Evolving Cities: Exploring the relations between urban form resilience and the governance of urban form

This project involves an exploration of the interplay between the designed and built qualities of urban form and urban governance over time in creating ‘resilience’. Its focus is on neighbourhood-scaled pieces of major cities and urbanised regions which exemplify long-term processes of land management through ownership, planning, investment and development. It examines the role of these processes in informing the patterns and timeframes of infrastructure provision, build-out, adaptation, renewal and redevelopment that characterise how such areas evolve from their inception. The project’s aims in doing so are two-fold. First, it aims to evaluate the ‘resilience’ of different sorts of urban form to the varied contexts of change and uncertainty which shape the evolution of the built city. Second, it aims to explore the roles of ‘city builders’ over the long-term in influencing the resilience which different sorts of urban form and infrastructure are able to acquire over time.