My work focuses on both developed (Europe/USA/Hong Kong) and less developed contexts (South and East Africa, Brazil, India, Lebanon).
In the past fifteen years, I have secured external (UKRI) and internal funding awarded by key research bodies as principal and co-investigator within international consortiums for a total of over £2.5M.
In the past fifteen years, I have secured external (UKRI) and internal funding awarded by key research bodies as principal and co-investigator within international consortiums for a total of over £2.5M.
Funded Research Projects (current and past)
2023-2024: Adaptable Cities, Pandemic Mitigation and Crisis Preparedness (British Academy)
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/projects/adaptable-cities-pandemic-mitigation-and-crisis-preparedness/
Principal investigator - Value £99,375.00 FEC
Co-Is: Prof. Zepf (U-Pec Paris) and Prof Sakai (Tokyo City University)
Cities and specifically large and very dense metropolitan areas have been severally impacted by COVID-19 particularly people’s health and wellbeing as well as local economies. There is an urgent need to gather insights, assess and reflect on how cities have and can be adapted, promptly and proactively, as to immediately mitigate the impact of any future pandemics while ensuring their urban, social and economic resilience and continuity as rich transactional spaces hosting all types of human, economic, financial and information flows. While we situate this research area across the G7, we specifically focus on three continents _North America, Europe and Asia _ and zoom on four cities: New York City, London, Paris and Tokyo. The project ultimate goal is to co-design with a panel of built environment experts, a set of multi- scalar and evidence-based lessons as to promote proactive adaptability.
2022-2024 PANEX-YOUTH - Adaptations of young people in monetary-poor households for surviving and recovering from COVID-19 and associated lockdowns
https://www.panexyouth.com
Principal Investigator (ESRC) – Value: £270,461.07 FEC
UK Team: Lauren Andres, Peter Kraftl (UoB), Stuart Denoon Stevens (NTU/UFS)
Brazil PI: Leandro Giatti; South African PI: Abraham Matamanda
This two-year project is part of the Trans-Atlantic Platform (T-AP) Recovery, Renewal and Resilience in a Post-Pandemic World (RRR) Call, funded conjointly by the ESRC, the NRF and FAPESP. This project aims to understand and assess the impact of COVID-19 and associated policies on food, education, play/leisure of young people living in deprived settings and in conditions of poverty in the UK, Brazil and South Africa. To do so, we adopt a nexus approach, focusing on food, education, and play/leisure embedded within a wider understanding of the living settings (local places) and home/personal contexts (household composition and home/personal life). This project seeks to use an action research methodology to co-create this knowledge about such adaptations and generate wider recommendations, with young people, and the communities in which they live, and non-government bodies and non-profit organizations that focus on this age group. By co-creating knowledge, we aim to align our data collection efforts with these organizations’ immediate knowledge needs to support the adaptations employed by young people to help them cope and recover from COVID- 19 and associated policy responses. Our approach also allows to create a bridge between those affected by policy (young people) and those drafting and implementing policy (organizations). To do so, we focus on case studies in three locations: Mangaung and Moqhaka in Central South Africa, West Midlands in the UK and Sao Paolo state in Brazil.
2022 Making places: Bottom-up strategies in London, New York and Hong Kong
Principal Investigator (UCL) – Value: £10, 000 (UCL CUHK Strategic Partnership Award)
with Francesco Rossini (CUHK)
The objective of this collaborative project with the Chinese University of Hong Kong is to explore the idea of making place through temporary urbanisms in other words small-scale, non-permanent interventions aiming to activate spaces and foster adaptable forms of place-making. While using London and New York as comparative benchmark, the project focuses on the city of Hong Kong where there is an urgent need to improve the quality of public spaces and inform urban planning and design strategies accordingly. Both London and New York have been for the past fifteen years embracing the use of temporary uses and projects to activate empty spaces and develop community-led initiatives; this has been accelerating during and as a result of the pandemic. We aim to understand the mechanisms behind the activation of temporary urbanisms (regulations, funding/financing, governance etc.) in both cities and reflect on what this means for Hong Kong and what recommendations can be drawn out of it.
2022 Everyday Practices and Temporalities: Safety, Inclusion and Access in 24-hour Delhi
Principal Investigator (UCL) – Value: £5000 (UCL IITD Joint Seed Fund)
with Surajit Chakravarty (PI - IITD)
This is a scoping study with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi which is the first to analyze everyday rhythms and temporalities and their implications for making Delhi a 24-hour city. The project aims to: document everyday rhythms and temporalities across socio-economic classes, gender, age groups, and abilities; analyze their spatial implications; make recommendations on safety, inclusion and access, and the use of appropriate technologies; add empirical evidence to the discourse on temporalities in urban planning.
2016 – 2020: The appropriateness, usefulness and impact of the current urban planning curriculum in South African Higher Education (ES/P00198X/1) (one year no-cost extension granted till 31 July 2020)
Principal Investigator– Value: £480, 188 FEC NRF Lead: Dr. Denoon-Stevens
Total Value ESRC/NRF: £ 599,188
https://saperproject.weebly.com/
The SAPER project was funded by the ESRC in the UK and the NRF in South Africa under the Newton Fund scheme. It was developed in close partnership with two planning accreditation bodies, the South African Council for Planners (SACPLAN) in South Africa and the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) in the UK and with the Commonwealth Association of Planners (CAP). It looked at the appropriateness, usefulness, and impact of contemporary Higher Education urban planning in South Africa. This research focused on the needs and challenges faced by planning practitioners (with a key interest in early-career planners) and the wider implications with regard to the internationalisation of planning education. Urban planning is considered a scarce skill in South Africa but plays a crucial role in tacking spatial and social segregation, inherited from apartheid, while addressing other challenges (e.g. housing provision, health and wellbeing). This project has been of key relevance to link urban development challenges to pressures inherent to economic development, and the need to address welfare and create more sustainable urban environments, particularly for the poorest and more vulnerable communities. Gaps were identified in training provision, pre and post-graduation and recommendations were developed to better address skill shortages, the unbalanced distribution of planners across the country and find ways to better support and mentor early-career practitioners. We demonstrated that planners find themselves negotiating between often contradictory and conflicting strategies. This has a significant impact on (international) planning education and practice, especially given that planning education tends to retain a technocratic approach to training, with little to no content on navigating this web of contradictory strategies by different stakeholders.
2017-2020 - "A systems approach to air pollution in East Africa (ASAP)" (DFID)
Co-Investigator and Research Coordinator. Co-leading two inter-disciplinary work-packages. End date: 30 May 2020.
Principal investigator: Prof. France Pope - Value: £1.2M
www.asap-eastafrica.com
ASAP brought together leading UK and East African researchers in air pollution, urban planning, economic geography, public health, social sciences, and development studies to provide a systemic understanding of how to improve air quality management in East African cities (Nairobi, Kampala and Addis Ababa). The core ambition of the project was to understand the challenges hindering the development of coherent policy and strategies aiming to reduce the effects of air pollution upon human health enabling sustainable development to proceed without further deterioration in air quality. Key to this research was the role planners and planning could play and decrypt what were the other difficulties faced, beyond skills and resource shortages: this included lack of land use management, poor regulations and no account for everyday and informal dynamics however shaping urban development. This led to questioning planning futures in the context of addressing complex agenda such as sustainable and inclusive development.
2018- 2020 - Resilient Cities Programme, Institute for Global Innovation (IGI), University of Birmingham
Member of the programme led by Dr Jonathan Radcliffe with a specific focus on ‘policies and governance process of urban and economic regeneration” and lead for the sub-theme: Cities and urbanisation in the South: tacking key challenges at European level.
This was one of the four inaugural themes selected by the newly launched Institute for Global Innovation. The ‘City Resilience’ theme investigated the drivers of urban distress and the conditions for securing city resilience, with a focus on global cities that are undergoing transitions at different levels of analysis: individual; community; city; national.
2018 – 2019: Re-inhabiting the City: Bringing new life to city centres of emerging economies in a changing climate (EPSRC/FAPESP) - completed
Co-Investigator. Principale Investigators: Dr Lucelia Rodrigues (UoN), and Dr Joana Soares Gonçalves (University of Sao Paulo). Value : £ 25,000
www.reinhabitingthecity.com
This project explored the issue of 'Re-Inhabiting the City' and questioned the re-use/re-design of vacant spaces in Sao Paulo's vacant urban core. It aimed to support the sustainable reoccupation of underused or abandoned buildings, creating places that are comfortable, resilient to climate change and occupied by a vibrant healthy community. It also aimed to address key urban challenges such as the reintegration of derelict sites into the urban fabric, lack of social cohesion, loss of socio-cultural values, lack of free spaces and public realm, social exclusion and inequality, reduced public health and wellbeing, and increased criminality.
2017-2018- Mega-event legacies and sustainable, greener, climate-resilient cities (GCRF IAA fund and GEES pump-priming fund)
Co-Investigator. Principal Investigator: Emma Ferranti (PI). Value : £ 18,779
This project utilised partnerships and research developed during previous EPSRC-IAA-funded on urban mobility in Brazil to (i) to examine the transport legacies of mega-events in the global south (2014 FIFA World Cup, Brazil; 2016 Summer Olympics Rio De Janeiro; 1963 Pan-American Games (São Paulo); 2014 FIFA World Cup, South Africa); and in doing so, (ii) pump-prime new research on mega-event legacies and sustainable, greener, climate-resilient cities.
2012-2014: Regeneration Economies: Transforming People, Place and Production
Institute for Advanced Studies Inaugural Theme – University of Birmingham
Co-PI with Prof. John Bryson (Birmingham Business School)
Value: £ 50 000
The economic crisis that commenced in 2007 has been associated with calls to rebalance the economy. This reflects political interest in economic restructuring to enhance competitiveness through diversity combined with localism. Academics have developed disciplinary approaches to understanding regional problems that require interdisciplinary solutions. Existing approaches are no longer appropriate for understanding cities that are experiencing an on-going process of economic regeneration. The Regeneration Economies theme included three interrelated strands of activity:
- The development of an integrated approach to understanding regional regeneration economies, more holistic or less partial than existing conceptualisations.
- An exploration of the consequences of the major developments in engineering which will revolutionise production systems and transform the functioning economic geography of regional economies by developing a distinctive research dialogue between engineering and the social sciences.
- An understanding of the relationship between firms, regional competitiveness, skills and training.
2012: Regeneration Economies in an Age of Uncertainty: Transformation, Innovation and Economic Growth
Institute for Advanced Studies – University of Birmingham
Co-PI with Prof. John Bryson (Birmingham Business School)
Value: £3600
The economic downturn that commenced in 2008 is associated with a new focus on enhancing local economic development and on rebalancing local economies in an age of uncertainty. This notion of ‘balance’ reflects a new emphasis on manufacturing as a key driver of economic growth. The project’s rationale was to explore the development of a new set of approaches to understanding the transformation of local and regional economies that have experienced considerable turbulence. The development of our new concept of ‘regeneration economies’ has had the potential to act as a distinctive framework for researching and understanding economic transformation in places like the West Midlands, Chicago and Randstad. A feature of these workshops was to consider the interactions between a set of local and global processes as they are being played out in regeneration economies. Workshop 1 developed a research approach to exploring places through the conceptual lens of ‘regeneration economies’ that was tested in Workshop 2.
