UCL Grand Challenge of Sustainable Cities

Lead:

• Dr Shaun Scholes (Health and Social Surveys Group, UCL Institute of Epidemiology & Health)

Main collaborator:

• Professor Laura Vaughan (Bartlett School of Graduate Studies)

Additional collaborators:

• Dr Jennifer Mindell (UCL Institute of Epidemiology & Health)
• Dr Angela Donkin (UCL Institute of Health Equity)

Food-related ill-health in the UK is responsible for about 10% of deaths and illnesses and costs the NHS an estimated £6 billion annually. Money, transport, the availability of healthy food, cooking facilities and knowledge and skills all affect people’s ability to eat a healthy, balanced diet.

This study aims to involve secondary school pupils in understanding and evaluating the issues which influence our diet, and define a ‘healthy food basket’ which is appropriate for different social and cultural groups. The project will also survey students to identify how often healthy food items are bought and how easy it is to buy healthy food in their local communities.

A paper describing the pilot study, the main findings, and methodological lessons learned will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. The project team will also present the findings at a year 10/11 (GCSE cohort) assembly (or support pupils in doing so) to inform students of academic research as a potential career option.

Lead:

• Dr. Catalina Spataru  (UCL Energy Institute)

Main collaborator:

• Dr. Hervé Borrion  (Department of Security and Crime Science)

Additional collaborators:

• Dr. Ivan Wall (Department of Biochemical Engineering)
• Prof. Perry Elliott, (Young Institute of Cardiovascular Science)
• Dr. Pier Lambiase (Cardiology Department Heart Hospital)

This project aims to develop new techniques for managing the risk of power blackouts in emerging energy grids. Healthcare, security and financial systems across the world depend on reliable power supplies, which are vulnerable to disturbance from natural hazards and technological failure.

This project aims to understand how complex systems react to disturbances, to support improved forecasting and contingency planning by drawing on power engineering, energy, mathematics, medicine, operational research and security, to develop new approaches to modelling power blackouts.

Two workshops with experts from a range of different disciplines will enable us to understand why systems fail and what we can learn from different systems. Collaborators will co-author a research paper aimed at wider academic dissemination.

Lead:

• Dr Emily Morris   (Institute of the Americas)

Main collaborator:

• Dr Julio Davila   (Development Planning Unit)

Additional collaborators:

• Prof. Nick Tyler (Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering)
• Dr Juan Llanes Guerra (Centro de Estudios del Medio Ambiente (CEMA), University of Havana)
• Antonio Villasol (Ministerio del Transporte)

The aim of the project is to design and assess alternative transport strategies for Havana. The project will consider the most efficient modes of transport for people and goods, and the role of transport in promoting public health, reducing CO2 emissions, reducing import dependency and creating a safer and more liveable city.

The project will highlight Havana’s need for a climate-friendly transport strategy by strengthening collaboration between UCL-based researchers with the aim of influencing changes in urban transport policy in Havana. The participation of a researcher from Havana University’s Centro de Estudios del Medio Ambiente (Centre for Environmental Studies) and confirmed interest of the Cuban Ministry of Transport means not only that UCL research collaborators will have unique access to the information on Havana’s transport challenge, objectives and constraints required to refine the research question, but also that the work can feed directly into policy-making in Cuba.

Lead:

• Dr Stephen Marshall (Bartlett School of Planning)

Main collaborator:

• Prof Nick Tyler (Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering)

Additional collaborators:

• Dr Catherine Holloway (Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering)
• Prof Michael Batty (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis)
• Dr James Cheshire (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis)

The ‘City for Human Locomotion’ is the vision of an urban environment designed to expedite travel on foot, by bicycle, wheelchair and other human-powered modes (rollerblades, skateboards, scooters, etc.).

Currently there is a vicious circle whereby the lack of knowledge about the full potential for human-powered modes leads to a lack of provision; this discourages use of these modes; and their invisibility hinders the political will to cater for their use. This situation could be turned around, if we could assemble and integrate more knowledge on all these fronts.

The primary aim is to assemble baseline knowledge about the different human-powered modes, especially those about which less is known (e.g. wheelchair use, rollerblades, skateboards, etc.), their potential conflicts and synergies, and their potential roles in a sustainable ‘city for human locomotion’; hence to gauge the potential for where future research would best be directed.

