Platform: Complex Built Environment Systems

CBES aims to tackle the following three main issues:1. How to design, maintain and operate the built environment while minimising the emissions of greenhouse gases. 2. How to adapt the environment, fabric and services of existing and new buildings to climate change.3. How to improve the environment in and around buildings to provide better health, comfort, security and productivity.Initially, in the 1950's and 1960's, most building science research focused on applying physics, chemistry etc to the environment in buildings. Many of the problems that can be tackled by this single discipline approach have now been solved; the key remaining problems are multi-disciplinary. Hence, Bartlett research in this area expanded to involve multidisciplinary activities across the built environment, with building scientists working closely with planners, architects etc. In the 1980's and 1990's, much of this work still relied on individual disciplines using existing tools and techniques from their own discipline by simply applying them along with tools from other disciplines. More recently, the strategic direction of CBES has been shaped by the necessity for a truly multidisciplinary approach. The development of CBES is therefore very much in line with the recent key recommendation of the Second International Review of Engineering that academia, industry and government develop strategies to encourage increased linkage of engineering research to more basic mathematical, physical, chemical and biological sciences, so that scientific and engineering discoveries may stimulate even more and broader discoveries and their applications. The strategic development of CBES rests upon two key factors:1. The identification and development of innovative opportunities to advance academic and industrial collaboration beyond the traditional territories of the Built Environment. The group is already taking an international lead in work involving significant breakthroughs in health, energy and conservation issues related to environment in buildings. Its success in developing this multidisciplinary approach has been rewarded through increased and more diverse research funding (4.4M since 2000, 56% EPSRC funded). CBES have already developed a unique set of interdisciplinary projects, working with acarologists, epidemiologists, sociologists, chemists and conservators, in institutions across the UK and worldwide. However, there is considerable potential for new projects working with clinicians, climate physicists, neurologists, electrical engineers, nano-technologists, economists and crime scientists to tackle key questions which determine the physical environment in and around buildings. Working with these disciplines is vital in order to tackle such key problems as the impact that climate change is having on the urban heat island and environmental control in buildings, how occupants interact with the built environment to control and adapt their environment, how we neurologically assess the lit environment within buildings and the impact that the built environment is having on health.2. The development of the required theoretical cross disciplinary techniques to undertake these new challenges. CBES aims to work with the most appropriate discipline specialists and to provide the most appropriate techniques for solving the practical problems facing the built environment. For example, CBES feels there is considerable potential to adapt epidemiological techniques for the building stock as a whole. Also developments in complexity theory are applicable to many of the research challenges the research group is currently studying but so far have not been applied to these areas.If CBES is to fully achieve its planned strategic development, Platform funding is required to provide a step change in the way it undertakes research and works with new disciplines.