified... more Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of 'fair dealing' under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

Birmingham's services evidence map dataset

This spreadsheet catalogues studies about the city of Birmingham, UK, that were used in an eviden... more This spreadsheet catalogues studies about the city of Birmingham, UK, that were used in an evidence mapping analysis. Studies have been selected based upon the following criteria. 1. Take as their subject area all or part of the city of Birmingham UK. 2. Are relevant to the delivery of the city's services, with particular attention paid to those services delivered in all or part by Birmingham City Council (either directly or indicrectly by a third party). This spreadsheet has been prepared by Joanne Leach, j.leach@bham.ac.uk, joanne@joanneleach.co.uk, 07785 792 187, The School of Engineering, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT. The spreadsheet has been prepared as part of the EPSRC-funded Urban Living Birmingham (ULB) research project, grant number EP/P002021/1, http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/P002021/1.

A regional approach to COVID-19 recovery: lessons from the West Midlands

Town Planning Review, 2022

Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified... more Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of 'fair dealing' under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

A comparison of energy systems in Birmingham, UK, with Masdar City, an embryonic city in Abu Dhabi Emirate

Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, Nov 1, 2016

Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified... more Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. • Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. • Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. • User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of 'fair dealing' under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) • Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

Briefing: Resource scarcity and resource security – a suppressed civil engineering challenge

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, May 1, 2017

While natural and manufactured resources provide the raw materials with which civil engineers wor... more While natural and manufactured resources provide the raw materials with which civil engineers work, the term 'resources' should always be considered in its wider interpretation and then in the context that resources are in many cases limited. That they should be used wisely (resource efficiency) is beyond contentionwe do this as a matter of courseyet considerations of where and how resources are obtained and refined for use are far less likely to feature in a civil engineer's psyche. Similarly, considerations of resource availability for others now, and importantly in the future, and the vulnerability of these resources to future supply disruption (e.g. for geopolitical reasons) are likely not to be in the forefront of our thinking when conducting our routine business. The ICE Research, Development & Innovation towards Engineering Excellence panel has chosen this topic as one of pressing importance across all the sectors that comprise civil engineering. Accordingly, the panel is promoting this topic for Research & Development Enabling Fund (R&DEF) proposals. This briefing note describes the prior work of the panel in exploring the extent of this issue, along with insights from current research, to raise awareness, encourage R&DEF proposals and prime debates on this topic.

The Liveable Cities Method: establishing the case for transformative change for a UK metro

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Feb 1, 2020

There is currently great interest in the creation of sustainable and liveable cities, both in the... more There is currently great interest in the creation of sustainable and liveable cities, both in the UK and globally. While it can be argued that good progress is being made in thinking about the needs of future cities, meeting these needs and aspirations in practice poses major challenges of understanding and measurement (what is meant by these terms and how can progress towards their achievement be measured?), complexity (cities are complex systems of systems with many interacting parts) and resilience (will interventions made today be relevant and effective in the future?). The Liveable Cities research programme created a systematic decision-making method for improving urban sustainability and liveability: the Liveable Cities Method (LCM). The LCM prioritises four criteriaindividual and societal well-being, resource security, resource efficiency and carbon dioxide emissions as a proxy for environmental harmin an interconnected framework and assesses the need for, and the resilience of, interventions designed to move cities towards improved sustainability and liveability. This paper illustrates the LCM through an example intervention made to the city of Birmingham, UK, and highlights how addressing sustainability and liveability in this way offers unique opportunities for the UK civil engineering profession to lead thinking among urban professionals. 8 Cite this article Leach JM, Rogers CDF, Ortegon-Sanchez A and Tyler N (2020) The Liveable Cities Method: establishing the case for transformative change for a UK metro.

