Urban Sustainability for the Twenty-Four Hour City: Development of Design-making Tools & Resources

This proposal brings together experts from design, engineering, construction, urban planning and IT, all of whom have worked on aspects of sustainability, from crime to accessibility and environmental sciences. The vision for the project is to support and enable sustainable and socially responsible urban design through the development of innovative, inclusive and practical decision-making tools & resources. These will be derived fror an in-depth understanding of the patterns of human/environment interaction, and will resolve practical urban design, operation and management problems, particularly in relation to the twenty-four hour city. The project uses the development of a generic process for sustainable design decisionmaking as the spine around which knowledge on the various dimensions of sustainability can be built. This is to enable multi-criteria decision-making and 'what if?' scenarios to be undertaken by key practitioners and stakeholders. The project has at its core three work packages addressing: (i) the process of sustainable design decision-making; (ii) land use in urban environments, and the relationship between diversity and social and economic vitality;(iii) the use of design for the reduction of actual and percieved crime and the creation of a positive experience of urban environments. Each peripheral work-package would develop further knowledge to add to the design decision-making resource, while work-package 10 contributes considerable ICT to support application and dissemination of knowledge.