SNACC: Suburban neighbourhood adaptation for a changing climate: identifying effective, practical and acceptable means of suburban re-design

September 2009 to September 2012

Prof Katie Williams, University of the West of England (UWE)

AIM: The proposed research answers the question: how can existing suburban neighbourhoods be best adapted to reduce further impacts of climate change and withstand ongoing changes?

Objectives:

  • Develop climate change scenarios that are meaningful at the suburban neighbourhood scale.
  • Develop socio-cultural and governance change scenarios appropriate at the suburban neighbourhood scale.
  • Construct a typology of UK suburbs (identifying the ‘latent’ adaptation capacity of their built forms)
  • Develop a portfolio of potential adaptation (and mitigation) strategies for suburbs (including autonomous and planned adaptations, for individual dwellings and neighbourhoods) and cluster these into testable adaptation ‘packages’.
  • Develop a hedonic model to determine the impact of adaptation strategies on house prices in suburbs.
  • Determine the technical performance of the adaptation strategy ‘packages’, based on a number of criteria, including their impact on carbon reduction and the extent to which they ameliorate specific impacts (e.g. reduce heat or provide shade).
  • Determine the practicality of the adaptations (in terms of costs, scale, extent of re-modelling) for key agents of change.
  • Determine the acceptability of the adaptations (in terms of impact on house prices, visual intrusion, relative trade-offs between cost and benefits) for key agents of change.
  • Identify the adaptation packages that perform best across the three tests for different types of suburbs, with different adaptation capacities, given the different climate change and socio-cultural and governance change scenarios.

July 2012: Community resilience, meeting with Cabinet Office and Defra

June 2011 Meeting with the Scottish Government:

April 2011 Conference output:

September 2010 Joint stakeholder/researcher forum:

Journal articles:

  • Gupta, R. and Gregg, M. (2011). Adapting UK suburban neighbourhoods and dwellings for a changing climate, Advances in Building Energy Research Journal, 5:1, 81–108.
  • Gupta, R. and Gregg, M. (2012) Using UK climate change projections to adapt existing English homes for a warming climate, Building and Environment, 55: 2012, 20–42.
  • Williams, K. (2011). Climate Proofing the UK’s Suburbs, Project, Journal of the Department of Planning and Architecture, University of the West of England, 60–64.
  • Williams, K., Gupta, R., Hopkins, D., Gregg, M., Payne, C., Joynt, J., Smith, I. and Brkljac, N. (2012). Retrofitting suburban areas to adapt to a changing climate, Building Research and Information (submitted to BRI)
  • Williams, K. Joynt, JLR. and Hopkins, D. (2010). Climate change and the compact city: the challenge of adapting suburbs, Built Environment, 36:1, 105–115.
  • Williams, K., Joynt, JLR., Payne, C., Hopkins, D. and Smith, I. (2010). The conditions for, and changes of, adapting England’s suburbs for climate change, Building and Environment, 55 (2012), 131–140.

Book chapters:

  • Gupta, R. and Gregg, M. (forthcoming in 2011). Adapting existing homes to climate change. In: Smith, S. (ed.) The International Encyclopaedia of Housing and Home. Elsevier.

Published conference proceedings:

  • Gupta, R and Gregg, M (2011) Suburban neighbourhood adaptation for a changing climate: developing climate change scenarios for suburbs, Peer-reviewed paper. In: EVRARD, A. & BODART, M. (Eds.) PLEA 2011 Architecture & sustainable development: Conference Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Passive and Low Energy Architecture (PLEA) Volume 1, 13–15 July 2011, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Presses Universitaires de Louvain, pp. 233-238. ISBN: 978-2-87463-276-1.

Reports:

  • The SNACC team is contributing a report to the RETROFIT 2050 project, which focuses on re-engineering the city 2020–2050: Urban Foresight and Transition Management, funded under the EPSRC Sustainable Environment Programme.

Working papers:

  • Developing climate change scenarios that are meaningful at the suburban neighbourhood scale – Rajat Gupta.
  • Adapting the English suburbs for climate change: A conceptual model of local adaptive capacity – Ian Smith and Diane Hopkins.
  • Identifying a typology of English suburbs: Based on building and neighbourhood morphology – Katie Williams, Jenny Joynt and Catherine Evans.
  • Development and application of the DECoRuM model: Developing the existing modelling and visualisation capacities – Rajat Gupta.
  • The implementation of the VEPs tool in the SNACC project: A brief – Nada Bates-Brkljac.

Conferences, events and outreach

  • Professor Rajat Gupta presented a peer-reviewed paper Suburban neighbourhood adaptation for a changing climate: developing climate change scenarios for suburbs at the PLEA 2011 Architecture and Sustainable Development: 27th International Conference on Passive and Low Energy Architecture (July 2011).
  • Professor Glen Bramley presented at the ARCC Coordination Network: Meeting with Scottish Government in Edinburgh (June 2011).
  • Professor Katie Williams presented In Suburbia: the challenge of adapting homes, gardens and neighbourhoods at the EPSRC/UKCIP Adapting our Built Environment: ARCC Contributions and Challenges Conference (April 2011).
  • Professor Katie Williams presented What does an adapted neighbourhood look like? to the Local Government Group Roundtable (February 2011).
  • Dr Ian Smith worked with researchers from Griffith University, Australia, to devise a bid to fund a research bid to investigate the adaptation of Australian suburbs for climate change and explore further collaboration opportunities (January 2010).