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Centre for Urban Regional Ecology (CURE)
Part of the School of Environment and Development

Our Research

WaterProof Northwest

Following on from the success of the ENMaR project, Mersey Basin Campaign (MBC) wanted to deliver a project to further engage local authorities (and in particular planners) in the delivery of the EU’s Water Framework Directive. It was decided that a partnership project between the University of Manchester and MBC would be organised and that the project would use the process of scenario planning to identify the challenges and opportunities that could impact on delivery of the WFD in the Northwest. The overall aim of the project was to produce four contrasting scenarios that could be used to enable better planning and decision-making with regards to the future management of the region’s water environment.

Project

It was decided that 2030 would be the timeframe for the scenarios to complement a similar set of scenarios developed by the Environment Agency. A leaflet was produced promoting the project aims, which was then distributed widely at MBC events. In the project’s early stages, roundtable meetings were organised to identify drivers for change that would possibly impact on society and the environment over the next 20 years. A long list of all the possible drivers was produced and through further consultation, a shortlist of priority drivers was produced. Further consultation was provided by MBC who went out to key-stakeholders and conducted interviews that were then transcribed and the results fed into the University’s research. Along with a large amount of desktop research, these drivers helped inform the scenario prototypes. An artist was commissioned to produce visual representations of the prototype scenarios. Further consultation was then done assessing the prototype scenarios and their accompanying images. An interactive display was produced which featured a brief summary of each scenario as well as their accompanying images. The display board was taken to various events and people were asked to cast a vote as to which scenario they felt was the most likely vision of the Northwest in 2030. This display board was also a valuable tool for raising awareness of the issues and promoting the project to a wider audience The University of Manchester then produced the final scenarios and the results were disseminated via a half-day event and a final report.

How we did it

Publicity

The WaterProof Northwest leaflet and display were used to publicise the project. The project had a dedicated page on the MBC website and an e-newsletter was also produced and sent out to stakeholders. The final report and event publicised the results and outputs of the project.

Project Value and funding Sources

Funding of £49,000 was provided by the Environment Agency. United Utilities contribution was in-kind, through providing a project manager for the project.

Who was involved?

MBC’s Policy Advisor – acted as project manager for the project, liaised with the University, commissioned production of the leaflet, organised roundtable meetings, conducted interviews with stakeholders and organised the final event.

University of Manchester – conducted research for the project, led roundtable meetings and workshops and produced the final scenarios and report.

Environment Agency – funded the project and helped inform the scenarios.

United Utilities – provided project manager for the project and helped inform the scenarios.

MBC’s Graduate Intern – made reports of discussions at roundtable meetings and workshops, made audio recordings of interviews and commissioned their transcription, project managed the production of the interactive display board.

Stakeholders – members of United Utilities, the Environment Agency, MBC and the local authorities of Manchester City Council, Salford City Council and Trafford City Council, all provided input into the development of the scenarios.

Lesson learned

Engagement is part of the product – the process of engaging with stakeholders throughout the project was important for two reasons. It helped shape the scenarios and it raised awareness of the issues.

Application of futures research to strategic planning

As a key part of development of the Environment Agency Corporate Strategy for 2010-2015, the organization has sought to understand some of the range of pressures likely to result in the environmental challenges that it may be called upon to face.

This strategy review programme was directed to the Board as a contribution to anticipatory thinking and forward programme development.

The role of CURE was to provide expert advice and analysis, generally on the prospects for UK environmental policy: and particularly on 5 key themes as below. A fully detailed report based on consultation interviews workshops and policy reviews was prepared for each of these. The summaries were published in a special issue of Environmental Scientist, and launched at the Royal Society by Professor Bob Watson, Chief Scientist to DEFRA.

Sponsor: Environment Agency (lead contractor - SAMI Consulting)

Research programme: November 2007 – May 2009

Contact: Joe Ravetz joe.ravetz@manchester.ac.uk

Further information: udpate report July 2009

Publications

 

Climate and Public Health Risks – a challenge of this new decade

Continuing urban climatological research at the University of Porto, Portugal has led to investigations into the links between the urban heat island, lifestyle, living conditions and ill-health. Dialogue with public health specialists has identified a need for a stronger theoretical and methodological basis for these enquiries and has shifted the emphasis to the health effects of extreme weather episodes (heat waves and prolonged cold spells). To develop these aspects the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has supported an initiative to upgrade post-graduate training in this area and to underpin the continuing research. An international seminar will be held in November 2010 with contributions from Manchester on Health and Environmental Justice and Urban Areas, Risk Assessment in the NHS and Methods and Techniques in Bioclimatology.