The urban futures methodology applied to urban regeneration

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Mar 1, 2012

Making cities more sustainable is a top priority-for national governments, for cities and for the... more Making cities more sustainable is a top priority-for national governments, for cities and for the people who live, work and visit urban areas. The past decade has seen a concerted UK effort to develop, apply and assess sustainability solutions for the present and near future; however, little has been done to test urban regeneration solutions beyond that. This paper describes a methodology that has developed future scenarios for the year 2050 against which to test the robustness of current engineering solutions, thereby providing unique insights into the potential impacts of present urban planning and design decisions, and thus financial investments. If a proposed solution delivers a positive legacy, regardless of the future against which it is tested, then it can be adopted with confidence. When there are very different outcomes depending on the future, the solution can either be modified to create an improved outcome regardless of the future or implemented in the knowledge of the likely impacts if the future develops in different ways. The urban futures methodology has been applied to the Lancaster Luneside East regeneration site, for which contextual information is described along with a justification for its use as a case study to trial the methodology.

Do measures of performance constrain creativity and imagination

Planners, architects, urban designers and other built environment professionals engage with a myr... more Planners, architects, urban designers and other built environment professionals engage with a myriad of checkboxes, guidelines, requirements and specifications, all of which potentially compromise creativity and innovation in urban design. Approaches that measure performance are accused of belying the nature of places as messy, plural, organic, accidental and emotive; trying to find a formula that works may tick boxes, but it risks creating soulless spaces, oppressing innovation and incorporation of inappropriate design elements. This paper argues that sustainability assessment methods do have something to contribute to creativity and innovation in urban design precisely because they encourage engagement with challenging and often complex societal priorities. Through interviews with built environment professionals and a critical examination of sustainability assessment methods, the authors suggest that such methods can promote creativity and innovation if they engage competently with sustainability, work at a scale that allows for both breadth and depth (typically greater than the building scale) and incorporate in their design a set of eight key characteristics designed to promote creativity and innovation.

Briefing: Embedding transdisciplinarity in engineering approaches to infrastructure and cities

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Jun 1, 2020

Many of the specialisms on which infrastructure and cities rely for their effective design, const... more Many of the specialisms on which infrastructure and cities rely for their effective design, construction, operation, governance, management and maintenance are underpinned by the principles of certainty, accuracy, precision and prediction. Not least of these is civil engineering. Yet infrastructures and cities are characterised by complexity and emergence. In recent decades, understandings of infrastructures and cities have begun to reflect these properties, and in particular, transdisciplinarity is promoted as critical to advancing these new understandings. However, this presents conceptual and operational challenges for civil engineering, as there is a fundamental mismatch between the certainty, accuracy and precision required by engineers and the complexity and emergence of transdisciplinary research approaches. The forms of value arising from these research approaches are themselves contentious, leaving engineers exposed to competing claims and making them ill prepared to exploit new insights to full advantage. This briefing explores these mismatches and contentions and proposes a set of four principles that underpin successful transdisciplinary research, laying the foundation for transforming research in infrastructure and cities by leveraging emergent, transdisciplinary approaches. Cite this article Leach JM and Rogers CDF (2020) Briefing: Embedding transdisciplinarity in engineering approaches to infrastructure and cities.

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Global Environm

Reading cities: Developing an urban diagnostics approach for identifying integrated urban problems with application to the city of Birmingham, UK

Cities, Mar 1, 2019

Reading cities: developing an urban diagnostics approach for identifying integrated urban problem... more

Do sustainability measures constrain creativity in urban design

Measuring city performance and diagnosing city challenges: a decision-making framework for policymaking and urban design

With the world's population continuing to urbanise, achieving liveable and sustainable cities is ... more With the world's population continuing to urbanise, achieving liveable and sustainable cities is essential for our survival. Liveable sustainability brings together sustainability's long-term, large-scale goals with liveability's more immediate ones. How liveable sustainability is measured and assessed varies by scale, scope, and geography, and there are many methods from which to choose. This confusion inevitably hinders progress against the numerous problems facing cities. Achieved through the development of a bespoke decision-making framework, this research reveals the issues with diagnosing urban challenges and with measuring and assessing urban liveability and sustainability. It exposes how existing methods fall short, largely because of how they use and manage data, and uncovers fundamental flaws in both decision-making based upon existing measurement and assessment methods, and the arising interventions in the urban landscape. The decision-making framework comprises a means of diagnosing urban challenges (the Urban Diagnostic Method), a city analysis method linking liveable sustainability with its measurement, an indicator-based measurement and assessment method (UK City LIFEn: UK City Liveable-sustainability Framework Edition N) for measuring and assessing liveable sustainability at the city scale, and a decision-making process (the Liveable Cities Method) that determines the need for, and resilience of, interventions in the urban landscape.

