Shaping the future of cities

  • 11 October 2018
  • 2 minutes

How can we make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable? The PEAK Urban programme was set up to address this question, and Caius Director of Studies in Architecture, Dr Nicholas Simcik Arese has just joined their team as a researcher.

Led by Principal Investigator Michael Keith at Oxford University, PEAK responds to Goal 11 of the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. They have identified that ‘continuing urbanisation comes, particularly across the global South, with new and intensified challenges around environmental and social sustainability’. The project’s website states that ‘over the next decade or so, finding solutions to urban challenges that are most acute in the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America will disproportionately determine sustainable development outcomes for the planet as a whole.’ 

PEAK Urban aims to build skilled capacity for decision making on urban futures by: i) generating new research grounded in the logic of urban complexity, ii) fostering new leaders that draw on different disciplinary perspectives to address the challenges found in the 21st century city, and iii) growing the capacity of cities to understand and plan their own futures. 

The project has expanded and now has links in Anthropology (COMPAS), the Mathematical Institute, Geography (Transport Studies Unit) and Medicine (George Institute) in Oxford, and is collaborating with colleagues in excellent research groups in China, Africa, India and Colombia. 

Over the next 3-4 years, Dr Simcik Arese will work to expand this partnership to the University of Cambridge’s Department of Architecture. He will do this through a series of workshops, seminars and policy papers, while collaborating with PEAK researchers in Oxford and Colombia.

Find out more about the project on the PEAK Urban website

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