Project Leader: Professor Ana Monteiro of the Department of Geography, University of Porto. Portugal.

Publications

EcoCities

Eco Cities is a joint initiative between the University of Manchester and office provider Bruntwood. The project looks at the impacts of climate change and at how we can adapt our cities to the challenges and opportunities that a changing climate presents.

It is an interdisciplinary research project which draws on the expertise of Manchester Architecture Research Centre, Centre for Urban Regional Ecology, Brooks World Poverty Institute and Manchester Business School.

The core aim of Eco Cities is to create a climate change adaptation blueprint for Greater Manchester, by the end of 2011. The blueprint will be based on leading scientific research, will include an exploration of possible future scenarios for Manchester, and will incorporate case studies at three spatial scales: building, neighbourhood and conurbation. As a decision-aiding approach, it is hoped that the blueprint will become a key resource for planners and other relevant stakeholders in the city region as they seek to adapt to climate change.

Central to all the work of Eco Cities is the concept of ‘building adaptive capacity’ i.e. helping cities to build the skills, knowledge and expertise necessary to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Eco Cities will not presume to take decisions for stakeholders or look to create a ‘one size fits all’ adaptation approach. Instead, Eco Cities will seek to visualise possible futures, enable information sharing and work directly with key stakeholders to help them plan and respond locally to the impacts of a changing climate.

Eco Cities also has a strong international dimension and seeks to position Manchester at the centre of a global network of individuals and organisations with an interest in climate change adaptation. This network will help us to share best practice on how cities are designed, built and managed in the face of a changing climate. Manchester will benefit from mutual learning with partner cities including Dhaka, Austin Texas, Nagoya and Singapore.

Key contact: ecocities@manchester.ac.uk

Ecosystem services on an urbanizing planet: What 2 billion new urbanites means for air and water


Cities are expected to add two billion inhabitants in the next twenty years, particularly in the developing world. With this major demographic transition, the challenge of providing fresh, safe water to urban inhabitants takes on global urgency. However, there is no current analysis focused on cities of the world that can be used to identify the cities most at risk of water shortage and the strategies now used and that might be used in the future to mitigate that risk. Cites over 50,000 have been ranked according to an aridity index, to their position in river basins, with regard to density of upstream land and water use, and according to water availability within 200 km of the city. This global analysis provides a broad-brush picture of the variables associated with the greatest water challenges. Data about water delivery to individual cities is not readily available, but a detailed literature search enables an analysis to be made in terms of three major categories of cities, those in arid areas, those reliant on water abtracted from rivers which may be polluted by human activity upstream, and those which are fast growing but poor. Strategies ranging from building new reservoirs and transporting groundwater from distant aquifers, to individual household boreholes, wells and tanks and purchasing bottles and sachets of “pure water” from vendors are assessed.

The project is funded by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA and the Nature Conservancy, USA.

Project leaders are Robert McDonald of the Nature Conservancy, Arlington, USA and Peter Marcotullio of the City University of New York, USA

Papers from the project are currently in preparation.

EUCO2 80/50

The EUCO2 80/50 initiative is being carried out with Metrex, the network of European Metropolitan Regions and Areas, with the aim of understanding how to enable Europe's metropolitan regions to assess their Greenhouse Gas emissions and to explore effective mitigation strategies.

CURE is working with partners in the Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

The project uses the GRIP process (Greenhouse Gas Regional Inventory Protocol), an approach developed at the University of Manchester by Dr Sebastian Carney and now recommended by the EU Covenant of Mayors. It is a stakeholder-oriented approach focused on mutual learning and structured around three stages:

  1. Setting up a regional Greenhouse Gas inventory (or several)
  2. Developing energy scenarios
  3. Using the scenario outputs to inform plans

Currently, working on the second of these stages, researchers are running scenario sessions in 15 metropolitan regions.

The inventories are available in the interim report. The scenarios will be published in the project report in March 2010. A series of academic outputs will follow, including a variety of international conference presentations and academic papers relating to scenario construction, energy policy formation and other aspects of science and technology studies.

As the sole academic partner, CURE is responsible for delivering this project in collaboration with each one of the regions.

