• Urban Planning

• Urban Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

• Urban Carbon Mapping

• Nature-based Solutions

• Green Infrastructure

• Urban Microclimate and Local Climate Zones

• Urban Resilience

• Sustainable and Resilient Urban Forms

• Assessment Tools and Decision Support Systems

• Smart Cities

• Post-pandemic cities

Background

My research is motivated by the fact that urban planning and design are key elements for achieving global peace and sustainability. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports show that the next 2-3 decades are crucial to influence city development. Smart and sustainable urban development is crucial to avoid lock-in into wrong urban design and urban development paradigms. My main area of research is sustainable and resilient urban development, including integrated assessment of sustainability and resilience of urban environments, the study of green and low-carbon urban initiatives, developing strategies for climate change mitigation and adaptation in cities, and study of the evolution of environmental planning theories. Since moving to Hiroshima University in July 2018, I have also been doing research at the intersection of peace and global sustainability as part of my duties at the Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS).

Current and future research

I am currently mainly working on four research projects related to climate change, urban carbon management, urban sustainability assessment, and urban form resilience. I will continue working on these projects over the next few years.

The first project is a collaborative effort involving several institutes and universities such as Global Carbon Project and National Institute for Environmental Studies (Japan). The project intends to analyze the implications of future urbanization for global carbon budget. In other words, we want to find out to what extent global urbanization might extend the carbon problem and to what extend it might help solve it. Issues related to alternative urban design scenarios and evolutionary co-design of cities are also investigated. As part of this research initiative, I would also like to pilot test a standardized framework for urban carbon mapping that I have recently developed. The framework uses the Local Climate Zones (LCZs) concept for proving a bottom-up accounting of carbon dioxide emissions in cities. The outputs of this project will contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

The second research stream aims at providing further insights on the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of urban resilience and resilient urban form. This research project investigates the impacts of urban form on resilience at different stages of disaster risk management process (mitigation, preparation, absorption, recovery, and adaptation). I am trying to identify major characteristics of resilient urban forms and find out which urban forms effectively enhance resilience and coping capacity of communities.

The third research stream is focused on developing a tool for assessing sustainability, resilience, and smartness of cities in an integrated manner. There are currently many tools that assess such qualities (i.e., sustainability, resilience, and smartness) separately. However, taking an integrated approach is essential to achieve efficiency and efficacy in urban management. The main project objectives are to synthesize existing research on these concepts, present a critical review of existing assessment tools, and provide a detailed framework for integrated assessment. This project involves analyzing different research methodologies and creating a database on different criteria that can be used for assessing different socio-economic, environmental, and institutional aspects. In conducting this research, I am particularly interested in shedding more light on the issue of system boundaries in the context of integrated assessment.

The last research project aims at synthesizing knowledge at the intersection of peace and climate change. At the short- and medium-term, I explore the actual/potential implications of climate change for global peace and vice versa. The outputs contribute to the University’s newly established NERPS program. In the long term, I intend to further build on this research component by collaborating with colleagues within and beyond the university to expand the scope of the activities of NERPS. Among other things, my ambition is to develop a geo-referenced database of the climate change related conflicts and disputes around the world. Such a database will complement the existing conflict databases. In addition to such research activities, I will also contribute to the NERPS agenda by adopting inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to broaden the scope of the network.