Lead:

• Prof. Susan Michie (Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology)

Main collaborator:

• Richard Jackson (UCL Estates)

Additional collaborators:

• Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering
• UCL Human Resources
• UCL Union

Our study will bring together environmental expertise and behavioural science to investigate how people can be encouraged to reduce the amount of waste they produce, choose reusable rather than disposable products, and recycle their rubbish.

The study will investigate current waste trends and a survey to understand the factors that affect our likelihood to recycle or throw away our rubbish. This will be the basis of co-designing a prototype intervention with a building users group established for this purpose. This study will produce a prototype intervention, outcome measures and a building users group that is planned to lead to a subsequent pilot of implementing the intervention and evaluating its impact in a controlled trial to pilot the methods and feasibility of a controlled trial and methods for measuring the impact of the intervention.

GCSC Theme: Olympic Legacy

Lead: Matthew Wood-Hill (UCL Development Planning Unit)

Main collaborators:

Gynna Millan (UCL Development Planning Unit)
Steph Patton (UCL Anthropology, Manager, MyStreet: Doc in a Day, Open City London)
Dr Michael Stewart (UCL Anthropology)

Additional collaborators: Etienne von Bertrab (UCL Development Planning Unit)
Prof Muki Haklay (UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering)

Project: This project seeks to explore the potential of visual mapping methodologies (video and social media) to understand the impact of the London 2012 Olympics on open spaces in the city. The project therefore seeks to capture the ‘moment in time’ nature that the event provides to explore the specific questions ‘Whose Olympics? And whose London in 2012?'

The contentious use and ownership of open spaces in London is receiving increasing attention in the public eye. Since 2008 the Justice in the Green project has explored mapping techniques on the fringes of the Olympic site, revealing certain disconnects between legacy planners’ intentions and the aspirations of local residents and users of open spaces. Attention given to the Games has not focused explicitly on the changing importance of urban open spaces in enabling greater inclusion in the Olympic experience.

The project will operate through an online platform hosted by the established MyStreetFilms portal created by UCL Anthropology in association with Open City London. Our proposed platform, ‘MyOlympics’, will use this existing network to call for contributions from members of the public to visually map how open spaces in London are being transformed by the Olympics and related events, and how individuals are specifically experiencing these spaces during and immediately after the Games as the legacy begins to take shape. The anticipation in the build-up to the Olympics and the ‘feel good factor’ generated during the event ensures a high level of public and media interest. What happens in the period immediately after the event offers fertile grounds for continued research.

GCSC Theme: The Cultural City

Lead: Dr Richard Taws (UCL History of Art)

Main collaborator: Dr Jann Matlock (UCL French and SELCS)

Additional collaborator: Dr Barbara Penner (UCL Barlett School of Architecture)

Project: Our project will create a network of scholars in Europe and North America working on ruin, obsolescence, waste and demolition in modern cities. UCL Grand Challenges funding will support two focused interdisciplinary workshops and site visits designed to establish research connections and develop international dialogues. A website will accompany the workshops and a published collection of papers will disseminate this research to a wide public and generate international frameworks for future collaborations.

We begin with the premise that sustainable cities must contemplate their pasts as well as their futures. While researching the ephemeral aspects of cities might seem antithetical to an analysis of the sustainable city, we argue that the broken and the ruined, the ephemeral and the short-lived, the torn-down and the wasted, are crucial to policy as well as practices of sustainability. Ephemeral Cities will provide a historical and contextual investigation of buildings, objects, images and spaces that either fell by the wayside or were never meant to last. Investigating how ephemerality came to stand for the experience of urban life, we will ask how lessons from the past might help us meet the challenge presented by our own discarded objects in the cities of the future.

GCSC Theme: London

Lead: Dr Barbara Lipietz (UCL Development Planning Unit)

Main collaborator: Prof Mike Raco (UCL Bartlett School of Planning)

Additional collaborators: Prof Jennifer Robinson (UCL Geography); Prof Michael Edwards (UCL Bartlett School of Planning); Prof Susan Parnell (UCL Geography)

Project: This project aims to understand the processes shaping the possibilities for community voices to contribute to long-term strategic planning for sustainable urban development. It will consider how democratic modes of governance shape long-term strategic planning and city visioning in two different contexts, London and Johannesburg, through a systematic comparison of the recently published Revised London Plan (2011) and Johannesburg’s Growth and Development Strategy 2040 (2011) to explore:

• the democratic and participatory processes through which the strategies were produced. Do these reflect wider international definitions of a ‘good governance’ agenda and meet expectations of democratic urban governance?
• the extent to which the strategies reflect the interests of local stakeholders (including neighbourhood, community-based organisations and advocacy groups) and, specifically, whether the contents of the plans reflect local residents’ concerns for sustainable development, especially in post-financial crisis contexts.