Contact: sebastian.carney@manchester.ac.uk

Global Environmental Change and Urban Land Use Change in Peri-urban Area: A case study of Taipei-Taoyuan area

Peri-urbanization, both as a social phenomenon and a physical transformation of landscapes, can be regarded as an impetus for global environmental changes. Peri-urban areas are frequently characterized by valuable natural environments and resource bases, and can provide essential life-support functions for urban residents. The land use and land cover change in peri-urban areas resulting from urban sprawl, and consequent transformations in the biophysical and socioeconomic systems, are often ignored by urban planning professionals and urban and rural land administrators. Almost 80% of Taiwan’s people currently live in urban areas, making it an urbanized nation, and approximately 90% of the entire population reside on the western coastal plain, where peri–urbanization is increasing environmental pressure and already threatens the cities’ life-supporting environments. The projects objectives are:

The project is funded by Grant No. NSC 96-2415-H-305-012-MY3 of the National Science Council in Taiwan. The Project leader is Professor Shu-Li Huang of the Graduate Institute of Urban Planning, National Taipei University, Taiwan.

Publications

EU COST Action C22 Urban Flood Management

The main objective of this COST Action which ran from 2004 to 2009 was to increase knowledge required for preventing and mitigating potential flood impacts to urban areas by exchanging experiences, developing integrated approaches, and by promoting the diffusion of best practices in Urban Flood Management. The main objective of the Action was to increase the knowledge required for preventing and mitigating potential flood impacts to urban areas by exchanging experiences, developing integrated approaches, and by promoting the diffusion of best practices in Urban Flood Management. Secondary objectives were to gather and share information on the subject across Europe with respect to theory, methods, and practical experiences; process and present the information in a form that others can learn from it; initiate R&D projects for the EU’s 7th Framework programme; stimulate national R&D initiatives and increase awareness of the importance of UFM in general.

The Project was led my Prof. Chris Zevenbergen (Netherlands). The other UK partners were the Pennine Water Group and the Building Research Establishment and European partners came from Cyprus, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Spain.

CURE participants: Ian Douglas, Nigel Lawson, Juliet Richards, Joanne Tippett and Iain White.

Two large research projects involving CURE members, Risk Assessment and Risk Management in Small Urban Catchments (Era-Net-Crue) and SMARTeST (FP7), resulted from participation in COST Action C22:

CURE members have contributed several chapters to the principal books resulting from this project.

Publications

Key Contact: Nigel Lawson

Green and Blue Space Adaptation for Urban Areas and Eco Towns (GRaBS)

GRaBS or ‘Green and Blue Space Adaptation for Urban Areas and Eco Towns’ is an EU project, led by the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), with a network of leading organisations involved in integrating climate change adaptation into regional and local planning and development across Europe. With a total of fourteen partners, drawn from eight member states, the GRaBS project represents a broad spectrum of authorities and climate change challenges, all with varying degrees of strategic policy experience.

The project, made possible by the Interregional Cooperation Programme INTERREG IVC, financed by the European Union's Regional Development Fund, began in late 2008. Over three years it has four key objectives:

• raising awareness and expertise of key bodies and decision-makers responsible for spatial planning and development using green and blue infrastructure for adaptation;
• developing good practice adaptation action plans to co-ordinate the delivery of adaptation strategies in practice;
• to create an innovative assessment tool, developed by GRaBS partner University of Manchester, to aid the strategic planning of adaptation responses;
• and to use positive community involvement techniques to increase the understanding of stakeholders and community groups in planning, delivering and managing green and blue infrastructure.

Central to achieving these objectives is the exchange of knowledge and the GRaBS partners participate in a Mentoring Programme, which involves partner meetings, site visits, seminars and study tours. In 2010 Mentoring Visits have taken place in London, Amsterdam and Kalamaria with a study tour to Basel and Freiburg.

Key contact at the University of Manchester: Jeremy Carter (jeremy.carter@manchester.ac.uk)

Improving Sustainability Skills and Knowledge in the Workplace (Sustainable Consumption Institute)

The overall award was for £178k. The project ran from November 2008 – July 2009. The aim of the project was:

To identify effective training and communication methods to enable people to understand sustainability issues and take action – and to implement and assess a learning pilot which delivers this in Tesco.

Overall, this project and the subsequent ‘Scaling up project’ have involved 78 members of staff (30 in Stores and 48 in Head Office) attending training, with 105 additional members of staff being interviewed or attending focus groups. Five training courses have taken place, allowing for several cycles of action research. Training was carried out in Stores and in Head Office in both projects. The research team delivered the training.

