Centre for Urban Design, Architecture and Sustainability

The overarching ethos of CUDAS is that design informs all aspects of academic research of the built environment, whether in the historical, cultural, theoretical or environmental contexts.

CUDAS is an interdisciplinary research centre that comprises three research groups: Urban Design, Architectural Practice and Humanities, and Sustainable Environments and Practice, chaired by authorities in the fields, Ioanni Delsante (Reader in Urban Design) and Adrian Pitts (Professor of Sustainable Architecture). Research disseminating from these groups operates at many scales and levels, but a common thread throughout these investigations is a concern about the integration of architectural, environment and urban design. Accordingly, the overarching ethos of CUDAS is that design informs all aspects of academic research of the built environment, whether in the historical, cultural, theoretical or environmental contexts.

Through its diverse community of researchers, comprising 18 academic staff and an expanding cohort of PhD students from around the world, CUDAS takes a broadly inter-disciplinary and integrated approach to key areas of focus in architecture and urban design that both build upon historical precedents and advance new theoretical possibilities for the built environment and the city-at-large. The Centre has been recipient of a number of research grants (British Academy, AHRC, Erasmus + and Chinese funded research projects) and has organised/co-hosted some major conferences, symposia and exhibitions in the UK, Italy and China. CUDAS members have also produced substantial published outputs, including authored books, edited books, refereed journal papers and special issue journals.