People and Place (P&P) is a research group within the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at Northumbria University. It brings together researchers at different career stages, including academics, PhD candidates, and postdoctoral researchers, whose research investigates the interactions between people and the built environment in the context of place.
Recognizing the diverse values surrounding the built environment, the group engages with the social, economic, physical, and cultural fabric of places. Our research operates at the intersection of architecture, urban design, planning, architectural humanities, and the social sciences. Adopting an integrated view of the built environment and an interdisciplinary approach, the group addresses some of the most pressing global challenges through various disciplinary and methodological lenses. These include space syntax, carbon estimation, qualitative surveys, co-creation methods, post-occupancy evaluation, digital modeling, human geography, ethnography, and critical heritage studies. Our research spans across four main cross-cutting themes.
— Sustainable Futures
Research in this area focuses on the diverse roles that the built environment plays in society’s transition towards a sustainable future. This encompasses both technical understandings, such as Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) of the existing building stock, and building energy performance modelling, as well as employing a ‘nexus of practices’ approach to understand sustainable building measures in a wider social context.
— Heritages Places and People
Research within this area explores the role of built heritage in contemporary societies, with a particular interest in design-led practices, processes, and interventions for heritage valorisation and reuse. Activities develop at the intersection of architecture, museum and exhibition design, and memory, museum, and heritage studies, encompassing cultural collaborations, theoretical research, and funded projects.
— Inclusive Design
Research carried out within this cluster specialises in the areas of collaboration between parties, groups and individuals and participation of stakeholders and the wide community in research. This includes research projects and publications on strategic planning for the development of inclusive cities in response to social, spatial and environmental inequalities, strategic decision-making processes and outcomes towards sustainable cities, as well as political negotiations and emerging digital technologies as innovative ways to communicate with target groups.
— Urban Morphology
Research activities in this area delves into the morphological and spatial aspects of the built environment, including but not limited to space syntax analysis and GIS-based analyses. Research incorporates emerging areas arising from shared and integrative data (e.g., urban pedestrian and vehicular movements, demographic and geographic data sets) and cross-cutting research into wellbeing in the built environment (e.g., dementia, the ageing population, children’s physical and mental health, etc.).
The group’s members come from diverse backgrounds and disciplinary areas, reflected in the richness of their publications, research collaborations, and funded projects. Find out more below:
