Our proposal is to create for the first time a critical review of the existing research on the cultural value of architecture in the UK focusing on the architecture of the home and of the neighbourhood. 'Architecture' is not limited here to the activities of those with Royal Institute of British Architects chartered status. We refer here to architecture as 'design research' or 'research practice' characterised by the rigorous use of such methods as mapping, consultation, visioning, design, masterplanning and building. Whilst there is much evidence for value of architectural input in hospitals and schools, the value of architectural input in homes and neighbourhoods remains unclear partly because of the difficulty in setting up controlled test environments in these contexts. Other methods for establishing value need to be developed with some urgency as the architecture of home and neighbourbood has a key role to play in addressing important societal challenges such as the ageing population and energy use. The critical review will provide a framework for evaluating architecture in homes and neighbourhoods that will help policy makers and practitioners to steer the future of the profession. It will focus on three interconnected components or aspects of value: 1. Wellbeing 2. Neighbourhood Cohesion 3. Identity Belonging and Heritage As we are concerned with the aspects of architecture that cut across socio economic categories we will focus on ways of promoting wellbeing to groups rather than individuals. An important strength of this project is the Advisory Group, including key figures from both industry and academia informing our debate with knowledge from a wide spectrum of viewpoints. The project is supported by the Royal Institute of British Architects and will provide evidence for their review The Value and Impact of Architecture. Sitting controversially within the portfolio of the Culture and Creative Industries Ministry the value of Architecture is currently subject to debate. Indeed the government has recently appointed Sir Terry Farrell to lead a study on public policy, design and the built environment. This critical review will be used, via a briefing paper, as evidence in Sir Farrell's enquiry, in this way influencing policy on the development of the profession. Architecture's inability to evidence its own value can in part be put down to a lack of formal Research and Development culture within the profession. The critical review will influence architectural practice by evidencing and promoting the value of architecture. Initially in the form of a database the critical review will provide the foundation for a series of publication, most notably the Cultural Value of Architecture Report aimed at architects, clients and policy makers. It will draw together other reviews of this subject and provide an important benchmark for future research practice in the area of home and neighbourhood. The critical review will have an important impact on the development of architectural research methodologies which have remained hidden up until now, largely because practitioners rarely articulate what they do in terms of research. Architecture is not just about building, architects are adept at articulating and developing design proposals based on the spatial configuration and visualisation of complex sets of information (quantitative and qualitative). The project will give greater exposure to the methodologies of architecture through the wider Cultural Value project. It will also provide opportunities for the development of new blended methodologies developed through interdisciplinary interaction.

Facing the challenge of increasing urbanisation, strategies for future city development are not considering the long urban past. Archaeologists of ancient cities recognise that long-term urban processes can teach us about diverse human-environment interactions. Thus, TruLife's core research question is: Can studying the diversity of long-term urban traditions, exemplified by pre-Columbian Maya tropical cities, effectively inform designing for sustainable urban futures? Research activities Under the current Cross-Council Enquiry Highlight Notice, TruLife will create a humanities led network of researchers that incorporates the environmental and social sciences. They will convene in three workshops dedicated to pivotal concerns ubiquitous to building sustainable cities: A) Food Security B) Decay and Waste Management C) Spatial Practice TruLife's workshops establish concrete foundations for comparative frames of reference, associated terms, data, and analysis relevant to pertinent topics, which will be widely disseminated. Background The longest time span and most diverse cases of urban developmental pathways are being recorded by archaeologists. This significantly expanded evidence base of urban scenarios is currently not used in designs for sustainable urban life. A lack of comparative frames of reference (including commensurable methods and data presentation) causes the absence of direct, mutually informing dialogues. With a focus on the well-documented 2,500 year history of the Maya Neotropical urban tradition, workable, high-potential outcomes for wide-ranging research and innovative design applications can be achieved. Maya urbanism offers an elucidating case. It flourished without the 'human-animal grazing complex' Old World urban growth relies on. This contrast asks crucial questions about critical differences in human-environment interactions. Maya everyday urban life and development thrived in different urban ecological relations and metabolic processes to those of globalised temperate-climate models. European colonisation replaced Maya urban configurations with such models, causing the loss of key practices, including its long-term adaptability to change. Dependence on grazing animals results in declining soil fertility, soil erosion, massive deforestation, and misdirected investments (e.g. growing crops to feed cattle), all of which pose a global threat to humanity. Urban design and environmental engineering aspire to balance ecological relations of cities to attain more sustainable social life. The usability of ideas derived from TruLife's cross-disciplinary encounters follows from both a better appreciation of archaeological contributions outside the discipline and allowing environmental and urban social science to influence archaeological investigation. Dissemination and Impact TruLife will examine the relevance of long-term Maya tropical cities to offering critical contexts and alternatives to current discussions on strategies for urban futures, disseminating results in a special issue of an international journal (TruLife has links to Journal of Urbanism and Ecology and Society) and abridged methodological pointers on an existing research website. Developing a brief for a Design Ideas Competition will test the ability of new insights and frames of reference in areas of shared concern. The competition and resulting exhibition will be organised with non-academic project partners creating a powerful arena of knowledge exchange and impact, both of research and impacting subsequent research scopes. Reach The network comprises an international membership with a strategic UK base (12 in 6 countries), expert invitees (6), and non-academic project partners (2). Diverse membership, including links to related NGOs, steering group, and external partners ensure the quality and broad leverage for TruLife's outputs. Impact activities concern urban populations, urban professionals, students, and public.

