Urban Futures doctoral training programme

The new Urban Futures doctoral training programme is based within the Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment at Oxford Brookes University with the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences as co-partner.

The programme forms part of Oxford Brookes' ambition to develop a site of excellence for doctoral training provision. The programme includes a substantial training element in research methods and futures methodologies, a seminar series bringing together students and key researchers in sustainable futures, and provides students with the opportunity to develop their area of interest in a focused and inter-disciplinary environment.

The Urban Futures programme has a truly interdisciplinary focus and is designed to address the key challenges of global urban growth, and the implications not only for the built and natural environments, but also the creation of sustainable urban futures. The programme places particular emphasis on understanding environmental and technical challenges; behavioural and policy context; futures thinking; and societal impact. There is therefore a strong urban policy and practice component.

The programme builds on the research expertise within the Faculty in the Departments Planning and Real Estate and Construction and the School of Architecture. The Faculty is also home to the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD), which is the largest academic research institute in the UK dedicated to research on sustainable development in the built environment.

The programme focuses on research in the following areas:

1. Sustainable urban form: helping create urban futures which are truly sustainable.
2. Urban utopias and dystopias: the way in which studies of the past can inform not only the present, but also future change in urban areas.
3. Climate change: human adaptation and mitigation: how society (in its broadest sense, including the social constructs of policy measures) and climate change interact to produce impacts and consequences for urban futures.
4. Retrofitting for a Sustainable Urban Future: how buildings, communities or cities can be retrofitted to provide a more sustainable future.

For a list of potential dissertation ideas, click here. Please note that the list is not exhaustive and includes possible ideas.

The Urban Futures Programme brings together an interdisciplinary team of experts from which supervisory teams will be formed. These include:

• Prof Tim Dixon, the Urban Futures Programme Leader, who is also Director of OISD (sustainable urban form and futures studies);
• Dr Sue Brownill, the Programme Manager, who also runs the School's existing doctoral training courses (sustainable urban form and futures studies);
• Prof Georgia Butina Watson (urban design);
• Prof James Simmie (innovation, productivity and the competitiveness of urban regions);
• Prof William Clocksin (sustainable transport);
• Dr Rajat Gupta (carbon measurement/reduction);
• Dr Tim Jones (sustainable transport);
• Prof Ray Ogden (architectural technology);
• Prof Joe Tah (construction and IT);
• Dr Stewart Thompson (bio-diversity);
• Prof Stephen Ward (urban utopias) and
• Mrs Elizabeth Wilson (climate change).

Further details on potential supervisors can be found on the University's web pages, http://www.brookes.ac.uk/res/experts.

Examples of current scholarships include :

The Adaptation of Historic Inner City Areas to Flood Risks in the UK and the Netherlands

The Effectiveness of Participatory Development Processes in Improving the Environmental Sustainability of Informal Urban Dwellings