Monthly Archives: December 2012

Seminar on Urban Futures: Professor Chris Rogers from the University of Birmingham

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Professor Chris Rogers will give a seminar at 1-2pm on Tuesday 8th January, in Devonshire G21/22.

Chris will speak about “Future Proofing our Urban Design Decisions – the Urban Futures Methodology”
which summarises his work on the EPSRC funded Urban Futures programme. This work has been developed to help urban designers analyse the resiliency of their sustainability solutions – the things they are doing today in the name of sustainability, such as incorporating greywater recycling into a housing development or cycle paths across a city.

Professor Chris Rogers is the Director of the Birmingham Centre for Resilience Research and Education at the University of Birmingham.

This seminar is organised by CESER in conjunction with the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies.

Supersized Earth

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The 1200km Shahe Aqueduct in China - from the BBC website

Readers of this blog may be interested in the BBC’s Supersized Earth which you can watch on iPlayer.

The three episodes explore a few aspects of how humanity has being “redesigning” planet Earth to build the modern world.

The parallels with the philosophy behind aspects of the CESER research programme and the wider Earth Systems Engineering philosophy are extremely clear.  Although there is some amazing cinematography and the presenter covers some interesting ground I couldn’t help feeling it was a rather one sided take on the sustainability challenge – look how we’ve turned the desert into farms etc. and almost no consideration of the implications of waste, resource use, chemicals required and so on.  As anyone familiar with our research programme will know these issues are of course highly complex – but if we do not seek to communicate, understand and address them a truly sustainable future seems unlikely, regardless of our technological feats.

But please make your own mind up…

CESER research nominated for INDEX: Design to improve life award

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CESER research has been nominated for the prestigious INDEX: Design to improve life award.

INDEX: Design to Improve Life® is a Danish NPO with global reach, established in 2002. Their mission is to Inspire, Educate and Engage people in using Design to Improve Life-skills to develop sustainable solutions to global and local challenges.  The INDEX award is widely recognized as the most important design award in the world.