This project will bring Volume House Builders (represented) by Taylor Wimpey, built environment academia (represented by academics on a North-South axis from Edinburgh, Sheffield and Kingston Universities) and SME architecture practice together on a shared research project - a framework for developing a series of 2-3 other embedded projects - the primary aim of which is improving VHB provision and knowledge exchange across partners. In doing so we will share good practice and model novel forms of engagement across an industry in critical need of innovation. The built environment is perhaps the most ubiquitous example of the creative economy in modern Britain, yet is generally overlooked and undervalued in this context. The UK construction industry contributes around 10% of UK GDP. The work of the professions that drive it is therefore of vital importance to our society. Their expertise is reflected in a strong global reputation but the market is shrinking (RIBA Building Futures Report, p.39). In 2007, the Labour government announced a target of building an extra three million homes in England by 2020 to help deal with the growing demand for houses. At the same time it set up the framework to be world class in the delivery of zero-carbon homes by 2016. According to the Calcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery this would 'stretch' an industry (2007, p.7) not yet ready for these demands. The need for bulk delivery of sustainable housing remains the same, even after a change of government. Local authorities look to housing associations and private sector developers such as the VHBs to help them achieve these demands however the recent recession means that house builders are struggling more than ever to minimize their costs. This is likely to impact on design quality which, as CABE research has indicated was poor, even before the recession (CABE, Space in New Homes, What Residents Think, 2009 ). Our project focuses on improvements to the supply chain. The Calcutt Review has identified the need for VHBs to work with partners with the 'necessary expertise' to make this happen (2007, p.8). This is where architectural SME practice and academia come in. There is a great deal of, largely unacknowledged, research potential in SMEs in the architectural creative industries, yet these practices are under threat - their traditional market is being taken over by large interdisciplinary conglomerates (RIBA, Building Futures Report, 2010, p.32).The project will provide the necessary support to allow these firms to deploy their creative energy in a wider industry context, to build on their research base and to develop new business models. Academia has an important role to play in giving SME practices access to cutting edge research. Through the embedded research projects our departments will become a shared resource of both equipment and knowledge where practitioners and academics can exchange knowledge, similar to the MIT's model of 'Fablabs', at the same time providing opportunities for academic researchers to test their ideas in a real world setting. There are three elements to the project: - Knowledge Exchange through the Ideas Lab and the 2-3 embedded research projects that emerge from them disseminated through partner networks. - Innovation resulting from the 2-3 embedded research projects developed by architectural SME practice and academia in partnership with Taylor Wimpey. - Development of practice based research through the above activities and through the Housing Practice Research Review to be undertaken, in partnership with the RIBA, through which we will be able to identify the current state of practice based housing research. The report from this review will act as a platform for research in this area and as a framework for a Research Practice Guide, the focus of a series of CPD events. These are the ingredients of a strategy to expand the reach of project and to change the face of VHB housing.

