Technology Readiness of bio-based construction materials

Mark Corbett - Biorenewables Development Centre

Defossilisation of the Construction sector is a chance to upgrade existing building stock and new builds with bio-based materials that benefit the health and wellbeing of society alongside planetary health. New, sustainable biogenic chemicals and materials promise to turn building stocks into an asset that sequesters GHG from the atmosphere, rather than contributing to the 25% of UK emissions associated with the built environment. The Biorenewables Development Centre is a leading UK translation and scale-up centre, supporting customers to develop technologies from the lab bench through commercialisation. This seminar will explore the future of bio-based construction materials through innovation case studies, showcasing technologies at various stages of maturity.

Speaker Bio: Mark is Director of the Biorenewables Development Centre, an open-access process development and scale-up organisation providing expertise to accelerate commercialisation of biobased processes and products. BDC’s capabilities span feedstock identification and preprocessing through to upstream chemical and biological processing, with scale-matched product purification technologies, typically at 1-100kg scale. Mark has over twenty years’ experience in research and innovation working in and for business and academia. He is a member of the UK Industrial Biotechnology Leadership Forum (IBLF) and Co-founder of the UK Alliance for Sustainable Chemicals & Materials. He is co-author of the IBLF National Industrial Biotechnology Strategy to 2030. He is a passionate advocate for Engineering Biology as the key driver to develop novel Industrial Biotechnology processes and products at the scale required for the transition to a prosperous and sustainable, defossilised economy.

Catalysts of Change: The Role of Entrepreneurs in Advancing a Sustainable Wellbeing Economy

School for Business and Society

The world is increasingly facing a complex web of interconnected crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and socio-economic fragility. These multifaceted challenges threaten both societal resilience and ecological integrity, prompting growing consensus on the urgent need for systemic transformation. In response, discussions around sustainable economic models are gaining traction, with a range of alternative approaches from incremental reforms to radical structuring in addressing the root causes of unsustainability. Within this landscape, the Wellbeing Economy (WE) has emerged as a middle-ground paradigm, advocating for a shift away from material growth as the central objective of economic development. Instead, it prioritises human and planetary wellbeing as core measures of progress. While the concept of a Wellbeing Economy is promising, translating its principles into practice faces significant challenges. This talk examines the catalytic role of entrepreneurs in driving systemic change and explore their potential to operationalising the Wellbeing Economy. Drawing upon case studies and emerging practices, it highlights how entrepreneurial innovation can act as a transformative force in advancing sustainable and equitable futures.

Go Local or Go Home

Luke Gooding - SEI-Y

The future of the built environment isn’t about one-size-fits-all solutions, it’s about decentralisation. From supply chains to energy systems and policy-making, shifting power to the local level is key to creating a resilient, low-carbon future. The challenge isn’t just technical; it’s about restructuring systems to prioritise local needs, resources, and decision-making. This presentation explores how decentralisation can drive meaningful change. Strengthening smaller, regional supply chains reduces reliance on fragile global networks, making retrofits and sustainable materials more accessible. Locally governed energy systems, from community-owned renewables to smart microgrids, enhance resilience and affordability while keeping economic benefits within communities. Policies tailored to local contexts can drive climate-positive action in ways that are both effective and equitable, ensuring that solutions reflect the unique needs of the people they serve. Through case studies and real-world strategies, this research highlights how decentralisation can transform the built environment, creating cities and communities that are adaptive, sustainable, and designed for the people who live in them.

Homes don't make decisions, people do

Steve Hall - Department of Environment & Geography

We can use social sciences to solve net zero challenges in the built environment. Dr Stephen Hall will share his work on understanding how messy, emotional human beings are at the end point of all Net Zero policy and how earnest messaging on climate, energy bills and carbon are falling on deaf ears. This session will introduce the idea of 'relational' decision making. Instead of making decisions based on rational calculations, people instead decide on upgrades or changes to their home based on a series of relational 'packages'. Understanding relational packages is more than just an enrichment of our appreciation of the social world, it has profound implications for climate policy on the built environment. 

