Dr Emma Street
Dr Emma Street is Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Governance at the Department of Real Estate and Planning, University of Reading, U.K.
An urban geographer by background, Emma’s research cuts across the spatial planning, urban design and architecture disciplines. She is interested in the values, assumptions, decisions and processes that shape the way that urban environments look, function and are governed. She has a particular interest in exploring this via what might be seen as the mundane, instrumental or procedural; be that building codes and regulations, urban policies or elements of the planning system. In the early-mid 2000s Emma worked with Rob Imrie on research exploring the inter-relations between architecture, risk and building regulations and codes. Emma retains a research interest in these issues as well as the future of the architecture profession more broadly. Emma is currently involved in collaborative research on reforms to the English planning system. One consequence of these reforms has been the increasing use of private sector consultants in servicing various planning tasks; we ask what this means for the public interest as well as the future of the planning profession. Emma has a long-standing interest in public-private sector relation; her PhD research examined the role businesses played in the public realm regeneration of London’s South Bank. Urban regeneration remains an active research topic and she is working with industry and local government partners on town centre regeneration in New Towns in England.
is Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Governance at the Department of Real Estate and Planning, Henley Business School, University of Reading, U.K. Emma’s research concerns the way in which the built environment is planned, regulated and governed. She is particularly interested in questions of accountability and social justice in the context of changing modes of regulation and governance as they pertain to urban spaces. Her research cuts across the disciplinary (and professional fields) of spatial planning, architecture and urban design, policy-making, and urban development and real estate.
Dr Emma Street will present at the symposium:
Regulating the built environment: a (brief) history
Description: Regulations seeking to order the built environment have existed for millenia. These take on a range of different forms from socio-cultural codes embedded within vernacular building styles, to more formalized (quasi) legal standards exemplified by contemporary building regulations. Regardless of their form, regulations tend to be thought of as value-neutral ‘objects’ rather than (as this paper argues) socio-cultural, sometimes political, interventions in design, construction and development processes that serve to delimit and define the activities of both producers and inhabitants of the built environment.