Briefing: Embedding transdisciplinarity in engineering approaches to infrastructure and cities

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Smart Infrastructure and Construction, 2020

Many of the specialisms on which infrastructure and cities rely for their effective design, const... more Many of the specialisms on which infrastructure and cities rely for their effective design, construction, operation, governance, management and maintenance are underpinned by the principles of certainty, accuracy, precision and prediction. Not least of these is civil engineering. Yet infrastructures and cities are characterised by complexity and emergence. In recent decades, understandings of infrastructures and cities have begun to reflect these properties, and in particular, transdisciplinarity is promoted as critical to advancing these new understandings. However, this presents conceptual and operational challenges for civil engineering, as there is a fundamental mismatch between the certainty, accuracy and precision required by engineers and the complexity and emergence of transdisciplinary research approaches. The forms of value arising from these research approaches are themselves contentious, leaving engineers exposed to competing claims and making them ill prepared to exploi...

Improving city-scale measures of livable sustainability: A study of urban measurement and assessment through application to the city of Birmingham, UK

Cities, 2017

A comparison of energy systems in Birmingham, UK, with Masdar City, an embryonic city in Abu Dhabi Emirate

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2016

Adapting design management tools and techniques to meet the needs of a small charity

Towards the establishment of a new transdisciplinary area of scholarship in infrastructure and cities: A literature review

Many of the specialisms upon which infrastructure and cities rely for their effective design, ope... more Many of the specialisms upon which infrastructure and cities rely for their effective design, operation, governance, management and maintenance are underpinned by the principles of certainty, accuracy, precision and prediction. Not least of these is civil engineering. Yet, infrastructures and cities are characterised by complexity and emergence. In recent decades, understandings of infrastructures and cities have begun to reflect these properties and, in particular, transdisciplinarity is promoted as critical to advancing these new understandings. However, this potentially presents conceptual and operational challenges for civil engineering (and other specialisms) as there is a fundamental mismatch between the certainty, accuracy, and precision required by engineers and the complexity and emergence of transdisciplinary research approaches. The forms of value arising from these approaches (i.e., the scientific and knowledge contributions) are themselves contentious, leaving practitioners exposed to competing claims and making them ill-prepared to exploit new insights to full advantage. This review explores these mismatches and contentions, laying a foundation for how civil engineers in particular (and other urban professionals, and indeed those from other disciplines) can conduct research in infrastructure and cities whilst leveraging emergent, transdisciplinary approaches. It informs the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC, www.ukcric.ac.uk). UKCRIC represents a paradigm shift in the UK's approach to infrastructure and cities research: how it is conceived, funded, organised and put into practice. Transdisciplinary research approaches have the potential to enable this paradigm shift. This report explores transdisciplinary research approaches and how they can add value to the study of infrastructure and cities, with a focus upon civil engineering. It explores two questions: are transdisciplinary research approaches suited to the study of infrastructure and cities, and are the studies of infrastructure and cities suited to transdisciplinary research approaches. In so doing, it tests the authors' working hypothesis that transdisciplinarity in this context must incorporate an ability to work constructively and collaboratively beyond one's own discipline by virtue of developing an understanding of the philosophies, cultures, languages, methodologies, and to some degree literatures, of all the disciplines involved in infrastructure and urban design, and thereby shape how all the disciplines influence the combined activity. This report examines how UKCRIC can foster transdisciplinary partnerships and activities, delivering academic and industry impact nationally and internationally.