Environmental policy considerations in York

Graham Gill - Department of Environment & Geography

I will present insight from 36 interviews with key stakeholders in York around cultural, social, economic, and political factors that affect the implementation of environmental policy in the city. I will also draw upon case studies from 50 interviews conducted in Bath, Bristol, Edinburgh, Plymouth, and Preston to add context to this understanding.

Dhaval Thakker - University of Hull

Sustainable Preservation & Urban Regeneration of World Heritage Sites: Historic Cairo – A Human-Centric Approach

Gamal Abdelmonem - Department of Architecture

This talk will take a Human-centric approach to preserving historic cities and interrogate the relationship between people, culture, and place. Using historic Cairo as a case in point, Gamal will discuss why navigating community narratives and cultural practices uncovers new knowledge, dismantles biases, and reconstructs our perceptions about the present as much as it does about the past.

Smartline: Choosing sensor locations and modelling mould growth

Tamaryn Meneer - University of Exeter

The Smartline project investigated opportunities for technology to support healthier and happier homes. Sensor, survey, and housing data were collected from 280 homes in Cornwall, including environmental readings, utility usages, and household characteristics. Two areas of research will be presented: (1) The use of cluster analysis to select representative locations to place sensors; (2) A model of mould growth that was adapted for air readings of relative humidity and temperature in noisy domestic environments. 

Ideas, Plans, Place – YoCo and shaping York Central

Phil Bixby - Architect, Constructive Individuals

York Central offers York a massive opportunity – 45 hectares of brownfield land close to the city centre – but also a massive challenge to envision what people want this future quarter, and its influence on the city, to be. The My York Central public engagement process and subsequent formation of York Central Co-Owned (YoCo) is a story of a city’s big ideas and how they became a community plan, and also how this all sits alongside the challenges of developing a massive site in mixed ownership, with a range of stakeholders and their various priorities. The story will be told by architect Phil Bixby, who along with heritage academic Helen Graham devised and facilitated the public engagement, and is currently helping YoCo to steward the public vision onto the site.

Ghost Signs: Preserving faded history and public memory

Tyson Mitman - York St John University

The Ghost Signs Project looks at the faded signage that exist around us in York, and attempts to use it to better understand York's commercial history, how it has developed, and how these developments can inform how the life, culture, commercial values, and aesthetics of the city has shifted over time. This project has just been funded through Historic England, and is in its very early stages. This talk will discuss the inspiration for the project, the research in its current stage, and what the goals of the project are. The purpose of this is to encourage the audience to engage with the city in a new way, both ideologically and visually. The encouraged shift in perspective will hopefully inspire the audience to reimagine the city as a kind of open-air museum to itself that helps connect public space to public and personal memory, which makes the everyday experience of the city more interactive and special.

Homelessness Futures: Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing Built Environment

Nicholas Pleace - Centre for Housing Policy, School for Business and Society

Varying attitudes towards homelessness have long been reflective wider political and ideological differences and, as we have seen over the weekend with the proposed ban on rough sleepers using tents in England, those tensions are accelerating at present. Policy and practice that has been shown to be highly effective - in essence a toolkit to reduce homelessness to a peripheral social problem exists - sits uncomfortably next to attitudes that closely mirror the thinking of a century and a half ago that approached the 'houseless poor' as perpetrators of deliberate social deviance. Alongside this, tensions are arising around the sustainability of responses to homelessness in a context in which 'housing' and 'home' need to be rapidly reconceptualised in pursuit of net zero.  

Structures of feeling in the affective economies of private renting in the Majority World

Adriana Mihaela Soaite - University of Glasgow

The interest in the private renting sector as a mechanism generator of new inequalities is dominated by accounts of the Minority World. In these economically developed countries of sustained regulatory, market, welfare and tenant-activism institutions, much of the focus has fallen on proposing ways of increasing the sector’s efficiency and addressing tenants’ precarity. But what about the Majority World?  

Advancing a Critical Interpretative Synthesis of the academic literature on renting in the Majority World and drawing on the method of ‘experimental comparison’, I aim to read the affective economies as private renting through Raymond William’s (1977) concept of ‘structures of feeling’ that is a ‘sense of a shared affective quality through which the present is rendered sensible and apprehended’. Through an inductive/deductive interpretation, I propose understanding the affective economies of private renting through three dominant structures of feeling: (a) greed and alienation, emerging through capitalist relations as exposed by Karl Marx (1867), and more recently Madden and Marcuse (2016); (b) ethics of care, emerging through the social infrastructure of diverse economies, as exposed by Karl Polanyi (1957), and more recently Gibson-Graham (2008); and (c) cruel optimism, emerging through the attrition of the conditions of possibility of the ‘good life’, as exposed by Lauren Berlant (2011). I apply this framework of interpretation to the very different historical presents of Eastern Europe, Western Africa (Ghana and Nigeria) and the Indian subcontinent. Rooted in broader theories of affect (Anderson 2014), it is hoped that the theoretical reading proposed shows that the lived experience of private renting is not only shaped by economic and political structures but also by structures of feeling through which the other two are both reproduced and questioned, potentially leading to the emergence of new everyday practices and institutional arrangements. 

Lessons from the Bronze Age: investigating the built environment of Mohenjo-daro

Adam Green - Department of Archaeology/Department of Environment and Geography, University of York

The Bronze Age site of Mohenjo-daro was one of the world's first cities. It boasted a thriving civic infrastructure, with commodious multi-level houses built with baked brick along planned streets; large-scale and small scale public structures like offices, baths and assembly hall; a coordinated drainage system; innovative craft industries and long-distance trade. And yet, the city was conspicuously egalitarian, challenging long-held assumptions about ancient inequality. In this talk, Adam will introduce Mohenjo-daro, and discuss how research at the ancient city can help us think differently about our built environments today.

A Sustainable Future for York Minster: Driving Change in Heritage Context

Alex McCallion - Director of Works and Precinct, York Minster

Alex McCallion, Director of Works & Precinct will give a seminar on the complexities of a heritage estate such as York Minster.  Alex will talk about the process he has been through to create a Neighbourhood Plan for the 7Ha Precinct, the first of its kind in England and adopted by City of York Council in June 2022.  He will then focus on the £40,000,000 of capital projects being delivered on the back of the Plan as well as talk about the journey to Net Zero he is leading on both at York Minster and in the county as he attempts to deliver the first Carbon Net Zero cathedral by 2030.  Of particular interest will be the detail around the forthcoming Centre of Excellence for Heritage Craft Skills & Estate Management.

STREETLIFE and The Common Room: A historic High Street Hub for York

Kate Giles - Department of Archaeology

STREEETLIFE was a UK Government Community Renewal Fund project undertaken in 2022 by the departments of Music, English and Related Literatures and Archaeology and History. It sought to explore the potential for heritage-led renewal of the historic High Streets, offering new experiences, activities and opportunities for residents and visitors to better understand the dynamic history of the street over two millennia - and to think about its future development, as leading developer The Helmsley Group develops proposals for the 'Riverside'. Thanks to follow-on funding from the University of York, the project is now exploring the legacy and future of the its Hub at 29-31 Coney Street. Come along to hear Heritage Project Lead Kate Giles reflect on its successes - and challenges and hopefully you will be inspired and encouraged to get involved in the current initiative of 'The Common Room'.

Stand in the Place Where You Live…Psychosocial costs of inequalities between places

Kate Pickett - Department of Health Sciences

Vertical Farming - what can it offer urban food systems?