2011-2013: Mega-Events and Regional Development
Regional Studies Association
Co-PI with Prof Graeme Evans, Middlesex University and Dr Bas Van Heur, Maastricht University
Value: 3000€
The aim of the research network was to situate mega-event led regeneration within regional studies and both to theorise the concept and transfer accumulating knowledge and develop methods of planning, impact evaluation and measurement of their effects over time. The outcome of the research network was to develop a regional perspective and typology of mega-events and related regeneration policies and processes, and better understand their regional scope and impact within both local-regional-national contexts and as a global phenomenon. Four workshops were held in London and Maastricht, plus special sessions convened at the AAG in New York (2012) and Chicago (2015) and at the 2015 Regional Studies Association annual conference in Piacenza where 2 sessions were organised. Over 40 presentations including by academics (senior, mid and early career), research students, practitioners and policy-makers, have been made to audiences, totalling 160 people, with attendance at each event ranging from at least 20 to 50.
2010-2011: Persistence resilience and marginal communities
University of Birmingham – Resilience Initiative
Co-I with Dr. John Round (PI)
Value: £30 000
How communities develop resilience to more mundane, everyday pressures has been inadequately explored. To fill this lacuna this project, gathering a range of academics from various discipline (geography, urban planning, engineering, management, psychology and modern languages) examined how communities deal with ongoing economic, social, cultural, political contextual challenges/pressure placed upon them by adopting various coping tactics. These tactics might be built thanks to volunteerism, social networks, the emergence of local leaders or other ‘bottom up’ initiatives. By exploring how communities develop persistent resilience the project demonstrated how such networks and tactics can be strengthened.
2010-2011 Internationalising Higher Education in Russia
British Council
Co-I with Dr. John Round (PI)
Value: £4000
The project aimed to assess how urban development teaching in Russia can be modernised to European standards focussed on encouraging increased industry (such as construction and energy companies), practitioner and community involvement in the teaching of urban development modules at undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing professional development levels.
2006-2008: Représentations, légitimités et traductions des démolitions-reconstructions dans les projets de renouvellement urbain de quartiers (Representations and narratives developed for the regeneration of social housing estates), Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture (PUCA)
Co-I with Dr. Duarte (PI)
Value: 59 000€
2006-2007: Alarm procedures and hazard mitigation in urban areas: linking hazards mitigation to sustainable development, UMR-CNRS Pacte
Co-I with Prof. Mancebo (PI)
Value: 5000€
2005-2007: Sustainable urban development: a cross-disciplinary topic for doctoral researchers
Co-PI, UMR-CNRS Pacte
Value: 2000€
2023-2024: Adaptable Cities, Pandemic Mitigation and Crisis Preparedness (British Academy)
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/projects/adaptable-cities-pandemic-mitigation-and-crisis-preparedness/
Principal investigator - Value £99,375.00 FEC
Co-Is: Prof. Zepf (U-Pec Paris) and Prof Sakai (Tokyo City University)
Cities and specifically large and very dense metropolitan areas have been severally impacted by COVID-19 particularly people’s health and wellbeing as well as local economies. There is an urgent need to gather insights, assess and reflect on how cities have and can be adapted, promptly and proactively, as to immediately mitigate the impact of any future pandemics while ensuring their urban, social and economic resilience and continuity as rich transactional spaces hosting all types of human, economic, financial and information flows. While we situate this research area across the G7, we specifically focus on three continents _North America, Europe and Asia _ and zoom on four cities: New York City, London, Paris and Tokyo. The project ultimate goal is to co-design with a panel of built environment experts, a set of multi- scalar and evidence-based lessons as to promote proactive adaptability.
