More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas and UN projections suggest that this proportion will rise to 68% by 2050 worldwide. In Europe, this proportion has already been succeeded with 74% of our citizen living in cities.
Cities generate the vast majority of the country’s wealth and investment in its infrastructure amounts to billions each year. Cities are complex entities, with dynamic and interacting infrastructure, social and environmental aspects. For cities to be attractive to live in, they need to provide infrastructure for housing, transport, energy, leisure and health. There are many interdependencies between those sectors. Yet, research typically focuses on single sectors, and limited timeframes and therefore is unable to understand the interwoven processes and systems.
Urban Observatories enable the gathering of robust data to better understand cities and their relationship with decision making across a range of scales and sectors in order to:
By:
The mission of the Urban Observatories is to understand how to monitor cities at multiple scales both temporal and spatial and across multiple sectors. The approach will enable discovery-led science through large scale deployments of scientific instruments in the city to answer questions about technology, data storage, data standards and communications as well as more far reaching questions about the scale of monitoring required to carry out experiments in the city (density, accuracy, repeatability). Importantly, it will also enable experimentation: engineering system interventions (enacting a policy, putting in place an operational practice or making a physical change, for example) can be made and the resulting impact observed and measured.
Newcastle, Sheffield and Bristol form the first wave of Observatories and are passing on their experiences to the second wave of Observatories, namely Birmingham, Manchester and Cranfield. This knowledge exchange forms part of the CORONA project. The CORONA project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The network of observatories forms one of the three strands of UKCRIC.
Birmingham Urban Observatory Lead
PhD FRMetS FHEA
BSc Geography (University of Sheffield, 1998)
PhD Geography (University of Birmingham, 2002)
PG Cert in Learning & Teaching (University of Birmingham, 2009)
Deputy Lead of UKCRIC’s Birmingham UO, Director of UKCRIC’s National Buried Infrastructure Facility
Eur Ing, BSc, PhD, CEng, MICE, FCIHT, SFHEA
Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA)
Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Highways & Transportation (FCIHT)
Member of FEANI (Fédération Européenne d’Associations Nationales d’Ingénieurs / European Federation of National Engineering Associations (Eur Ing)
Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (MICE)
Chartered Engineer (CEng)
PhD in Geotechnical Engineering, University of Nottingham
BSc (Hons) in Civil Engineering, University of Leeds
Urban Biodiversity Lead
School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences
Professor of Biogeography
Technical Lead
BSc(Hons), MB ChB, MRCP, PG Dip, PhD.
Co-director OPENspace Research Centre;
Director, PhD/MPhil programme in Landscape Architecture;
Past President European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools
Researcher
BSc, MSc, PhD, CEng, MICE
Department of Civil Engineering
Senior Research Fellow