Katherine Denby - Department of Biology

Within the FixOurFood programme we are researching how businesses that prioritise social and environmental benefit (not just profit) can be encouraged in the food system and help tackle the health, environment, and economic challenges of how we produce, supply, and eat food. As part of this, we are running an urban indoor vertical farm (Grow It York) supplying hyper-local fresh produce to food businesses and the local community and engaging with the local community to raise awareness of the environmental and health impacts of our food system and promote consumption of healthy food. I will talk about Grow It York and how vertical farming could have a positive benefit on urban food systems. 

Residents’ well-being in Asian cities: The links with neighbourhood wealth and location

Sohail Ahmad - Department of Environment and Geography

It has been argued that neighbourhood attributes play a crucial role in well-being measures. Yet, more knowledge is needed to know how the neighbourhood's wealth and neighbourhood's location relate to residents' well-being, particularly in cities of emerging economies. This talk explores the links between neighbourhood's wealth and their locations, within- and between-city, and well-being measures using household survey data from Delhi, Dhaka and Manila. Findings reveal that inhabitants living in rich neighbourhoods have higher neighbourhood satisfaction than poor neighbourhoods, after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. Inhabitants living in inner-city neighbourhoods have lower well-being measures than city centre/suburbs, as expected. In comparison to Delhi, inhabitants in Dhaka have lower well-being measures. Households’ financial conditions are positively linked with well-being measures, notably stronger than their neighbourhood’s wealth and locations. Overall, evidence from this study suggests that improvement in well-being measures requires targeting place-based interventions, such as low-income and inner-city neighbourhoods, and people-based interventions through improving their household’s financial conditions. Finally, this talk concludes with potential policy implications for sustainable neighbourhood development in Asian cities. 

Slum or slum rehabilitation housing? Discussing gender vulnerability in low-income urban settlements in the global South

Anika Haque - Department of Environment and Geography

Women's involvement in UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 11 (safe, resilient and sustainable human settlements) remains an under-researched area, especially in the urban context. Yet gender equality is central to achieving the sustainable development goals. The global South cities reflect the acute reality of urban women being structurally marginalized from the urbanization and associated development process/es. Using a case study from a global South city (i.e. Mumbai, India), this talk will discuss the gendered vulnerabilities in slum rehabilitation housings. It will show how material infrastructure (e.g. housing and associated urban services) influence the ideas of (gender) marginality and inequality and traps women in a vicious poverty cycle. It will also indicate how such reinforcing loops can be broken via (building) design interventions.

Liverpool and the Making of Creative Capitalism in Late Twentieth-Century Britain

Sam Wetherell - Department of History

Contemporary politicians and economists regularly celebrate the importance of “creativity”. We are told that Britain’s “creative industries” employ two million people. How did this come to pass? How and when did art-making and creativity become expected to shoulder the burden of economic development? What are the historical processes that allow us to conceive of a “creative economy”? This paper will look at the redevelopment of Liverpool's waterfront in the 1980s to answer some of these questions. 

The technical and behavioural barriers to delivering good ventilation in hospitality premises. 

Abigail Hathway - University of Sheffield

The Covid-19 pandemic has raised the importance of delivering decent ventilation in all buildings. However, the general provision of ventilation in a lot of spaces is unknown. This talk will present findings from research investigating current ventilation provision in a range of small and medium scale hospitality venues (venues with no bespoke buildings expertise in the business), and the technical and behavioural barriers to improvement.

Understanding vulnerability to the net zero transition in the UK: a conceptual framework

Carolyn Snell - School for Business and Society

Existing research indicates that certain socio-economic and demographic groups will be disproportionately burdened during transition to net zero. Families living with vulnerabilities like low income, poor housing and lack of access to services will have a different experience to families without disadvantage. Also, that the impact of a net zero transition will vary regionally, with particular concern for Yorkshire and the North of England. However, there is insufficient knowledge on how these different elements will interact with one another and a lack of consolidation of existing research.

