Reading 2050 lecture series

The Reading 2050 lecture series is a platform of discussion around the work of the Reading 2050 group.

The group was established in 2013 by the School of the Built Environment, Barton Wilmore and Reading UK to deliver a strategic, long-term vision that will support the delivery of Reading’s legacy of a truly smart & sustainable city.

Upcoming Reading 2050 talks:

28 June – Reading: Nurturing Nature and Young People in the Future

Speaker: Natalie Ganpatsingh, Nature Nurture
Time: 18:00-19:00
Location: Building L022, room G01,
London Road campus,
University of Reading,
RG1 5AQ

The School of the Built Environment (SBE) will be hosting a lecture on Nature and People in Our Urban Future on 28 June. The lecture is part of the Reading 2050 lecture series, which provides a platform to discuss how Reading should evolve into a smarter and more sustainable city by 2050. The lecture  is scheduled for 6.00-7.00 pm on Thursday 28 June. It will feature Pride of Reading Award winner Nature Nurture’s Natalie Ganpatsingh. The lecture will be in Room G01 (Building L022) on our London Road campus.

For details on the full series see: https://www.reading.ac.uk/architecture/architecture-public-lectures.aspx

Natalie Ganpatsingh, Director, Nature Nurture CIC: Philosopher, artist and Forest School Leader on a mission  to connect urban communities with the nature on their doorstep.  Natalie believes that connecting people with the wild spaces within our towns and cities is crucial to building strong, happy, healthy communities who care about each other and the environment. Her award-winning social enterprise,  Nature Nurture CIC collaborates with the conservation, heritage, health and education sectors to achieve positive outcomes for people and the planet. In 2016 Nature Nurture achieved a achieved a Pride of Reading Award in recognition of  their success in engaging people with nature. In 2017 they enabled trees to talk with Raspberry Pis and were selected as one of the 50 Gamechangers in the Thames Valley design and technology community. Her work has taken her to Belize (Raleigh International Expedition Artist, 1998), Ghana (Oxfam On the Line project, 2000), Kenya (Mediae Development Education Project, 2008) and Palestine (United Nations ‘Participate’ project, with ‘Real Time Video’; film-making with Palestinian women, 2013). Natalie is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.

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Past Reading 2050 talks:

31 May – The Urban Metabolism of Reading
Speakers: Eugene Mohareb and Daniela Perrotti, School of the Built Environment

Place and Environment Public Lecture Series list

Further information: Reading 2050 vision

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Universities of Reading (UK) and Santo Tomas (Philippines) awarded British Council funding

The British Council is supporting a new urban study to map social and green infrastructure assets.

Flora Samuel and Eli Hatleskog, in Reading’s School of Architecture will be mapping social assets, urban greenery and the connections between them in rapidly changing cities in the Philippines, in partnership with the University of Santo Tomas, thanks to a £120,000 award from the British Council.

Click here for further information about the eco-social mapping project.

 

Major archeological project wins EU funds to investigate early human settlements

A new archeological project has won EU funding to study the earliest human settlements in Iraq and Iran (17,000-7,000 BC).

University of Reading archaeologists have succeeded in winning a highly prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant of €2.5 million (£2.2 million) for a multi-disciplinary project entitled ‘MENTICA’, Middle East Neolithic Transition – Integrated Community Approaches.

The five-year grant will support six work packages involving archaeological excavations and scientific analysis of early agricultural communities in the Zagros mountains of Iraq and Iran, one of the core regions where human societies first made the transition from mobile hunter-gatherers to settled farmers, founding the basis for the cities and civilisations that followed.

Click hear for further information.

 

Urban metabolism modelling workshop for Brazilian cities

Research Workshop: Urban metabolism modelling for sustainable green infrastructure development in rapidly urbanized mid-sized cities in Brazil, 9-13 July 2018.

Dr. Daniela Perrotti (PI), Dr. Vincent Luo, and Dr. Eugene Mohareb (co-Is) have been awarded a Global Challenge Research Fund Pump-Priming Grant to develop the research on ‘Urban metabolism modelling for sustainable green infrastructure development in rapidly urbanized mid-sized cities in Brazil: A case study in Rondonópolis, Mato Grosso’.

The research will be conducted in collaboration with the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT), Brazil, Dept of Geography and of Management and Dept. of Environmental Technologies, and the University of Leeds (UoL), School of Civil Engineering.