2022-2024 PANEX-YOUTH - Adaptations of young people in monetary-poor households for surviving and recovering from COVID-19 and associated lockdowns
https://www.panexyouth.com
Principal Investigator (ESRC) – Value: £270,461.07 FEC
UK Team: Lauren Andres, Peter Kraftl (UoB), Stuart Denoon Stevens (NTU/UFS)
Brazil PI: Leandro Giatti; South African PI: Abraham Matamanda
This two-year project is part of the Trans-Atlantic Platform (T-AP) Recovery, Renewal and Resilience in a Post-Pandemic World (RRR) Call, funded conjointly by the ESRC, the NRF and FAPESP. This project aims to understand and assess the impact of COVID-19 and associated policies on food, education, play/leisure of young people living in deprived settings and in conditions of poverty in the UK, Brazil and South Africa. To do so, we adopt a nexus approach, focusing on food, education, and play/leisure embedded within a wider understanding of the living settings (local places) and home/personal contexts (household composition and home/personal life). This project seeks to use an action research methodology to co-create this knowledge about such adaptations and generate wider recommendations, with young people, and the communities in which they live, and non-government bodies and non-profit organizations that focus on this age group. By co-creating knowledge, we aim to align our data collection efforts with these organizations’ immediate knowledge needs to support the adaptations employed by young people to help them cope and recover from COVID- 19 and associated policy responses. Our approach also allows to create a bridge between those affected by policy (young people) and those drafting and implementing policy (organizations). To do so, we focus on case studies in three locations: Mangaung and Moqhaka in Central South Africa, West Midlands in the UK and Sao Paolo state in Brazil.
2022 Making places: Bottom-up strategies in London, New York and Hong Kong
Principal Investigator (UCL) – Value: £10, 000 (UCL CUHK Strategic Partnership Award)
with Francesco Rossini (CUHK)
The objective of this collaborative project with the Chinese University of Hong Kong is to explore the idea of making place through temporary urbanisms in other words small-scale, non-permanent interventions aiming to activate spaces and foster adaptable forms of place-making. While using London and New York as comparative benchmark, the project focuses on the city of Hong Kong where there is an urgent need to improve the quality of public spaces and inform urban planning and design strategies accordingly. Both London and New York have been for the past fifteen years embracing the use of temporary uses and projects to activate empty spaces and develop community-led initiatives; this has been accelerating during and as a result of the pandemic. We aim to understand the mechanisms behind the activation of temporary urbanisms (regulations, funding/financing, governance etc.) in both cities and reflect on what this means for Hong Kong and what recommendations can be drawn out of it.
2022 Everyday Practices and Temporalities: Safety, Inclusion and Access in 24-hour Delhi
Principal Investigator (UCL) – Value: £5000 (UCL IITD Joint Seed Fund)
with Surajit Chakravarty (PI - IITD)
This is a scoping study with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi which is the first to analyze everyday rhythms and temporalities and their implications for making Delhi a 24-hour city. The project aims to: document everyday rhythms and temporalities across socio-economic classes, gender, age groups, and abilities; analyze their spatial implications; make recommendations on safety, inclusion and access, and the use of appropriate technologies; add empirical evidence to the discourse on temporalities in urban planning.
2016 – 2020: The appropriateness, usefulness and impact of the current urban planning curriculum in South African Higher Education (ES/P00198X/1) (one year no-cost extension granted till 31 July 2020)
Principal Investigator– Value: £480, 188 FEC NRF Lead: Dr. Denoon-Stevens
Total Value ESRC/NRF: £ 599,188
https://saperproject.weebly.com/
The SAPER project was funded by the ESRC in the UK and the NRF in South Africa under the Newton Fund scheme. It was developed in close partnership with two planning accreditation bodies, the South African Council for Planners (SACPLAN) in South Africa and the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) in the UK and with the Commonwealth Association of Planners (CAP). It looked at the appropriateness, usefulness, and impact of contemporary Higher Education urban planning in South Africa. This research focused on the needs and challenges faced by planning practitioners (with a key interest in early-career planners) and the wider implications with regard to the internationalisation of planning education. Urban planning is considered a scarce skill in South Africa but plays a crucial role in tacking spatial and social segregation, inherited from apartheid, while addressing other challenges (e.g. housing provision, health and wellbeing). This project has been of key relevance to link urban development challenges to pressures inherent to economic development, and the need to address welfare and create more sustainable urban environments, particularly for the poorest and more vulnerable communities. Gaps were identified in training provision, pre and post-graduation and recommendations were developed to better address skill shortages, the unbalanced distribution of planners across the country and find ways to better support and mentor early-career practitioners. We demonstrated that planners find themselves negotiating between often contradictory and conflicting strategies. This has a significant impact on (international) planning education and practice, especially given that planning education tends to retain a technocratic approach to training, with little to no content on navigating this web of contradictory strategies by different stakeholders.
