Environmental and Urban Planning

Europe's environmental and climate ambitions will be won or lost in its cities and regions. Land use, infrastructure, green space, mobility and the built environment together determine how sustainable, how healthy and how resilient a place can be, and the decisions taken today will shape these places for generations, long after the people who made them have moved on.

A poorly planned district locks in emissions, congestion and vulnerability for decades; a well-planned one quietly delivers benefits year after year.

SoReCC works at this intersection, studying how to embed environmental intelligence and resilience thinking into the way places are planned, built and managed.

Good planning is not only a technical exercise in zoning, capacity and compliance. It is a negotiation between competing and legitimate needs: growth and conservation, density and liveability, present cost and future benefit, private interest and public good. These tensions cannot be resolved by formula alone; they require judgement informed by evidence and by the people who will live with the result.

We see environmental quality and resilience not as constraints to be added at the end of a process, but as design principles to be built in from the start, where they are cheaper, more effective and more durable. And we hold that the residents of a place carry knowledge about how it really works that no model or master plan can fully capture, which is why their voice belongs in the design itself rather than in a consultation after the decisions are made.

Our network combines environmental research, engineering and the social sciences to examine how planning decisions play out over time, across both the natural and the social environment. We work on:

• the effect of planning and land use on ecosystems, resource use, emissions and the quality of daily life
• nature based solutions, biodiversity, urban cooling and clean water integrated into the fabric of a place rather than added as decoration
• the design of places that are both low carbon and genuinely liveable, refusing the false choice between the two
• environmental and impact assessment that informs decisions in advance rather than merely documenting them afterwards
• structured co-creation so that local knowledge sits alongside technical analysis in shaping the outcome

By connecting environmental science with planning practice and community voice, we help places pursue sustainability and resilience together rather than trading one against the other. We pay particular attention to the long shadow of infrastructure decisions, since the streets, buildings and networks laid down now will determine what is possible, and what is prohibitively expensive, for decades to come.

Some of the most cost-effective tools available to planners are not built but grown. Trees and green corridors cool streets and clean the air; wetlands and permeable surfaces absorb floodwater that hard drainage cannot; healthy soils and habitats support the biodiversity that in turn supports human wellbeing. We study how nature based solutions can be woven into dense urban settings, where they deliver several benefits at once, and how to value those benefits properly so they are not lost in decisions that count only short-term financial costs and ignore what a mature tree or a restored wetland is worth over its lifetime.

This work speaks to the European Green Deal, the New European Bauhaus and the EU Mission on Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, and to the wider European agenda on natural resources, biodiversity and the environment. These frameworks share a recognition that sustainability and quality of life are made concrete at the level of the street, the district and the region, not only in national targets.

It contributes to Sustainable Development Goals 11, 15 and 6: sustainable cities and communities, life on land, and clean water and sanitation.

Places shape lives. SoReCC works to ensure that the places Europe builds and renews are sustainable, resilient and fit for the people who will live in them, so that the legacy of today's planning is one future generations are glad to inherit.