In 2024, UNSW Built Environment and City Futures Research Centre researchers received $7.8m in grant funding to tackle some of the biggest challenges in our fields, from embedding AI into city-making decisions to mitigating the urban heat island effect.
The City Futures Research Centre are part of a consortium who have received $6.5 million of grant funding to develop The Urban Copilot project. This includes $2.7 million directly from the Federal Government through its Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) program. Urban Copilot is an innovative GenAI product suite designed to assist industry professionals in interpreting planning and building regulations and creating development applications that subsequently meet government requirements.
Scientia Prof. Chris Pettit, Prof. Bill Randolph and Dr. Ryan van den Nouwelant were awarded $717,251 of funding for their project ‘AI, Cities and Development Assessment’, through the 2025 ARC Discovery project round. This research will uncover the legal, technical and ethical requirements for the trustworthy use of AI in urban development assessment.
City Futures Research Centre were also awarded a $1 million grant by the office of the NSW Chief Scientist for the development of the Housing Analytics Lab (HAL). This project will create a hybrid digital and physical facility to support data-driven housing solutions, including an AI classifier of planning assessments to understand spatial clusters of current and future housing development activity.
Finally, City Futures have partnered with FrontierSI to launch MapAI, supported by a $1.3m funding round in 2024. Founded by Scientia Prof. Chris Pettit and Dr. Bala Soundararaj, with contributions from Dr. Richard Billingsley, Dr. Henry Petersen and Travolta Tran, MapAI aims to democratise geospatial analysis, making it easy for anyone to ask a map-based query.
Scientia Prof. Deo Prasad and Dr. Anir Upadhyay have been awarded a grant of $384,918 from the World Bank to collaborate with researchers from University College London and Universitas Trisakti Indonesia. The project aims to address the research gap on green construction in Indonesia by evaluating the performance of EDGE-certified homes, generating evidence to promote sustainable building practices, refine certification standards, and minimise the environmental impact of housing.
Prof. Chyi Lin Lee and A/Prof. Moe Mojtahedi have been awarded $150,000 from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) for a project entitled Transforming high-rise housing construction: policy solutions to overcome productivity constraints.
This research will investigate constraints in the housing construction sector associated with supply chain, workforce, technology, regulation, system of work, and markets. It will map industry, model constraints and simulate potential solutions, bringing these together with the goal of enabling more affordable housing and overcoming productivity constraints in the Australian construction sector.
Researchers from UNSW’s High Performance Architecture Research Group made novel findings in the battle against urban heat across 2024.
A study led by Anita Lawrence Chair in High-Performance Architecture Prof. Matt Santamouris, co-authored with A/Prof. Riccardo Paolini, and published in Nature Cities, detailed a multi-faceted strategy to cool Riyadh in Saudi Arabia by up to 4.5°C, combining highly reflective ‘super cool’ materials developed in the High-Performance Architecture Lab with irrigated greenery and energy retrofitting measures. This approach would also reduce the city’s cooling energy demand by 16 per cent. The study was a collaboration between UNSW, the University of Sydney, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Royal Commission of Riyadh City, the University of Calcutta and the University of Athens.
A further study in Nature Cities, led by Dr Ansar Khan from the University of Calcutta and co-authored by Prof. Santamouris showed that city-wide installation of photovoltaic solar panels on roofs could raise temperatures during the daytime and lower them at night-time.
Finally, A/Prof. Lan Ding, Scientia Prof. Deo Prasad and Dr. William Craft have led the creation of a new national index to measure and then mitigate heat vulnerability in Australia. The National Heat Vulnerability Observatory Index (NaHVO) is a $700,000 project where UNSW have partnered with the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water to develop national benchmark datasets and an innovative, robust and consistent methodology to measure heat vulnerability in Australian towns and cities.
SHErobots - Ecologies of Care, is a collaboration between UNSW, TU Delft and the University of Sydney, highlighting female researchers and practitioners at the global forefront of contemporary robotics.