2017-2020 - "A systems approach to air pollution in East Africa (ASAP)" (DFID)
Co-Investigator and Research Coordinator. Co-leading two inter-disciplinary work-packages. End date: 30 May 2020.
Principal investigator: Prof. France Pope - Value: £1.2M
www.asap-eastafrica.com
ASAP brought together leading UK and East African researchers in air pollution, urban planning, economic geography, public health, social sciences, and development studies to provide a systemic understanding of how to improve air quality management in East African cities (Nairobi, Kampala and Addis Ababa). The core ambition of the project was to understand the challenges hindering the development of coherent policy and strategies aiming to reduce the effects of air pollution upon human health enabling sustainable development to proceed without further deterioration in air quality. Key to this research was the role planners and planning could play and decrypt what were the other difficulties faced, beyond skills and resource shortages: this included lack of land use management, poor regulations and no account for everyday and informal dynamics however shaping urban development. This led to questioning planning futures in the context of addressing complex agenda such as sustainable and inclusive development.
2018- 2020 - Resilient Cities Programme, Institute for Global Innovation (IGI), University of Birmingham
Member of the programme led by Dr Jonathan Radcliffe with a specific focus on ‘policies and governance process of urban and economic regeneration” and lead for the sub-theme: Cities and urbanisation in the South: tacking key challenges at European level.
This was one of the four inaugural themes selected by the newly launched Institute for Global Innovation. The ‘City Resilience’ theme investigated the drivers of urban distress and the conditions for securing city resilience, with a focus on global cities that are undergoing transitions at different levels of analysis: individual; community; city; national.
2018 – 2019: Re-inhabiting the City: Bringing new life to city centres of emerging economies in a changing climate (EPSRC/FAPESP) - completed
Co-Investigator. Principale Investigators: Dr Lucelia Rodrigues (UoN), and Dr Joana Soares Gonçalves (University of Sao Paulo). Value : £ 25,000
www.reinhabitingthecity.com
This project explored the issue of 'Re-Inhabiting the City' and questioned the re-use/re-design of vacant spaces in Sao Paulo's vacant urban core. It aimed to support the sustainable reoccupation of underused or abandoned buildings, creating places that are comfortable, resilient to climate change and occupied by a vibrant healthy community. It also aimed to address key urban challenges such as the reintegration of derelict sites into the urban fabric, lack of social cohesion, loss of socio-cultural values, lack of free spaces and public realm, social exclusion and inequality, reduced public health and wellbeing, and increased criminality.
2017-2018- Mega-event legacies and sustainable, greener, climate-resilient cities (GCRF IAA fund and GEES pump-priming fund)
Co-Investigator. Principal Investigator: Emma Ferranti (PI). Value : £ 18,779
This project utilised partnerships and research developed during previous EPSRC-IAA-funded on urban mobility in Brazil to (i) to examine the transport legacies of mega-events in the global south (2014 FIFA World Cup, Brazil; 2016 Summer Olympics Rio De Janeiro; 1963 Pan-American Games (São Paulo); 2014 FIFA World Cup, South Africa); and in doing so, (ii) pump-prime new research on mega-event legacies and sustainable, greener, climate-resilient cities.
2012-2014: Regeneration Economies: Transforming People, Place and Production
Institute for Advanced Studies Inaugural Theme – University of Birmingham
Co-PI with Prof. John Bryson (Birmingham Business School)
Value: £ 50 000
The economic crisis that commenced in 2007 has been associated with calls to rebalance the economy. This reflects political interest in economic restructuring to enhance competitiveness through diversity combined with localism. Academics have developed disciplinary approaches to understanding regional problems that require interdisciplinary solutions. Existing approaches are no longer appropriate for understanding cities that are experiencing an on-going process of economic regeneration. The Regeneration Economies theme included three interrelated strands of activity:
- The development of an integrated approach to understanding regional regeneration economies, more holistic or less partial than existing conceptualisations.