The first action of the research consists of an Interdisciplinary Research workshop at the University of of Mato Grosso, Campus of Rondonópolis (9-13 July 2018). The workshop is co-organized by Daniela, Vincent and Eugene and the Brazilian co-Is, Dr. Fabio Angeoletto, Dr. Jeater Waldemar M.C. Santos, and Dr. Normandes Matos da Silva, and will be attended by leading academics at UFMT and UoL and stakeholders at the Municipality of Rondonópolis (Directorates of Environment, Infrastructure, and Housing and Urban Planning).

The project will concentrate on two key challenges in current local policy-making: air pollution due to the heavily industrialized urban environment and fossil fuel transport; tree cover erosion as a result of the rapid urbanization, and poor accessibility to green areas especially in most deprived neighbourhoods of the city. An urban metabolism study of Rondonópolis, using Material Flow Analysis (MFA), will provide the opportunity to apply knowledge of the inputs, outputs and in-boundary flows of the urban system in sustainable green infrastructure planning and management. The project will enhance current research initiatives from the PI and co-Is through collaboration and share of multi-disciplinary knowledge on urban metabolism and green infrastructure, while increasing local urban management capacity to respond to the multiple social and environmental challenges resulting from rapid urbanization. The consortium will focus on research methods and processes that can be applied in other urban regions with similar physical and metabolic characteristics and policy concerns in Brazil and South America.

Project link

UK-China Urban Regeneration and Sustainable Communities Leadership workshop

Reading University to present at a joint UK-China research workshop this June, at Xi’an Jiaotong University

Daniela Perrotti has been awarded a grant (by the Newton Fund – British Council Researcher Links’ programme) to attend the research workshop “UK-China Urban Regeneration and Sustainable Communities Leadership” at Xi’an Jiaotong University, one of the most prestigious Universities in China.

The workshop will be held on 27-29 June 2018 and is co-organised by Xi’an Jiaotong University and the University of Portsmouth, with 20 selected UK and Chinese researchers. Perrotti is invited to give a guest lecture on Urban metabolism and regeneration strategies in rapidly urbanised regions, based on her previous and ongoing research.

The workshop would provide the opportunity to strengthen existing collaborations with the attending UK researchers and establish new partnerships with Chinese institutions around common research interests.

Workshop link

University Staff page

 

Drawing Maps: Systems and Disruptions

Lee Valley Drift Map 1

Oliver Froome-Lewis presented a paper, ‘Drawing Maps: Systems and Disruptions‘ at Disegno 2018, at the Faculty of Architecture, Tournai, Belgium.

In his paper for Disegno 2018 (18-20th January), Froome-Lewis considers the map as systematiser, disruptor, metaphor and reality system and consider the way that actions play out, never quite producing the anticipated behaviours. Drawing a map simultaneously organises two surfaces, the content on the paper and the corresponding territory on the ground that it seeks to represent. The map offers information about what might be encountered which is then augmented or confounded during the resulting physical journey. Can propositional maps (i.e. maps with behavioural intent), produce a new, free flowing territory that can be travelled in the imagination and in reality or in both concurrently, creating possibilities for new kinds of interaction in the city and stimulating new co-dependencies between the imagination, expectation and experience? In ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’, de Certeau proposes a useful distinction between the organisational strategies that emerge from institutions and structures of power, and the consumers who use a variety of subversions and manipulative tactics on the ground. A map, created as a dispositif, then becomes disordered when performed by the consumer, as a consequence of tactical (mis)interpretations.

In 2013, Froome-Lewis published and distributed eight thousand copies of two maps, designed for London Legacy as part of their ‘Emerging East’ initiative, to connect communities surrounding the Lee Valley and the Olympic Park in East London. A series of experimental traversals of the territory informed the creation of the maps. He has since been framing this work, and other practices carried out in the field, in theory so as to develop the potency of such maps. Where the map can be regarded as a discursive choreography, real and virtual, for performing the city. Selecting and curating map content creates new realities.

Reading 2050 lecture series

Reading 2050

The lecture series is a platform of discussion around the work of the Reading 2050 group established in 2013 by the School of the Built Environment, Barton Wilmore and Reading UK to deliver a strategic, long-term vision that will support the delivery of Reading’s legacy of a truly smart & sustainable city.

Upcoming Reading 2050 talks:

28 June – Reading: Nurturing Nature and Young People in the Future
Speaker: Natalie Ganpatsingh, Nature Nurture
Time: 18:00-19:00
Location: Building L022, room G01,
London Road campus,
University of Reading,
RG1 5AQ

Past Reading 2050 talks:

31 May – The Urban Metabolism of Reading
Speakers: Eugene Mohareb and Daniela Perrotti, School of the Built Environment

Place and Environment Public Lecture Series list

Further information: Reading 2050 vision