The project builds a comprehensive framework of the risks and opportunities that families and communities face as a result of the transition, undertaken in three stages:

• Reviewing current literature, case studies and existing data, including lived experience data where available, to establish what is known about the factors that will impact families and communities, and families and communities’ capabilities to respond. This information will be used to create a draft framework and identify gaps in current knowledge.

• Testing the framework in participatory community-based workshops to understand the lived experience of families within communities to develop a co-produced, revised framework that identifies key indicators of vulnerability or capability.

• Further developing the framework with stakeholders across the social, welfare, economic, energy and environmental sectors, and in national and local government.

This project will provide the strategic insights necessary and policy recommendations desirable to enable government, practitioners, and other relevant parties to plan for and manage a ‘just transition’.

The State of Urban Neighborhood Research

Gideon Baffoe - Department of Environment and Geography

The concept of neighbourhood remains highly relevant in urban studies. However, until now, no attempt has been made to statistically chart the field. This study aims to provide a macroscopic overview using bibliometric analysis of the main characteristics of neighbourhood research in order to understand the academic landscape. The study analyses the emergence and evolution of the concept of neighbourhood in published research, conceptual and intellectual structures as well as scholarship collaboration. It is found that topics related to the local economy of neighbourhoods are sparse, suggesting a major gap in the literature.

When Proptech meets the estate: The potential and limits of IoT innovation in managing indoor air quality in social housing

Alison Wallace - Centre for Housing Policy

This paper examines what artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things can offer social housing tenants complaining about damp, mould and cold homes and their social landlords’ asset management strategies. Data driven technologies comprise what some have dubbed the fourth industrial revolution, doing for cognitive processes what steam and electricity did for physical processes. Consideration of the societal impacts of such innovations currently lags the increased computational power, connectivity and artificial intelligence that offer accelerated disruptive practices in a number of domains. These technologies are shaping housing outcomes by supporting the creation of new asset classes or property management systems, but are also increasingly applied to more prosaic but no less profound housing experiences. A small exploratory study of the deployment of connected environmental sensors to remotely monitor indoor air quality in social tenants’ homes is used to discuss the potential and limits of technological solutions to overcoming adverse health outcomes arising from poor housing conditions. The findings point to a largely connected and supportive tenant body, who value the sensor data supporting landlords’ stock reinvestment and crucially providing a voice to tenants by evidencing their complaints.  The paper highlights the importance of the sociotechnical context to these data encounters as while the sensors provide new insights, issues such as fuel poverty and limited investment resources could marginalise any gains.  As governments rush to utilise technology to support austerity weakened systems, in these circumstances their transformational potential could prove limited in overcoming housing and health inequalities.

The long and winding road to reform: Micro-inequalities in the planned villages of New Earswick and Woodlands

Callum Reilly - Department of Archaeology

Model villages, utopian settlements and other planned communities of the modern world are often framed as heterotopias: spaces intended as alternatives to the outside world that in fact replicate the inherent contradictions of everyday life. Community founders, working under the rhetoric of reforming working-class conditions, sometimes struggled to achieve their social ambitions and even inadvertently contributed to inequities in housing, green space and other resources. This paper illustrates how variable access to amenities in two early twentieth-century garden villages – New Earswick (York) and Woodlands (Doncaster) – has complicated a wider legacy of social reform.

Exploring the distribution of homes in the UK, and how a focus on this can ensure more people can live in decent, affordable homes

Darren Baxter - The Joseph Rowntree Foundation

The housing market has undergone a series of seismic shifts in recent decades which have undermined economic security. Prices and rents have risen significantly faster than earnings, access to housing has become more challenging for households on low incomes, and this has driven, or have been driven by, big shifts in tenure –particularly the loss of social housing and the increase in private renting.

This situation has created winners and losers, tracking and widening existing inequalities. We are far away from realising decent housing for everyone. While at the same time housing now has a growing significance in the economy and this makes solving these problems hard.

