A Bath Spa University research project helping to create the ‘smart’ cities of the future is to receive more than £540,000 to develop its work further.
The funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) will enable the project to address major knowledge gaps in the implementation of smart city initiatives in Bristol and Mexico City.
The two-and-a-half-year long project aims to ensure sustainable outcomes for the communities, the environments and the economies involved.
The team plan to identify future-proof smart tools and techniques that are available to monitor ‘blue spaces’ such as wetlands, ponds, lakes and rivers.
Through their research the project group aims to understand locals’ values and perceptions of urban blue spaces, as well as identify local and regional factors that will ultimately deliver highly-valued and resilient blue spaces in smart cities.
It is a collaboration between Bath Spa University, Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Ecosur in Mexico, Scotland’s Rural College and the University of Huddersfield.
Bath Spa biology department senior lecturer in nature conservation and environmental management Dr Ian Thornhill will lead the project, entitled ‘Resilient people need resilient ecosystems’, also known as ‘RESPiRES’.
It will focus on social-ecological resilience across Mexico’s emerging – and the UK established – economies.
Dr Thornhill said: “Smart and sustainable cities require functional and resilient ecosystems to support the health and wellbeing of their human population.
“However, this can only be achieved by understanding how people interact with and perceive these ecosystems.
“Blue spaces, such as wetlands, ponds, lakes and rivers, play a key role in the urban ecosystem and for human health in cities. Understanding the factors that favour healthy ecosystems will facilitate the design of governance systems that improve the provision of highly beneficial services for people.”
By exploring place-based values and applying a standardised analytical framework in both Mexico City and Bristol, the project team will co-construct a suite of indicators for each city that facilitate purposeful monitoring of social-ecological resilience by local communities and propose the best technologies available to the Smart City in order to do this.
The project will soon be recruiting for postdoctoral fellows and research assistants to work on it.
The ESRC funding has come via the Newton Fund and the Mexican Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CONACyT)
