The UK requires significant new housing and related physical and social infrastructure to accommodate population growth and changing household composition. Such development needs to be undertaken in an economic, engineered, environmental and socially sustainable manner. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) provide a strong conceptual framework by which to assess the sustainability of urban development. However, in order to plan and deliver sustainable development in the future requires a stronger coupling of existing urban models to a multi-objective evaluation of the UN SDGs.
This PhD project will develop a multi-objective framework that will allow urban development models to be evaluated directly in relation to the delivery of the SDGs. Key research questions that the PhD will look to address include:
- How can the UN SDGs be translated to an appropriate set of deliverable spatial metrics for the UK?
- How can urban development models be adapted to indicate the future economic, engineered, environmental and social sustainability of urban development via a set of UN SDG spatial metrics?
- What are the appropriate decision support tools and related machine learning methods required to understand high dimensionality multi-objective modelled SDG spatial metrics for future sustainable urban planning?
The research will build upon existing work within the Geospatial Engineering research group which has established expertise on urban development modelling (Ford et al, 2019) and spatial multi-objective decision support (Caparros-Midwood et al, 2019). The successful candidate will be able to utilise, modify and enhance the open source model UDM (Urban Development Model; Ford et al, 2019) as well as software for spatial multi-objective optimisation. The PhD will have access to extensive computing resources via School of Engineering visualisation and decision support GPU hardware capability.
Newcastle University is committed to being a fully inclusive Global University which actively recruits, supports and retains colleagues from all sectors of society. We value diversity as well as celebrate, support and thrive on the contributions of all our employees and the communities they represent. We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer and encourage applications from everybody, regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, age, disability, gender identity, marital status/civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, as well as being open to flexible working practices.
References:
Ford A, Barr S, Dawson R, Virgo J, Batty M, Hall J. A multi-scale urban integrated assessment framework for climate change studies: A flooding application. Computers, Environment, and Urban Systems 2019, 75, 229-243.
Caparros-Midwood D, Dawson R, Barr S. Low Carbon, Low Risk, Low Density: Resolving choices about sustainable development in cities. Cities 2019, 89, 252-267.
Application enquires:
Professor Stuart Barr
[Email Address Removed]
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/engineering/staff/profile/stuartbarr.html
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