PhD

The Bartlett Real Estate Institute (BREI) will draw on UCL’s long and substantial track-record of world-class research.

Studying for a doctorate with the BREI means being part of The Bartlett, UCL's global faculty of the built environment: a place with exceptional people, technology and research experience.

Why study for a PhD at the Bartlett Real Estate Institute?

The aims and objectives of the BREI will require new forms of research enquiry that are very likely to extend beyond a single narrow area. Such research can be described as interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary, and while this can be extremely exciting, it can also present challenges. Spanning disciplines will involve considering the following questions:

• What is the appropriate research philosophy and resultant methodology?
• What literature base will the research build on?
• What form of contribution will the PhD thesis make?

Pondering such questions is an essential part of the process of intellectual development that doctoral students undertake. However, in the case of the BREI, there will be a clear expectation that in addition to this academic contribution, our doctoral students will demonstrate a contribution to practice and policy.

Our Professional Doctorate Programme

Many who work in the broad world of real estate will have educated to degree level and will also be professionally qualified and accredited. For a number of people, career success may lead them to consider undertaking a doctorate.

The BREI is establishing the necessary infrastructure for a structured professional PhD course. This is unusual, since PhDs are typically intellectual journeys travelled alone by the student. The BREI Professional PhD Programme is a departure from this approach; it will instead seek to build a community of peers, all of whom are well established and successful in their career fields.

A calendar of structured events (some spread over 4 or 5 days) will allow those who working while studying to learn from each other and provide support and encouragement. This will provide significant additional opportunities to help candidates seeking to push existing knowledge boundaries and become recognised experts in their field.

The BREI’s Professional Doctorate Programme (PDP) will be centred on the premise that there is a need and an opportunity to challenge existing paradigms of what we understand by real estate, and in particular, what it attaches value to.

As well as being founded on inter/transdisciplinary approaches to research, the PDP will require PhD students to always consider the global context, even if their research draws on the extraordinary opportunities our London location offers.

Those considering our PDP may well have the objective of a change in career that does not involve becoming an academic. The inter/transdisciplinary nature of the BREI will provide opportunities to span the divides that exist between sectors, disciplines and specialisms that affect both the real estate sector and the built environment more generally.  

To support this, each year the PDP will run a Research Methodology seminar series that will expose students to the different research paradigms that are usually deployed within real estate and the built environment, as well as those outside, but relevant to, built environment study. PDP students will be encouraged to attend some of the wide-ranging postgraduate modules that are already taught across the Bartlett.