In this project we define ‘built form’ as the assemblage of individual buildings and structures in the built environment and we make use of a wide range of new insights and data to model the evolution of the built form in Britain. Building on the pilot CDBB project PolyChora, which has developed an alpha-version of a new digital interface for visualising changes in land use, buildings and transport infrastructure, this project aims to (a) develop a fully-fledged new digital modelling method and beta-version software tool for representing and visualising the built form at the national, regional and local scales, (b) use it to carry out demonstration studies for three areas that face distinctly different development and regeneration pressures for housing, infrastructure and social service provision in West London, South Manchester and the Greater Cambridge-Greater Peterborough Combined Authority in collaboration with collaborating practitioners, businesses, local governments and community groups, (c) scale up to the level of Britain in investigating the evolution of built form in collaboration with the newly founded UK2070 Commission and UK central government departments, (d) produce policy-cogent reports on findings and data management for dissemination to both public and private sector users, such as those interested in balancing employment growth between current hot-spots and declining regions, addressing housing and infrastructure backlogs, and enhancing the natural environment and the performance of eco-system services.
Presentation at CDBB Week 2019
Next Steps
The modelling method developed here has been used in a DEFRA project under its Future Evidence Programme, and new prediction model for emissions of NOx, NO2, PM10, PM2.5, linking these to land use modelling developed by this project.