The project will be among the first systematic academic interrogations of the revised London Plan, meeting UCL’s wider mission to ‘contribute to the vibrancy and development of London as a world-leading city’ and its commitment to supporting community inputs to making sustainable cities. It will pilot an initiative to develop comparative methods and interpretive frameworks in urban governance appropriate for an international approach to urban studies.

GCSC Theme: Sustainable Resources

Lead: Dr Fuzhan Nasiri (UCL Bartlett School of Graduate Studies)

Main collaborator: Dr Sarah Bell (UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering)

Project: Globally, reclaimed water is increasingly supplied for various uses due to aggravating water shortages caused by growing urban communities and climate change, more stringent wastewater effluent standards, and the expanding availability of high-performing and cost-effective water reclamation technologies. In the United Kingdom, however, there has not been a consistent and considerable pattern of urban water-reuse because historically there has been a sufficient supply of water. With highly increasing water demand in the South-East and more droughts due to climatic change, there is growing public and political consensus to establish water-reuse networks as part of a sustainable cities agenda. At present, the projects within the UK have focused on building and development-scale water re-use. However, greater opportunities exist, at a larger scale, with urban water reuse networks, to rebalance water use and demand, tap into unconventional water resources and improve the economic and environmental performance of urban water supply systems.

This project serves as a pilot study to investigate the feasibility, costs, and benefits of developing water reuse networks in urban areas with a particular emphasis on London. The aim of this pilot study is to develop a multi-university EPSRC research network and proposal by July 2012.

GCSC Theme: Sustainable Resources

Lead: Tse-Hui Teh (UCL Bartlett School of Planning)

Main collaborator: Dr Barbara Penner (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture)

Additional collaborators: Dr Sarah Bell (UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering); Virginia Gardiner, Loowatt

Project: Our proposed workshop responds to the peculiar silence about sanitation systems in relation to sustainability. Discussions around sustainable cities focus on issues like farming, recycling, and water conservation, all of which intersect with sanitation and resource recovery, but rarely address them. New Loos for London? holds that sanitation must be part of any meaningful strategy for sustainable cities.

Our project aims to explore the viability of dry sanitation in London. In an age of water, energy and fertilizer scarcity, dry sanitation requires fewer resources to transport and treat waste than waterborne systems and offers improved nutrient recovery. A two-day invited workshop brings together key figures from bodies that deal with waste and sewers, entrepreneurs and designers developing alternative systems, cultural commentators, and interested members of the community. It will allow a focused exchange of information and views about the main technological, social, logistical and political implications of such schemes.

New Loos for London? develops on Tse-Hui Teh’s PhD research about London which found that some environmentally aware citizens were already using “yellow mellow” toilet flushing techniques to conserve water. This project aims to build on their informal efforts by considering how to implement dry sanitation systems at a community level.

GCSC Theme: Sustainable Resources

Lead: Dr Murray Fraser (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture)

Main collaborator: Dr Camillo Boano (UCL Development Planning Unit)

Additional collaborators: Nasser Golzari and Yara Sharif, Palestine Regeneration Team (PART)

Project: The project is to design an entirely new building type called the ‘Learning Room’, which is being conceived in this first instance as helping with reconstruction in the Gaza Strip. It is conceived as a prototype for a series of annexes to existing schools that can be applied in many countries if the prototype proves successful.

There are two key aims for the Learning Room: firstly, to provide a community centre where residents can meet together to discuss urban regeneration plans; secondly, to act as a knowledge base for innovative forms of sustainable construction that can help with rebuilding in conditions of chronic lack of building materials, energy, water etc. We are also currently writing a self-build manual to help Gazans create low-energy dwellings when rehousing, and the Learning Room will thus act as the location where this knowledge can be disseminated. Families rebuilding their houses will be able to study different forms of construction and low-cost passive energy-saving devices. It will act as a ‘community laboratory’ in some of the poorest and toughest places on earth.