- An exploration of the consequences of the major developments in engineering which will revolutionise production systems and transform the functioning economic geography of regional economies by developing a distinctive research dialogue between engineering and the social sciences.
- An understanding of the relationship between firms, regional competitiveness, skills and training.
2012: Regeneration Economies in an Age of Uncertainty: Transformation, Innovation and Economic Growth
Institute for Advanced Studies – University of Birmingham
Co-PI with Prof. John Bryson (Birmingham Business School)
Value: £3600
The economic downturn that commenced in 2008 is associated with a new focus on enhancing local economic development and on rebalancing local economies in an age of uncertainty. This notion of ‘balance’ reflects a new emphasis on manufacturing as a key driver of economic growth. The project’s rationale was to explore the development of a new set of approaches to understanding the transformation of local and regional economies that have experienced considerable turbulence. The development of our new concept of ‘regeneration economies’ has had the potential to act as a distinctive framework for researching and understanding economic transformation in places like the West Midlands, Chicago and Randstad. A feature of these workshops was to consider the interactions between a set of local and global processes as they are being played out in regeneration economies. Workshop 1 developed a research approach to exploring places through the conceptual lens of ‘regeneration economies’ that was tested in Workshop 2.
2011-2013: Mega-Events and Regional Development
Regional Studies Association
Co-PI with Prof Graeme Evans, Middlesex University and Dr Bas Van Heur, Maastricht University
Value: 3000€
The aim of the research network was to situate mega-event led regeneration within regional studies and both to theorise the concept and transfer accumulating knowledge and develop methods of planning, impact evaluation and measurement of their effects over time. The outcome of the research network was to develop a regional perspective and typology of mega-events and related regeneration policies and processes, and better understand their regional scope and impact within both local-regional-national contexts and as a global phenomenon. Four workshops were held in London and Maastricht, plus special sessions convened at the AAG in New York (2012) and Chicago (2015) and at the 2015 Regional Studies Association annual conference in Piacenza where 2 sessions were organised. Over 40 presentations including by academics (senior, mid and early career), research students, practitioners and policy-makers, have been made to audiences, totalling 160 people, with attendance at each event ranging from at least 20 to 50.
2010-2011: Persistence resilience and marginal communities
University of Birmingham – Resilience Initiative
Co-I with Dr. John Round (PI)
Value: £30 000
How communities develop resilience to more mundane, everyday pressures has been inadequately explored. To fill this lacuna this project, gathering a range of academics from various discipline (geography, urban planning, engineering, management, psychology and modern languages) examined how communities deal with ongoing economic, social, cultural, political contextual challenges/pressure placed upon them by adopting various coping tactics. These tactics might be built thanks to volunteerism, social networks, the emergence of local leaders or other ‘bottom up’ initiatives. By exploring how communities develop persistent resilience the project demonstrated how such networks and tactics can be strengthened.
2010-2011 Internationalising Higher Education in Russia
British Council
Co-I with Dr. John Round (PI)
Value: £4000
The project aimed to assess how urban development teaching in Russia can be modernised to European standards focussed on encouraging increased industry (such as construction and energy companies), practitioner and community involvement in the teaching of urban development modules at undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing professional development levels.
2006-2008: Représentations, légitimités et traductions des démolitions-reconstructions dans les projets de renouvellement urbain de quartiers (Representations and narratives developed for the regeneration of social housing estates), Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture (PUCA)
Co-I with Dr. Duarte (PI)
Value: 59 000€
2006-2007: Alarm procedures and hazard mitigation in urban areas: linking hazards mitigation to sustainable development, UMR-CNRS Pacte
Co-I with Prof. Mancebo (PI)
Value: 5000€
2005-2007: Sustainable urban development: a cross-disciplinary topic for doctoral researchers
Co-PI, UMR-CNRS Pacte
Value: 2000€