The basis of the training was a whole-system framework for understanding and decision-making around sustainability. This framework draws from decades of previous development, including The Natural Step, Cradle-to-Cradle, Industrial Ecology, PP4SD and the Principal Investigator’s earlier work. New tools and processes were developed and tested in the action research. The framework became known as ‘the RoundView’.

The RoundView is a positive, whole-systems approach to sustainability. The motivation for its development was to make the ideas accessible to staff at all levels. The hope was to increase not just participants’ capacity to act, but also their motivation and enthusiasm for change, and their ability to communicate effectively with each other towards this end.

The RoundView supports leadership and vision on the scale necessary for people and businesses to thrive now and into the future. During this action research, new open-source visual and hands-on tools were developed to make it easier for anyone to understand and apply these ideas, and to explain them to others.

Key contacts: Dr. Joanne Tippett.

The International Council for Ecopolis Development

INTEcopolis is an organization promoting and helping to invent, research, design, plan and build ecologically healthy cities. It works in cross-cultural environments in the following areas:

INTEcopolis has engaged with several Chinese cities to develop new strategies for urban development. One of these cities, Huaibei in Anhui Province, faces the future decline of its coal mining industry and is already suffering environmental problems of air pollution, mine waste disposal and subsidence of the land over collapsed mine workings. Through INTEcopolis, information has been exchanged with local governments and NGOs in Greater Manchester and in 2010 a delegation from Huaibei visited Manchester, developed proposals for further links with Wigan and held a seminar in the School of Environment and Development to which several members of CURE contributed.

Professor Ian Douglas is the current President of INTEcopolis and Professor Rusong Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is the Executive Vice-President.

Publications

Douglas, I. Regeneration and socio-economic recovery following mine closures in England, UK (abstract).

‘Joining-up’ participation in environmental planning – developing a learning resource for capacity-building (Environment Agency - Working with North West Universities)

The overall award was for £14k. This project ran from Nov. 15 2005 – Oct. 30. 2006.

In this action research, a cohort of nine trainee facilitators were trained in a participatory planning methodology, developed by Tippett, called DesignWays. A report was published for the Environment Agency, which has been circulated in the NorthWest Office.

The interim results were presented at a peer reviewed international conference, Complexity, Democracy and Sustainability: The 50th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California, and formed the basis of a book chapter in the book, Advances in Urban Flood Management.

Ketso (Knowledge Exchange Work, Social Enterprise Spin-off)

Ketso is an interactive, hands-on toolkit for bringing meetings and workshops to life. It allows people to share their ideas, to learn from each other and to make informed decisions, enabling issues to be explored and priorities agreed upon. With its colourful, hands-on tools, Ketso is accessible to all. Everyone has an equal voice, allowing you to harness the creativity of people at all levels.

Ketso helps manage business meetings, stakeholder workshops, brainstorming sessions – and any other situation where people come together to talk and think creatively. Put simply: it helps people to get things done.

Ketso is based on over fifteen year’s development and research at the University of Manchester - from rural regeneration in Southern Africa; to community and business development in England's NorthWest; to working with students in schools and Universities; to consulting on the delivery of government policy.

Ketso was launched as a social enterprise in April 2009.

Open source to promote international knowledge exchange from research into sustainable development and consumption (Sustainable Consumption Institute)


The overall award was for £31k. The aim of the project is:

To create a framework for knowledge exchange that harnesses the power of open source to promote international knowledge exchange from research into sustainable development and consumption.

Recent developments in open source have shown great practical potential outside the realm of software. Open source may improve knowledge exchange from research by helping to:

There are a growing number of attempts to develop practical applications for open source; however, research on how it can be applied to knowledge exchange for sustainable development is in its infancy. We lack clear guidelines as to how to apply these ideas to different fields. If ideas are to spread and be applied successfully, it is important that they are adapted to suit different contexts. There is a danger that a new idea promoted as ‘best practice’ will get applied without considering what may need to be changed to make it work well in the new context. Open source will allow people to adapt the outcomes of sustainability research to different contexts, and to share the learning that emerges from this adaptation. This project will develop a framework for understanding open source and for applying it to knowledge exchange in the field of sustainable consumption and development. It will draw on existing literature and case studies, as well as interviews with key innovators in the field, to develop guidelines for successful application of open source. Thus new ideas about development that can help promote more sustainable behaviour amongst producers and consumers can be shared more widely.

Contact: Joanne Tippett

OPEN: One Planet Economy Network

This is a continuing research programme with various projects and phases, operating at UK level, together with applications at the Welsh and English regional levels. A further phase has started at the European level.

