Research Projects

Liveable Cities: Engineering cities for planetary and societal wellbeing

PIs: Helene Joffe with Nick Tyler (Engineering, UCL), Brian Collins (Engineering, UCL), Francesca Medda (Engineering UCL) and teams from Birmingham (Chris Rogers, PI), Southampton and Lancaster

£6,250,000 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (2012-2017);£2,200,000 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (2015-2018)

The broad vision of this project is to transform the engineering of cities to deliver societal and planetary wellbeing. A key challenge, however, is to ensure that radical engineering solutions take human dimensions of living and working in a city into account. A central element within this is to generate socially acceptable low-carbon solutions that individuals, families and communities have the desire to achieve. This means taking their aspirations for the future into account.

Through a combination of novel qualitative and quantitative research methodologies the UCL Psychology team are examining people’s aspirations and desires and how best they can be modified to successfully promote low-carbon living alternatives http://liveablecities.org.uk