The ISSUES Project

About 90% of the UK population live in urban areas, and urban sustainability is a prime issue. Everyone wants such communities to become more sustainable but what knowledge, technologies and processes are needed? What is available and where is it? And where are the gaps?

“Everyone can think of a building they hate, a street that really depresses them, or a place where they'd call in the bulldozers. People don't need to be told when the built environment around them isn't working - they already know.” - CABE

The Sustainable Urban Environments Programme is an EPSRC funded portfolio of research looking at ways of improving sustainability in the urban environment. Spanning 30 different UK Universities, this programme has funded 18 consortia in different areas including waste, water management, transport planning and strategy, spatial planning, regeneration and stakeholder engagement.

“We all want to live and work in a more sustainable environment, but how do policy makers and practitioners know what works in practice?”

ISSUES (Implementation Strategies for Sustainable Urban Environment Systems) is the knowledge transfer arm of the SUE programme. At ISSUES, we are working to ensure that the findings from research work carried out by the SUE consortia are understood and used by policy makers, practitioners and other end-users. Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), our team is led by Professor Paul Jowitt at Heriot-Watt University and Professor Peter Guthrie at the University of Cambridge.