These shifts are not a natural outcome, but the result of policies and incentives. Policy has sought to actively shift tenure a number of times in the last 100 or so years. In recent decades, and particularly following the global financial crisis (GFC), these trends have stemmed from the way macro-economic and fiscal policy was set pre and post GFC, leading to the expansion of the PRS and challenges to access homeownership, alongside the retrenchment of the state from direct provision and a quantitative and qualitative shift in the balance of investment between public and private spending.

However, this is not how housing policy over this period has framed the problem. The almost sole focus has been about setting targets for new supply. This presentation will set out why this focus is limited and how the goal of housing policy needs widening, with the distribution of homes taking much greater prominence. It will set out how current JRF research is beginning to explore a framework for achieving this.

The role of environment and culture on olfactory language

Asifa Majid - Department of Psychology

Urban planning for resilient cities

Paul Hudson - Department of Environment and Geography

Since 2010 over half of the world's population lives in urban areas, which is problematic in the face of climate change as urban areas are hotspots of future risk from extreme weather events. Therefore, how cities grow in the future can and will have significant impacts on the threat posed by extreme weather events. However, while proactive urban planning can help build climate resilient cities, that is not the only priority that city governments have. We shall discuss the various trade-offs and concerns that different urban planning and location decisions generate in the face of climate change.

Housing as a solution to today’s environmental, economic and social ills

Michael Jones - Head of Housing Delivery at the City of York Council

The City of York Council plans to build hundreds of new healthy and sustainable homes in the city. The plans have been described by the Guardian as the most ambitious programme in the country for a generation and the UN has recognised the work as a Centre for Excellence. The programme aims to build on the housing pioneers of York’s past by tackling modern day ills through the creation of new neighbourhoods which are inclusive and healthy for all. ‘Housing crisis’ is a commonly expressed term but means different things to different people. This talk will explain what is being done in York to try and tackle this range of issues, from affordability through to climate change and social isolation and loneliness.

Houses and material culture in comparative perspective: from the Mongolian steppes to medieval Co. Dublin

Jeremy Goldberg - Centre for Medieval Studies

This necessarily brief exploration of how the houses people inhabit reflect their cultural values and how they are themselves socialised by their experience of home will draw upon examples from across the world starting in the (comparatively) recent past before exploring some of my own work on later medieval England and Ireland. My purpose is as much to suggest possibilities and to stimulate discussion as to offer neat solutions.

Green Office Fixtures and Fittings

Avtar Matharu - Department of Chemistry

Most offices are a haven of silent, unseen, crude oil-derived adhesives found in fixtures and fittings such carpets, tables, shelves and soft upholstery which are partly related to poor indoor air quality and/or a linear economy.  My talk explores wood-free, isocyanate, phenol and formaldehyde furniture derived from agricultural wastes and biobased adhesives that enable recycling of commercial carpet tiles.

Neighbours and Nastiness? The Work of Sanitation in Early Modern London

Mark Jenner - Department of History

We often assume that the remote past was filthy and that hygiene and modernity were (and are) inextricably linked. Drawing on case studies from London between c.1500 and c.1800, this talk not only challenges this toilet-training model of historical development but examines aspects of the ways in which the built environment was cleansed and maintained. On one hand it will look at how the ways in which householders did or did not maintain the public thoroughfares before their doors was bound up with their reputation, on the other it examines the status and self-presentation of the specialist workers who cleaned metropolitan privies. In both it will draw out the enmeshing of the social, the material and the symbolic.

Assessing wellbeing at a neighbourhood scale in low-middle-income-country secondary cities

Steve Cinderby - Stockholm Environment Institute

The number of older people in society is growing rapidly, and they both want and need to live independently for longer, often known as “aging in place".  There is  currently considerable research on using robots to assist older people, but robots have a number of practical and psychological problems for deployment in older people’s homes. The GUFO project explored the radical possibility of using small drones as assistive devices for older people. These could act both autonomously and under the control of the older person.  We will present some of the user-centred research we conducted in the HomeLab at the University about older people’s reactions to a drone and some of the technical and practical challenges of this possibility.

