Research project

SMARt ciTIES Network for Sustainable Urban Futures (SMARTIES Net)

Project overview

In a world where more than half of the global population now lives in urban areas, the way in which cities are planned and governed has increasing social, environmental and economic importance. While policy makers are designing long-term strategies based on drawing on IT, infrastructure development and green growth, pressing challenges such as poverty, environmental degradation and disease threaten to undermine the potential for a better urban future.

This multi-institutional project, led by the University of Nottingham, brought together a team of academics and policy makers from the UK and India to create a Smart Cities Network which developed future thinking and new approaches to increase the sustainability of selected cities in both countries.

Through networking events, workshops and entrepreneur competitions it focused on addressing the big issues faced by urban planners and governors including traffic congestion, affordable housing, the provision of accessible, resilient and future-proof infrastructure for clean water and sanitation, transport and energy, and waste management and recycling while ensuring all citizens have equal access to, and participation in, a city life which is safe, secure, inclusive, healthy and desirable.

It aimed to forge a sustainable community of researchers to develop innovative, future-proof and locally-acceptable solutions to the challenges faced by cities in India and the UK.

TRG provided strategic transport modelling expertise to this network.

Staff

Lead researcher

Professor Simon Blainey PhD, FRGS, FHEA, MCIHT, CMILT

Professor of Sustainable Transport

Research interests

  • Rail demand and operations modelling
  • GIS and transport
  • Transport decision support systems
Connect with Simon
Other researchers

Mr Jason Sadler

Principal Enterprise Fellow

Research interests

  • Spatial data infrastructure (SDI)
  • Web science
  • Environmental web applications and semantics
Connect with Jason

Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Research outputs