Establishing a long term urban research facility

Urban areas are complex systems, comprising many interacting infrastructure sectors. Understanding these inter-relationships is essential to sustainable urban and infrastructure development. Research focused on single sectors, or over limited timescales, will inevitably fail to capture these interdependencies and dynamics.

Long Term Ecological Research‘ in the USA has over 30 years monitored a wide range of species, habitat types etc. to develop a richer understanding of the ecological system as a whole and consequently how it might respond to stresses such as climate change. Inspired by this, and funded by an EPSRC New Directions grant, we will establish a unique ‘Long Term Urban Research’ programme that will deliver the evidence basis for sustainable infrastructure investment in urban areas.

Our ‘Long Term Urban Research’ programme will apply engineering principles at a city-scale. The facility will monitor a range of infrastructures and sectors (e.g. water, earthworks, transport, climate, waste etc.), interactions between sectors and the phenomena only observable at the system scale (such as the urban heat island). The work will be based in Newcastle and develop:

  • Long-term datasets generated by using multiple methodologies (including a new array of hundreds of sensors and other monitoring equipment) that will observe phenomena at the individual, building, campus through to city-wide and regional scales.
  • Informatics for managing, archiving and accessing real-time, remotely sensed and qualitative data.
  • Simulation models and qualitative interpretation that use this new data to better understand cities, infrastructure systems and urban activity.
The facility will bring together new and existing data that includes the urban climate (temperature, rainfall, humidity etc.), air quality, pedestrian and traffic flows and hydraulic flows. The sectoral breadth and spatial resolution of coverage will provide a globally unique monitoring facility.