ABSTRACT: Cities are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of acute shocks, such as extreme heat and intense storms, and chronic stresses, such as economic inequality and poor air quality. Improving the resilience of urban systems and communities is of growing concern to city leaders, businesses and citizens. This is a complex task requiring collaboration between diverse stakeholders and across academic and professional disciplines. Co-designing urban resilience engages those impacted by urban shocks and stresses in decisions about how best to improve resilience. Bottom-Up Infrastructure was a research pro-gram based in London 2014-2020 that aimed to improve urban resilience by engaging local communities in infrastructure design and decisions. This lecture will describe the Bottom-Up Infrastructure co-design method as it was developed through case studies of urban drainage, the water-energy-food nexus and air pollution. It will consider the problem of extreme heat in cities and how co-design methods might help to develop sustainable and resilient solutions.

Blo: Professor Sarah Bell is City of Melbourne Chair in Urban Resilience and Innovation at the University of Melbourne. Her research addresses urban resilience and community engagement with infrastructure. Her scholarly work draws on the social sciences to better understand how people, technologies and nature interact to create urban systems. She is the Director of The Retrofit Lab https://www.unimelb.edu.au/retroft, an interdisciplinary research hub to support the transition to sustainable, resilient cities by transforming existing buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes. Sarah is a Fellow of Engineers Australia. Her latest book 'Co-Designing Infrastructures' will be published open-access by UCL Press in 2022 (https://ww-w.uclpress.co.uk/products/186914)