The One Planet Economy has been defined as providing human wealth and prosperity within the resource limits and climate system of One Planet. It uses footprint indices for carbon, bio-productive land, and water as the outcome measures for this. Current trends in footprints show that the real impacts of consumption in the service-based UK economy continue to rise, even while the direct CO2 emissions are slowly reducing. The programme which aims to lead towards the One Planet Economy has been set up as a network of research, demonstration and capacity building, hence the title One Planet Economy Network (OPEN). There are several levels to this research:

• The transformation agenda: On current experience, real structural change is slow, as the investment horizons are too short, and the barriers are too high. This calls for a transformation of markets, supply chains, resource efficiency and recirculation, infrastructure, organizations and consumption patterns.
• To achieve this we need ‘Pathways’ for the way ahead – visions, route maps, value chains and business models, decision points, and ways to manage risk and uncertainty. This point towards a more 21st century view of the ‘relational economy’ – where public, private, third and household sectors are each linked by networks of shared trust, values, reciprocity and responsibility.
• Each Pathway centres on a typical ‘value chain’ or ‘value cycle’, a connected set of economic, social, cultural or political incentives and relationships. This aims at value added across each of these areas: for instance as social capital rises the cost of financial capital falls and the viability of investment is increased.
• There is also a quantitative model, based on the REAP system, which focuses on the key parameters of trade, throughput, energy and carbon intensity in each of the sectors.

Sponsor: WWF-UK and WWF-Cymru

Research programme: Various phases from January 2005 - December 2010

Contact: Joe Ravetz joe.ravetz@manchester.ac.uk

Further details
main project sites – www.oneplaneteconomynetwork.org
www.wwf.org.uk/what_we_do/changing_the_way_we_live/economy/

Publications

Other publications are in preparation

PLUREL (Peri-urban Landuse Relationships)

Development and sprawl in peri-urban areas is one of the most critical issues facing the urbanizing world. In the UK there is the challenge of where to build 3 million houses in the next 12 years – green belts, flood plains, or just further into the countryside? And in the EU, there are much faster growing cities than in the UK – from the over-development of the Mediterranean coast, to the hyper-modernization of Central and Eastern Europe.

The PLUREL (“Peri-urban Land Use Relationships”) is a large €10m consortium research project, funded by the EC, and coordinated by the University of Copenhagen. It aims to provide a state of the art analysis of the problems and solutions for peri-urban areas. At the centre is a set of in-depth case studies in 7 countries, including one on the Manchester city-region which is led by CURE. This involves policy analysis and stakeholder dialogue: technical modelling and analysis: and a creative multi-media strand. This is complemented by economic and landuse modelling at regional and EU scale: analysis of response functions, settlement typologies, and governance systems: and a range of economic and social studies. CURE is also a co-author of the Synthesis Report and active in the knowledge transfer to policymakers.

Sponsor: European Commission, Framework Programme 6.

Research programme: January 2007 – January 2011

Contact: Joe Ravetz joe.ravetz@manchester.ac.uk

Further details
• main PLUREL project site - www.plurel.net
• Manchester project site – www.manchester.ac.uk/plurel

Publications

Others are in preparation

Risk Assessment and Risk Management in Small Urban Catchments (part of the ERA-Net CRUE programme)

The project which ran between 2006 and 2008 developed a methodological framework for flood management in small urban catchments. Based on case studies of urban river catchments of the cities Hamburg, Manchester, Bradford, Glasgow, Cologne, Dresden, Paris, and Lyon, the effectiveness and efficiency of non-structural measures to reduce flood damage was analysed and evaluated with respect to:

Outcomes included an understanding of, and thus a reduction in, the risk posed by small, often hidden, urban catchments; good practice solutions for managing the risks posed by urban catchments and a National and European assessment of how current planning systems both constrain, and also provide opportunities, to the sustainable and ecological management of small urban catchments.

The overall award for Era-Net Crue was Euro 237,000. The award to University of Manchester was Euro 90,000 (£63,300).

The partners were Pennine Water Group, University of Sheffield; BRE Scotland; Technical University, Hamburg, Germany and CEREVE, École de Ponts et Chaussées, Marne-la Vallée, France.

CURE participants: Ian Douglas, Nigel Lawson, Juliet Richards, Joanne Tippett and Iain White.

Publications

Key Contact: Nigel Lawson

Scaling up – training the trainers to improve sustainability skills and knowledge in the workplace (SCI)


The overall award was for £107k. The aim of the project was:

To find effective ways to embed new thinking that maximises people’s understanding of sustainability and changes in behaviour, in the context of ‘training the trainers’.

