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.
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.
Selected research projects
Architecture for good – practising design as a socially and environmentally regenerative practice
Research by Jan Kattein exploring how architecture can be re-fashioned as a force for good, integrating social and environmental regenerative practice.
Dreams + Disillusions
Dreams + Disillusions, co-authored by CJ Lim and Luke Angers, examines the myriad ideas and ideologies that have shaped and reshaped architecture and cities.
Norman Foster – Editions Centre Pompidou
A monograph examining the work of architect Norman Foster through the lens of ecology, systems theory and the lasting influence of Richard Buckminster Fuller.
The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design
Essays by Tim Waterman exploring the entangled nature of utopian imagination, landscape and design, from food and politics to the commons and civic life.
Once Upon a China
Through comic-inspired drawings, CJ Lim recasts four great Chinese literary classics as architectural allegories of identity, consumerism, democracy and adaptability.
Landscape Citizenships
An edited collection extending growing scholarship on landscape democracy and justice, examining how landscape as everyday practice shapes politics and citizenship.