The exhibition included the work of three UNSW Built Environment researchers; Dr. Belinda Dunstan’s ‘Robotum Exuviae’ and ‘Still, Life’ explore the lifecycle of soft robots, documenting their preserved forms and discarded exoskeletons. Dr. Kate Dunn and Charlotte Firth’s ‘Terrafab’ envisions sustainable 3D-printed earth homes that optimise design, utilise site-sourced materials, and replace high-carbon materials like concrete and steel. And Charlotte Firth’s ‘Re-Print’ investigates 3D printing imperfections to create recycled PETG acoustic panels with micro-perforations that diffuse and absorb sound, promoting waste reduction and material reuse.
In October 2024 the ARC Centre for Next-Gen Architectural Manufacturing officially launched at UNSW. The Centre, an interdisciplinary, industry-focused research and training initiative, will accelerate digital transformation processes within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction sector to meet critical sustainability goals. Based at UNSW School of Built Environment and led by Prof. M. Hank Haeusler, it is funded by a $5 million grant from the Australian Research Council.
With a cohort of 25 PhD students and 3 postdoctoral researchers spread over three institutions, and working with national and international industry partners, the Centre will investigate when and how digital strategies in the Architecture, Design, and Engineering industries can deliver new solutions, services, or modes of operation that can fundamentally change the way buildings are designed and manufactured.
Tracy Huang, Dr. Nicole Gardner, Daniel Yu and Prof. M. Hank Haeusler convened a symposium and series of exhibitions reappraising the work of Japanese architect Shoei Yoh, supported by a DFAT Australia-Japan Foundation Grant.
The symposium, organised in partnership with Kyushu University, the Window Research Institute, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, brought together over 150 academics, architects, and industry professionals at the Architecture Institute of Japan in September.
The project also organised three international exhibitions of Shoei Yoh’s work in 2024, including at the POST Architecture Book store in Tokyo (visited by over 1,000 attendees), the SASA Gallery in Adelaide and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum
Shoei Yoh exhibition at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and (from L-to-R) Daniel Yu, Tracy Huang and Dr. Nicole Gardner
In June 2024, Senator David Pocock and Kylia Tink MP tabled a private member’s bill in both houses of the Australian Parliament to facilitate a human rights-based approach to housing. The bill would require the Commonwealth Government to develop and maintain a 10-year National Housing and Homelessness Plan to ensure that everyone in Australia has adequate housing. This legislation was inspired by the report ‘Towards an Australian National Housing and Homelessness Strategy’ led by Dr. Chris Martin of the City Futures Research Centre, co-authored with UNSW Prof. Vivienne Milligan, Chris Hartley and Prof. Hal Pawson.
Prof. Pawson also led The Australian Homeless Monitor 2024, co-authored with Chris Hartley and Dr. Fatemeh Aminpour, along with researchers from the University of Queensland. This research found 10,000 Australians are becoming homeless each month, a 22 percent increase in the three years to 2023-24.
Prof. Pawson said the rise in homelessness is largely due to rent increases in Australia.
“We’ve seen an extraordinary period of rent inflation, which has run over the last four years…That has definitely pushed a lot of people into a riskier situation, or into homelessness.”
Lecturer in Interior Architecture Eva Lloyd and Adjunct Lecturer Samantha Rich have led a two-year partnership to improve community nutrition outcomes and employment opportunities through the Bourke Community Garden, on Ngemba-Baakindji Country. Partnering with the UNSW Global Water Institute, the project connects students from UNSW Landscape Architecture and University of Sydney Nutrition and Dietetics with the Bourke Aboriginal Health Service, the Regional Enterprise Development Group and the Botanic Gardens Community Greening team. The garden has grown into a flourishing space for community members to connect, learn, share and nourish, now providing seasonal produce using water-sensitive techniques, a food hamper delivery program for elderly community members and a space for local pre-school children.
This ongoing project was recently awarded a $300,000 grant to fund two permanent garden manager positions and a graduate placement program.