This initiative followed directly from an earlier nine-month SCI project entitled ‘Sustainability Skills in the Workplace’. Feedback from Tesco staff involved in the Sustainability Skills project was positive, demonstrating significant shifts in attitude and awareness, and increased motivation to take action towards a sustainable future. The Scaling-up project was designed to build on this, and explore how to spread and embed sustainability learning throughout the organisation.

In addition to developing and piloting the RoundView training course, the current project explored and tested mechanisms for ‘scaling-up’ sustainability learning, to encourage and enable rapid spread throughout a large organisation. In-depth focus groups and interviews were combined with a small-scale train-the-trainer pilot in Stores and Head Office. This was further informed through secondary research and an exploration of the diffusion of innovation and transition management literatures.

This research project ran from Aug. 2009 to January 2010. There was evidence of improved understanding and skills, and perhaps most important for Tesco, greater enthusiasm for change and actions being taken. The following statement made by course participants illustrate this positive response:

“A new business model for Tesco is required; the whole world needs to make the changes now. I am surprised how much I have changed my work and personal life with the knowledge I have.”

This work has been presented to, and received positive feedback from: the UNESCO Education for Sustainability Team, Jonathon Porritt CBE (Chair of Sustainable Development Commission 2000-2009), the University of Pretoria Centre for Responsible Leadership, delegates at a Talent2Trade summit and the World Economic Forum Sustainable Consumption Roundtable.

More information at the Project website and Roundview website.

Key contact: Dr. Joanne Tippett

Smart Resilience Technology, Systems and Tools (SMARTeST)

Technologies for improved safety of the built environment in relation to flood events

This EU Seventh Framework research programme, involving The University of Manchester and 8 other European research institutes, will develop flood resilience systems. It will seek to develop innovative and smart technology and products and to introduce new systems. The emphasis is on cost effective solutions to flood resilient systems in the urban environment. The project will result in the production of the next generation of Flood Resilience (FRe) technology. Such technology may be based on so called smart systems that incorporate sensor technology, automatic control, annovative materials and high levels of performance. This innovation will improve the effectiveness especially in the case of pluvial and flash floods where extreme short response time requires automatic deployment of FRe-systems. Due to the close involvement of commercial enterprises and service providers it is believed that the research outcomes of this project will be directly applied by the FRe industry and will especially trigger the development of new markets for the protection of urban infrastructure. The project will result in the development of guidance documents for validating the performance of FRe technology and in experimental studies the reliability of today’s Flood Resilience products and the ones arising from this project will be assessed. They can be the basis for the development of national standards. Case studies will be conducted in Greater Manchester as well as in several other European cities. More information on the SMARTeST project website.

Partners:
Building Research Establishment (BRE), UK (Co-ordinator);
University of Manchester, UK;
Technical University of Hamburg (TUHH), Germany;
Centre Scientifique et Technique du Batiment (CSTB), France;
University of Athens, Greece;
Cytanet, Cyprus;
Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche Eau Ville Environnement (CEREVE), France;
Technical University of Delft, Netherlands;
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UMP), Spain;
Leibniz Institute of Ecological and Regional Development (IOER), Germany.

Contacts:
Nigel Lawson nigel.lawson@manchester.ac.uk tel +44 (0)161 275 3633
Paul O'Hare paul.o'hare@manchester.ac.uk tel +44 (0)161 275 3652
Iain White iain.white@manchester.ac.uk tel +44 (0)161 275 6895

SUREGEN (Sustainable Urban Regeneration)

SURegen is an EPSRC "SUE 2" funded research project that aims to provide practical tools to deal with the complexity and uncertainty of the regeneration process.

Support for all engaged in regeneration will be provided through a web based application. This will contain a set of integrated decision support tools in the form of a Regeneration Workbench, will help professionals working in the field to make critical decisions, and help those who are new to the field acquire the skills needed. Development of the Workbench will be guided by good practice from past and current regeneration projects in the Northwest of England and elsewhere. A feature of the project is the collaboration between the research team and a wide range of industrial and local authority partners.

Sponsor: Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council: Sustainable Urban Environment programme 3.

Research programme April 2008 – December 2012

Further details: main project site www.suregen.co.uk

Contacts: Joe Ravetz joe.ravetz@manchester.ac.uk; Richard Kingston richard.kingston@manchester.ac.uk

Publications

Other publications are in preparation

 

 

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