UK Green Building Council Member Commitment films

Posted on: 22 October 2014
By: mackene
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New films showcasing the pioneering sustainability work of 13 UK Green Building Council members have been launched, detailing how organisations are meeting UK-GBC’s new Member Commitment. Launched in early September 2014, the new Commitment encourages member organisations to share and demonstrate how they are helping to contribute to UK-GBC’s vision of a more sustainable built environment. Members commit to championing this vision by integrating sustainability into their business operations, leading and advocating practices that are environmentally responsible, ethical and fair, and being open and transparent about their progress and sharing best practice with others.

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Unleashing metro growth

Posted on: 22 October 2014
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Over the past year, the City Growth Commission has played an important role in raising awareness of the important and undervalued role the UK’s cities can and should play in national economic growth. This report further advances the case for affording greater levels of funding, autonomy and flexibility to enable all cities to respond to their unique challenges and realise their true potential.

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Scaling up community housing solutions

Posted on: 22 October 2014
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The publication was the background paper to the Building and Social Housing Foundation’s annual consultation, held in Windsor in May 2014. The consultation drew together community-led housing experts from both the UK and internationally, along with government representatives and practitioners from the wider housing sector to discuss how community-led housing could play a greater role in the UK. The background paper provides information about the objectives of the consultation, but also sets the scene for community-led housing in the UK and the lessons that can be learned from community-led projects elsewhere that have significantly increased in scope and impact.

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Community-led housing

Posted on: 22 October 2014
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The Building and Social Housing Foundation has produced a downloadable leaflet summarising key facts about community-led housing and identifying the differing roles of government, housing associations and others in enabling the sector to expand.

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Warm homes, not warm words

Posted on: 22 October 2014
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WWF’s latest energy report highlights how the opportunity to create warm, affordable low-carbon homes and workplaces is at risk unless the Government takes action to tackle the carbon emissions from heating our homes and businesses.

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Stopping Heathrow Airport expansion (for now): Lessons from a victory for the politics of sufficiency

Posted on: 22 October 2014
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A politics of sufficiency challenges the relentless expansion of production and consumption. It faces daunting obstacles in contemporary societies where macro-economic growth has come to be seen as imperative. However, when defined more narrowly, as a challenge to the growth of particular forms of economic activity, ideas of sufficiency have made some limited inroads. One significant example is the Conservative-led government’s cancellation of the planned third runway at Heathrow airport in Britain. This represented a major victory for environmentalists and others who argued that aviation growth conflicted with Britain’s carbon-reduction targets. The case sheds light on the conditions in which sufficiency-based policies can prevail today, notably through linkages with core political imperatives faced by states and political actors. In this case, a sufficiency approach became linked to the legitimacy needs of the Conservative Party at a key moment, while campaigners succeeded in casting doubt on claims that Heathrow expansion was economically imperative. This article appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning (Vol.16 Issue 4, 2014).

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The role of universities in the regional creative economies of the UK: Hidden protagonists and the challenge of knowledge transfer

Posted on: 22 October 2014
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Since the 1970s policies have been developed across Europe to evolve this institutional landscape. Since the late 1990s, regional and urban development strategies have also sought to harness the growth potential of the cultural and creative industries to regional and urban economic development. However, whilst the regional and urban planning literature has examined the growth-promoting potential of universities very closely, their possible role in relation to regional and urban creative economic development has received less attention. This paper aims to begin addressing this gap by interrogating the relationship between universities and the regional creative economy using, as a starting point, a model of analysis suggested by the Triple-Helix theoretical framework. The paper finds that whilst universities possess often long and hidden associations with regional and urban creative activities—as hidden protagonists—there are important institutional and professional challenges in the possibility of their developing an explicit and sustainable role as new actors in the regional and urban creative economies. The paper identifies the nature of these challenges with a view to developing a clearer understanding of the system, policy and institutional realities that underpin the often complex dynamics of knowledge creation−practice relationships found in arts and humanities disciplines. This article can be found in the latest issue of European Planning Studies (Vol.22, Issue 12, 2014)

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Fragility and recovery: housing, localities and uneven spatial development in the UK

Posted on: 22 October 2014
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Uneven spatial development has long been a characteristic feature of the economic and social fabric of the UK. The north–south divide has become something of a hegemonic narrative in the UK and this has served to mask an ‘archipelago’ of variegated spatial development in housing and locality conditions at sub-national and sub-regional scales. This paper explores the changing nature of sub-regional housing and locality conditions across the UK and evidence is found of significant spatial variation in the way that places responded to the effects of the most recent economic recession. It is available in the latest issue of Regional Studies (Vol.48 Issue 11, 2014).

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Research into the Green Deal and ECO Programme Supply Chain

Posted on: 21 October 2014
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The purpose of this study was to explore the operation of the supply side of the Green Deal and Energy Companies Obligation (ECO) programme and understand the views of Green Deal certified installers, assessor organisations and advisors.

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The role of planning in preventing major-accident hazards involving hazardous substances

Posted on: 21 October 2014
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The Government has published a consultation document which seeks views on its proposals to transpose the requirements of the Seveso III directive. These affect the way hazardous substances consents operate, and the way in which the planning system reduces the likelihood and impact of major accidents. The government is also seeking views on proposals to improve the regulatory framework on planning for hazardous substances. Comments are requested by 11 December 2014.

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