Sustainable Urbanism and Landscape

The Bartlett School of Architecture tackles urgent global challenges like climate change, resource scarcity and equity through research in sustainability, technology and design.

Jan Kattein, Angel Yard. Photo by Jack Hobhouse. — **Image:** Angel Yard, Jan Kattein Architects. Aerial view of community hall and enterprise spaces. Photo by Jack Hobhouse.

The large-scale built and natural environment presents many of our most pressing concerns – from climate change, energy and resource scarcity, to social, political and economic equity. These are complex phenomena: we do not yet know how to change our behaviours individually and collectively to ensure the longterm sustainability of local and global ecosystems, or the energy challenges facing the world in the coming century.

The Bartlett School of Architecture has set a strategic aim of carbon and energy reduction, in line with UCL’s Grand Challenge of Sustainable Cities, under which our research addresses these problems. Our research into environmental, technological, social and cultural sustainability is inherently connected to addressing the climate-change issues facing the world. From large-scale engineered urban infrastructures and resource management to indigenous-based or bottom-up community initiatives, or environmental decarbonisation technologies, we examine how architectural sustainability is central to the discipline’s contribution to improving 21st-century design and inhabitation.