Emma Street

Department of Geography
King's College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS
 
Email: emma.street@kcl.ac.uk  

PhD Title: New Planning for New Times: Sustainable Community-Building in London
 
The aim of Emma’s PhD research is to evaluate approaches to, and outcomes of, sustainable community building (SCB) programmes in London, through the context of a borough-wide survey and two case examples. The emergence of sustainable community building is the latest manifestation of what has become a central orthodoxy within spatial planning across Europe and North America. SCB is a key government objective and a policy priority in England. It seeks to establish diverse, mixed, and thriving urban communities to support more equitable and less environmentally damaging forms of economic growth (ODPM, 2003). SCB, arguably, is an important change for spatial planning that involves a re-regulation and restructuring of the relationships between state agencies and active, sustainable citizens and communities with more responsibility and power being devolved to the latter. It incorporates new conventional wisdoms that seeks to characterise development planning in holistic terms and makes direct connections between urban development and broader spatial policy objectives.
 
There is, however, little or no knowledge of how SCB is constructed and implemented, or of the conceptions of sustainability that underpin strategy and policy-making at different scales. The proposed research will seek to address this gap in knowledge, and develop the idea that SCB is a form of active social policy in which a range of programmes, such as housing, policing, and planning are being restructured in the pursuit of sustainability and SCB objectives (Raco, 2007). It will consider the relationships between SCB and the restructuring of welfare state systems, and examine the impacts of SCB on spatial planning processes and outcomes. In doing so, the proposed project will focus on, and provide a depth empirical account of, the politics and programmes that underpin SCB in London. The project will also provide insights into changing modes of state regulation, development priorities, and systems of democratic accountability, all of which are bound up with on-going reforms to the planning system.
 
Supervisors: Professor Rob Imrie and Dr Mike Raco.
 
Funding: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) CASE award
 
Research Group: Cities Group

Emma graduated with first class honours in Geography from Southampton University in 2003, with a thesis exploring the contemporary use of mapping in the case of IKEA, the global furniture brand. She went on to gain an MSc Public Policy (Distinction) from Bristol University in 2005, where she completed a dissertation on the role the Tobacco Factory, a theatre, restaurant and cultural centre, played in the regeneration of Southville, Bristol. Most recently, Emma worked as a Research Associate on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project entitled, ‘The regulation and codification of architects’ practices’ with Professor Rob Imrie at King’s College London. The research sought to generate critical insight into building rules and regulations and their relationships to architecture and its conceptual schema and practices.
 
Emma is the secretary of the RGS/IBG Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG). She is also joint co-ordinator of the Geography Department's Cities Group Seminar Programme and Emma has served on the King's College Research Ethics Panel for SSPP (Geography, Gerontology and SCWRU).

From the earliest periods of architecture and building, architects’ actions have been conditioned by rules, regulations, standards, and governance practices. These range from socio-cultural and religious codes seeking to influence the formal structure of settlement patterns, to prescriptive building regulations specifying detailed elements of design in relation to the safety of building structures. In Architectural Design and Regulation the authors argue that the rule and regulatory basis of architecture is part of a broader field of socio-institutional and political interventions in the design and development process that serve to delimit, and define, the scope of the activities of architects.
The book explores how the practices of architects are embedded in complex systems of rules and regulations. The authors develop the understanding that the rules and regulations of building form and performance ought not to be counterpoised as external to creative processes and practices, but as integral to the creation of well-designed places. The contribution of Architectural Design and Regulation is to show that far from the rule and regulatory basis of architecture undermining the capacities of architects to design, they are the basis for new and challenging activities that open up possibilities for reinventing the actions of architects.

'Architectural Design and Regulation is an insightful tour de force...Rob Imrie and Emma Street offer a unique analysis...It is a must-read for anyone who is serious about understanding current urban development and architecture practice'. Eran Ben-Joseph
 
Eran Ben-Joseph is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making

2011, Imrie, R. and Street, E., Architectural Design and Regulation, Wiley & Blackwell, Oxford, xxi + 349.
 
2009, Imrie, R. and Street, E., Risk, regulation, and the practices of architects, Urban Studies, 46, 12, 2555-2576.

2009, Imrie, R. and Street, E., 'Regulating Design':
The practices of architecture, governance, and control, Urban Studies, 46, 12, 2507-2518.

Street, E. and Imrie, R. (2007), ‘The regulation of architecture: the case of the Health, Exercise and Biosciences Facility (HEBS), David Morley Architects’, Project Paper 6: 'Papers in the codification and regulation of architects’ practices’, October 2007, Department of Geography, Kings College London, London.
 
Street, E. (2007), ‘The use of design codes in England’, Project Paper 5: 'Papers in the codification and regulation of architects’ practices’, September 2007, Department of Geography, Kings College London, London.
 
Street, E. (2007), 'Architects’ views on working with the building regulations', Industrial and Commercial Building Regulations Yearbook 2007, p.63.
 
Street. E. and Imrie, R. (2007), ‘Architects and building control’, Journal of the RICS Building Control Faculty, Issue 176, January/February 2007, p.14-17.
 
Imrie, R. and Street, E. (2007), 'Planning and the regulation of architecture', Planning in London, Issue 60, Jan-Mar 2007, p.53-55.
 
Imrie, R., and Street, E. (2006), 'Little change in the cultural divide', Town and County Planning, December 2006 Vol 75 Number 12, p.364-366.
 
Imrie, R. and Street, E. (2006), ‘The attitudes of architects towards planning regulation and control', Project Paper 3: 'Papers in the codification and regulation of architects’ practices’, October 2006, Department of Geography, King's College London, London.
 
Street, E. (2006), ‘Architecture and the regulation of design: a review’, Project Paper 2: 'Papers in the codification and regulation of architects’ practices’, September 2006, Department of Geography, Kings College London, London.
 
Book reviews
 
Street, E. (forthcoming), review of 'Territory, Identity and Spatial Planning: Spatial Governance in a Fragmented Nation' edited by Mark Tewdwr-Jones and Phillip Allmendinger, Routledge, London and New York, 2006, Environment and Planning B: Building and Design, forthcoming.
 
Street, E. (2007), review of 'Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making' by Eran Ben-Joseph, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005, Environment and Planning A, 39 (11): 2794-5. 
 
Conference papers

Imrie, R. and Street, E. (2008), ‘The autonomous architect’, paper presented at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference, August 2008.

Street, E. (2008), ‘Reflexive organisations and the politics of sustainable community building on London’s South Bank’, presented at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference, August 2008.
 
Imrie, R. and Street, E. (2006), ‘Architects and regulation: an overview’, paper presented at David Morley Architects, 13 October 2006.
 
Imrie, R. and Street, E. (2007), 'Architecture and the codification of the built environment', paper presented at the Association of American Geographers’ (AAG) Annual Conference, April 2007.
 
Street, E. (2007), 'Discourses of risk and sustainability in the design and construction industry', paper presented at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, August 2007.