Institute for Building & Urban Design

Planning and urban design are fundamental to shaping our cities and towns and have a pivotal role in achieving important development objectives, such as a wealthier and fairer, healthier and safer society. Being able to access the facilities in each city region in a time- and energy-efficient way is also key to the competitiveness of our cities.

Effective planning, which engages with developers and local communities, can enable partnership towards sustainable futures through processes of scenario-building, joint strategy and project delivery. As part of creating sustainable cities, the design and use of public spaces is essential to providing opportunities for recreation and a healthy life style. In fact, adequate access to green space is now recognised as an important factor in ensuring mental health. Moreover, greening our cities will make them more resilient to the effects of climate change.

In addition, the provision of well-designed, functional and energy-efficient buildings is now a fundamental pre-requisite within today’s society. The challenge of climate change and the UK goal of achieving an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 also pose serious questions for building designers and architectural engineers. Buildings presently account for some 45% of carbon emissions and it has been estimated that 80% of the buildings that we will be occupying in 2050 have already been built.

The rapid pace of change in the regulation of building energy performance has already created a high demand for research to support the move to zero carbon new buildings by 2020. Further, in addition to a reduction in energy consumption, it is also now expected that buildings use less water and that they maintain their resilience against the impacts of climate change and associated flood risk.

Building design must therefore encompass all aspects of contemporary and traditional construction techniques alongside the provision of suitably-designed building services systems to provide a safe and comfortable habitable environment.

Staff within our Institute for Building and Urban Design working in building drainage, acoustics, building simulation, low carbon buildings, construction management, town planning and urban design are leading the way in providing research solutions to these challenges.

Vision

Our Institute for Building and Urban Design aims to be world leading in architectural engineering, construction management and planning. It will deliver excellence in specialist areas of high value high impact research and postgraduate training across a wide range of fields covering design in the built environment.

Mission

The overall objective of good design is to ensure that buildings, infrastructure, public spaces and places are buildable, fit for purpose, resource efficient, sustainable, resilient, adaptable and attractive. Good design is synonymous with sustainable construction. Our mission is to achieve greater use of design quality assessment tools relevant to buildings, infrastructure, public spaces and places by advancing scientific understanding in architectural engineering, construction management and planning. The Institute will undertake cutting edge research aimed at delivering technological advances and informing government policy on topics relevant to these issues.

Successful research requires active dissemination of research findings to research users in a way that changes industry practice in the short, medium and long term. To achieve this, the Institute will actively engage in knowledge transfer by undertaking joint research with industry and government, become involved in professional standards development, provide high quality training for research students and deliver excellence in postgraduate teaching.