Equitable access to affordable and well-designed housing is fundamental for a just society. Yet, there is an estimated demand for 345,000 new homes per year in England alone. Housing inequalities and a failure of the market to supply decent housing to the subsidised sector that meet changing user and household demands is exacerbated by Covid-19. Already around 31% of adults in Britain experienced mental or physical health problems due to housing conditions during the first lockdown, with over 10% feeling depressed because of a lack of space. Growing pressure to deliver more and better-designed housing requires a re-evaluation of housing use, design, and quality. However, there is a great lack of design research bringing together practice-led research, architectural academic studies, and housing research in other disciplines. Especially how the evidence base informing housing design and its regulation is determined and limits innovation has received little attention. This knowledge gap is critical to architecture, with evidencing housing design value recognised by the Royal Institute of British Architects and the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence as an urgent problem. Despite widespread consensus on the positive impact that housing can have, what is specifically meant by design and what role architecture plays is often unclear. Especially the value of architecture and design to the homes we spent more than half of our lives in and how they are determined by regulations and standards or the external factors defining them, is insufficiently understood. In fact, we know surprisingly little about what the average home looks like or what determines its design. This project examines how architectural housing is standardised by design governance, especially in the subsidised housing sector. It explores the questions: What are the means of design governance to regulate housing design, and what evidence-based design and decision-making emerge from the underpinning spatial, technical, and social reasoning? How are typical housing designs standardised through design controls, typological preferences, and social norms? To what extent are the relationships between design governance, definition and assessment of design controls, and typical housing design contextual to a time and place or transferable? This project examines these questions through a historical comparison of design governance and housing design approaches in England and an international comparison of typical housing designs in Chile, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and China that represent the most common design controls used today in different design governance, housing market, and subsidised housing contexts. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the contextual determinants of housing design and a re-evaluation of the links between spatial, social, and technical reasoning and housing design research, the lessons that can be learned from this for housing challenges in England today will be assessed. While there is an abundance of studies from an architectural perspective of design, these are largely disconnected from housing studies in other disciplines that, in turn, tend to disregard questions of design. Especially little attention has been paid to how policies relate to design governance and technical research, and how this determines typical housing design and usability. These issues are commonly dismissed as a problem of architectural practice, undeserving of historiographical attention or critical study. To address this, the project develops an integrated and transdisciplinary review and design history of the relationships between housing design, design governance, and evidence base as shaped by diverse housing research. This will further enable a more inclusive historiographical and methodological revision of housing studies and architectural design research.

It is well known that climate change will have a significant impact on UK building design and energy use. It is also known, that the current standard reference year and design summer year (these are the weather files used by industry-standard computer models of buildings), being assembled from data collected only up to 1995, do not represent even the current UK climate. The building design community is therefore highly exposed to the possibility of occupant dissatisfaction and possible litigation. In addition, most buildings are not being designed to cope with increased variability in a warming climate. The desire to use probabilistic scenarios will not solve this unless either new reference years are created, made widely available and guidance given on which ones to use and when/or, totally new methods are developed. Even this is likely to be unsuccessful in driving adaptation decisions unless a full understanding of how designers might use such data is gained and a consistent way found of examining any changes in costs. There is therefore a need to simultaneously study not only probabilistic data sets for the built environment, but also how such information can be used to drive adaptation decisions. In many ways the move to probabilistic outputs by such groups as UKCIP presents an opportunity. The ability to create bespoke probabilistic reference years using, for example a weather generator, changes the way problems can be tackled and even how the client or architect thinks about such issues.An interdisciplinary approach is envisaged with the project separated into seven work packages:1. It has been identified that high resolution climate information has many practical applications for building design/(for example the BETWIXT project). However, the best way to downscale climate model information for any particular application is not clear. We will agree a process for the creation of new reference years for the period 2010 to 2080, with hourly time steps. This will make use of the UKCIP08 probability distribution functions and UKCIP08's weather generator, but with the addition of wind direction estimates.2. Consider how in theory, probabilistic climate data is best used to produce useful and accurate predictions of internal environments and energy use. 3. Create a large set of reference years compatible with common building simulation codes based on the latest probabilistic results. 4. Given the complex decision-making context of future proofing, an additional aim of the project is to better understand the organisational, social, and psychological factors that might influence the willingness of the industry to adopt new technologies/practices. Research will focus on how engineers work in practice, the time and knowledge constraints they work under, and the motivational factors that are likely to influence decisions about using future-proofing technology. 5. There is the need to fully understand the range of possible results in building performance that can be generated by UKCIP08 and then to finalise a much smaller sub-set of probabilistic reference years (PRYs), that reflect the needs and practices of design teams working within a commercial environment. (These files would be delivered in a format consistent with the requirements of common building simulation codes.) 6. Examination of the effect of climate change on UK building design and refurbishment. The smaller PRY subset would be used to examine how parameters such as thermal mass and glazed fraction can be used most effectively to improve thermal comfort and reduce energy demand for a range of built forms and uses, and produce case studies. 7. The economic costs of various design strategies will also need to be examined, for example the increased cost of cooling, as will the cost to architectural practices of altering their working practices in order to make use of probabilistic data.