A test site has been identified for a prototype Learning Room in a school in the Zaytouna neighbourhood of Gaza City, with that project being funded by UN-Habitat with support from the Palestinian Housing Council, Gaza University, Islamic Relief and other bodies.

Lead:

• Dr Charlotte Lemanski (Geography)

Main collaborator:

• Dr Colin Marx (Development Planning Unit)

The aim of this project was to run a small workshop where invited speakers would discuss the absent role of ‘The City’ (in a spatial sense) from popular analyses of urban poverty.

Although poverty is an inherently spatial concept, the way in which the space of the city is represented in analyses of urban poverty is surprisingly uni-dimensional, focusing almost exclusively on the physical distribution of poverty. Consequently, the aim of the workshop was to explore how approaching the ‘spaces of poverty’ from multiple perspectives could contribute towards more effective and just poverty reduction policies.

By bringing together scholars from different disciplines (e.g. geographers, planners, economists), as well as development policy experts (e.g. from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the World Bank), the workshop facilitated wide discussion regarding the role of urban space in the theory and practice of urban poverty.

Urban poverty is a key challenge for Sustainable Cities, especially as those cities with the fastest growing urbanisation rates are frequently also those with the highest rates of urban poverty.

• List of contributors to the workshop
  

Lead:

• Dr Robert Biel (Development Planning Unit)

Main collaborator:

• Dr Gemma Moore (UCL Public Engagement)

Additional Collaborators

• Dr Kaori O’Connor (Anthropology)
• Marina Chang (Development Planning Unit)

Agri-food systems in London exemplify unsustainability. This project aimed to conduct a pilot study into the current landscape of food and agriculture in London, and to use university-community engagement to build dynamic knowledge.

The project involved a large number of UCL staff and students, including the Food Junctions network (33 departments at UCL and 25 community groups). Multi-disciplinary expertise was provided by members of UCL with an interest in food and agriculture, including those involved in public health, medicine, anthropology, geography, archaeology, soil science, environment, public policy and economy.

Around 300 guests attended The Food Junctions Cookbook launch party, held in the North Cloisters at UCL on the 27^th October 2011.

Multi-sited ethnographical investigations produced a research report with a comprehensive, but critical, analysis of the current landscape of food and agriculture in London.

Lead:

• Dr Luiza Campos (Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering)

Main collaborator:

• Dr Saul Purton (Structural and Molecular Biology)

Additional Collaborators:

• Alessandro Marco Lizzul (Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering)
• Dr Frank Baganz (Biochemical Engineering)
• Dr Marcos Cruz (Bartlett School of Architecture)
• Paul Hellier (Mechanical Engineering)
• Richard Beckett    Bartlett School of Architecture

Algae has the potential to become a renewable source of biomass. This project investigated the feasibility of integrating algal production with common urban waste streams, such as carbon dioxide from exhaust gases and nutrients from wastewater.

Two working prototype PBRs (photobioreactors) have been built, a 10 litre and a 60 litre model. The larger photobioreactor, a development based on the original prototype, has been placed in the Darwin Building’s green house.Algal production can be integrated with many common waste streams, including diesel exhaust emissions, and wastewaters, providing environmental benefits to both air and water quality.

Biomass productivities within the reactor are high, but require considerable energy input. Work is ongoing to optimise the process and reduce costs.

• Visit the Algae@UCL group website
  

Lead Applicant:

• Dr Nick Shepley (English)

Main Collaborator:

• Prof Iain Borden (Bartlett School of Architecture)

Additional Collaborators:

• Dr Andrea Fredericksen (UCL Art Museum)

The major aims of the one-day festival and the exhibitions were to present specialist research material from many disciplines, and to do so in vibrant, accessible, and sustainable ways, suitable to a broad audience.

Inspired by the spirit of the oympics, the event allowed individuals from around the world to share their explorations of the city with an unusually broad audience (almost 500 people – academic and non-academic – from across the UK, Europe, and the US pre-registered for the day, and an extra 100 attended on the day).

The event and the exhibitions juxtaposed and interconnected research from The Bartlett, Birkbeck, Central St Martins; the Slade; CASA (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis), UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Department of English, UCL City Centre, UCL Urban Laboratory, UCL Department of Geography and UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

The event identified areas of shared interest and was the starting point for a number of collaborative partnerships: with the charity First Story, the Man Booker Prize, UCL English Department’s City Centre, and UCL’s Urban Laboratory.

• Visit the One day in the City webpage