Cities Convention

 Day 1: Cities Regeneration

Session 1: Masterplanning

Major regeneration schemes are facing up to the digital challenge, embedding social and environmental outcomes and delivering better places to live, work and learn through masterplanning. This session deep dives into what’s behind the headlines and the tech, looking at the planning decisions that have to be made in order to make change happen.

Session 2: Mapping

Mapping and scanning to create objects and place them within a pre-existing environment such as a landscape or townscape are now must-haves for developers and planners, enabling projects to evolve through design stages and into pre-construction, reducing time and cost and improving outcomes. This session explores the leading edge of digitisation of assets, spaces and places, and how this information is being used to save vital resources.

Session 3: Transport

Major transport schemes are often at the centre of regeneration schemes, revitalising former brownfield sites or providing critical access to planned new garden town settlements. Transport is a key infrastructure requirement of regeneration projects in ensuring access to town and city centres for employees and employers alike. At the same time, Autonomous Vehicles have the potential to fundamentally change town and city centres as well as rural transport services, all explored in this session.

Session 4: Social impact

One of the major benefits of regeneration schemes - and most, if not all major developments - is the social impact delivered as a result of the investment. Benefits are not all monetary; impacts include health, environmental and wellbeing through reducing pollution, improving air quality, reduced congestion and travel time, access to employment, education or skills and in terms of community investment. These impacts and benefits should be more widely discussed with affected communities and are explored in this session.

Day 2: Cities Infrastructure

Session 1: digital planning and construction

Digitising the planning process is now widely considered to be an essential step on the road to improving the planning process and provision of infrastructure. Capturing and utilising data is critical to efficient and effective services, and more sustainable and liveable towns and cities. The challenge in rural communities to ensure access to services is even more tangible. All this and more is explored in this session.

Session 2: citizen engagement

Ensuring infrastructure is done for people, not to people, is essential in creating a sense of awareness and ownership by local affected communities and those served by or benefiting from projects. For this to be successful, citizens need to be engaged early on in the planning and development process. Done well, this can lead to better and quicker decisions which embed many more beneficial and positive outcomes. Our speakers will provide practical examples of the value of early and meaningful engagement.

Session 3: connected infrastructure

It’s not all about sensors and IT standards (although these are really important!). It’s about knowing what data you’ve got, what data you need and what you’re going to do with it. Connecting people and places is growing - as is the challenge of extracting, analysing, storing and using the data. Giving buildings a personality is one way of building trust and providing a purpose to collecting data in order to improve outcomes such as energy efficiency and comfort, as is improving the efficiency and effectiveness of journey planning.

Session 4: managing the built environment

We plan for it, we build it, we use it - infrastructure is almost invisible when it works as intended. We tend to notice things when they go wrong. So what does it take to manage the modern built environment, which innovations are already making an impact and what R&D is in the pipeline for future infrastructure projects? Speakers in this session cast an eye over the future of our built environments