Thomas Jefferies

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

Future Cities

Future Cities is situated within the rich disciplinary context of School of Natural and Built Environment as a forum for wide ranging, leading edge design research. This develops, critiques and communicates ideas of place, environment, culture, technology and sustainability to define the limits of contemporary and future urban space.

The city has a 6000 year history and by 2050 68% of the world’s population will be urban. Challenges facing the future city demand enquiry, analysis and new insights developed through innovative inter-disciplinary and multi-partner design research, tested through impactful applied projects. Future Cities engages scholarship and practice from diverse backgrounds to consider aesthetics, spatial organisation and operation, sustainability, infrastructures, governance, the value of place and how we live, as the context for new conceptions of the urban. This will explore, define and design the nature of the 21st century city, acknowledging the necessity to reimagine the idea of the city within a digitally infused and spatially attenuated age with significant environmental challenges.

Future Cities is designed to provide a dynamic, research driven testbed, connecting wide ranging expertise, research and practice at global, national and local scales. The course will identify, research, develop and communicate testable design-based responses to key societal challenges. Future Cities extends and connects practice and theory through ground breaking projects, applied work, research and pilot studies.