Principal Investigator:

Stephen Marshall is Professor of Urban Morphology and Urban Design at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. He originally trained in civil engineering and worked in consultancy before becoming an academic. He is interested in relationships between urban form elements in space and over time, including interpreting urban adaptation and the evolutionary nature of urbanism, and implications of urban design and planning.  He is co-editor of Built Environment journal and his books include Streets and Patterns (2005), Cities Design and Evolution (2009) and Urban Coding and Planning (2011). His paper Science, pseudo-science and urban design was a finalist in the AESOP Best Published Paper Award 2013, and featured in Scientific American.

Research Associate:

Dr Claire Narraway is a biologist whose research has focussed on the evolution of social behaviour in honey bees, coordination of group behaviour in humans, sexual selection in drosophila, field assessment of fitness correlates in the azure damselfly, and learning in the common garden snail.  She is particularly interested in how social groups overcome conflict and coordinate their actions, applying the results of such research to novel problems. Claire’s role in the project involves undertaking a literature review of self-organisation and associated processes (adaptation, evolution) in the urban design/planning literature, and evaluating their biological content, co-ordinating inputs from the project’s co-investigators.

Co-investigators:

Dr Oliver Davis is Reader in Statistical Genetics at the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit and School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol. His research in genetic and environmental data science relates to how genes and environments interact in the development of complex human traits and disorders, using data collected from large population samples in the UK and elsewhere. One of his major research interests is in how our genomes respond to where we grow up, including the effects of the urban environment. He has a particular methodological interest in the visualisation of gene-environment interaction data, such as mapping genetic and environmental geographical hotspots for complex behavioural phenotypes across the UK.

Dr Sally Lowell is Reader in Stem Cell Biology and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Her central research interest is in the processes of self-organisation that govern the development of the embryo and the regeneration of damaged adult tissues.  She aims to understand the feedback mechanisms that generate organised complexity, and flexible functional structure. Most of this work is based around genetics and also how the architecture of the emerging tissues can influence their ability to undergo further change. Her publication (Malaguti et al 2013) was highlighted as one of five outstanding articles published in 2013, by the academic editors at eLife.

Dr Katrina Lythgoe is Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the University of Oxford, Department of Zoology. She applies ecological and evolutionary theory to predict the evolutionary dynamics of infectious disease in humans and other species.  In particular, she is interested in disentangling the, often conflicting, selection pressures acting on pathogens at different ecological levels, and to assess the impact this has on the evolutionary epidemiology of infectious disease. So, for example, a trait that is evolutionary advantageous for a virus within a host might limit its chances of transmission to a new host. Previously, she was the Editor of Trends in Ecology & Evolution (TREE), the leading reviews journal in the fields of ecology and evolution.

Prof Scott Turner is professor of biology at the State University of New York (SUNY), Syracuse, College of Environmental Science and Forestry. His research encompasses termite mound ‘architecture’ and ‘swarm construction’, which is relevant to ‘termite-inspired architecture’ such as the Eastgate Centre building complex in Harare, designed by Mick Pearce. He is author of The Extended Organism (Turner, 2002) which argues for a more holistic approach to biology linking the organism and its (built) environment, and The Tinkerer’s Accomplice (Turner 2007), which explores the biological basis of design. He is also the guest co-editor (with R Soar) of a special edition of Intelligent Buildings International on the topic “What is an intelligent building?”

Making contact

We’re interested in hearing from others working in this area, to share experience and exploit possible links. In any case, please get in touch via the form below if you’d like to be added to our mailing list.