GUFO: an Assistive Drone to Support Older People "Aging in Place”

Helen Petrie - Department of Computer Science and Sanjit Samaddar - Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media 

The number of older people in society is growing rapidly, and they both want and need to live independently for longer, often known as “aging in place".  There is  currently considerable research on using robots to assist older people, but robots have a number of practical and psychological problems for deployment in older people’s homes. The GUFO project explored the radical possibility of using small drones as assistive devices for older people. These could act both autonomously and under the control of the older person.  We will present some of the user-centred research we conducted in the HomeLab at the University about older people’s reactions to a drone and some of the technical and practical challenges of this possibility.

An ESRC interdisciplinary grant call discussion

A discussion led by Nicholas Pleace.

Future Homes Yesterday: The Lessons of Modernism

Michael White - Department of History of Art

There is hardly an architectural style that underwent a sharper and more lasting fall from grace than did modernism in the 1970s. However, while many remain glad to see a landscape ridden of tower blocks, one thing that went with it was the centrality that housing had attained in architectural thinking over the previous three-quarters of a century, leaving the problems modernism attempted to solve of providing all with what was described in the 1920s as an Existenzminumum (minimally-acceptable floorspace, density, fresh air, access to green space etc.) manifestly unresolved. Using the example of interwar avant-gardism in the Netherlands, I consider how architectural history can help us understand how much of the utopian baby was thrown out with the ideological bathwater.

Uncanny, Mummified, Spandrels of Space

Louis D'Arcy-Reed - Department of Environment and Geography

Spandrels of space are considered by Slavoj Žižek as spaces for utopian dreaming and occur within the excess space of the parallax gap. Spandrels exist as elements ‘beyond’ traditional elements in architecture — the empty space above and below the window, the ‘left-over’ from material decisions, a gap between structure and ornament. To explore this concept further, I wish to interrogate the sculptural work of Rachel Whiteread, who casts dissolve the boundaries between the seen and unseen. Works such as Ghost (1990) or House (1993) reclaim the spatial excesses, or spandrels, in an opaque and isolatory manner, giving rise to feelings of the uncanny. As the uncanny rises, what happens to utopian dreaming? Interrogating the Whiteread’s preserved and mummified space considers the excesses of space as more than just an excess — it is a physical manifestation of the embodied, the directed, and narratives of spatial practice.

Indoor Air Quality - Should we be worried?

Nicola Carslaw - Department of Environment and Geography

In developed countries, we have been estimated to spend about 90% of our time indoors, for instance at home, at work, or commuting between the two. It therefore follows that our exposure to air pollution, whether to pollutants generated indoors or outdoors, happens mainly in the indoor environment. This presentation will highlight some of the ways in which we can be exposed to air pollution indoors, how this might change in the future and what we can do about it.

The Case for Social Geography

Nicholas Pleace - Department of Social Policy and Social Work

Brexit, the pandemic and the rise of the alt-right can all be connected to the dynamic interrelationships between society and space, as can the increasingly clear links between where you live, what your chances in life will be and the kinds of mental and physical health problems you are likely to face. A group of 'social geographers' at Newcastle are making the case for social geography as a way to explore the intersections of climate and social justice in multiply degraded built environments, but does this represent real conceptual and methodological innovation or a return to the practices and limits of Booth's nineteenth century 'Maps Descriptive of London Poverty'?

Built heritage challenges: from mudbrick to a circular economy?

Louise Cooke - Department of Archaeology

In this presentation I will focus on current issues in built heritage conservation. Considering how we can better use building biography to communicate environmental change, how we can consider buildings within whole carbon assessment and how better decisions can be made for building retrofit. Together these strands connect within ideas of the circular economy and bring in examples of challenge-led teaching.