Urban and Built Environment

Co-creating sustainable and inclusive post-carbon societies

DSC has an outstandingly broad range of expertise on urban and built environments. Our research projects with both national and international collaborators are shaping how our built environments are used and how they can be sustainable.

DSC’s research in this area includes urban planning, housing, mobility, digital urban futures, urban design, architecture, building practice, property and construction management, sustainable buildings, circular economy, occupational health and safety, innovative infrastructures and the role of digital technology in all aspects of infrastructure and the constructed environment.

Research Centres and Groups

Centre for Urban Research

The Centre for Urban Research (CUR) is directly responding to the globally important need to shape cities that are environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. CUR is a thriving inter-disciplinary research centre focused on policy-relevant, high impact, research excellence in the fields related to urban planning. As the largest urban research hub in the southern hemisphere, CUR provides an intellectual home for multidisciplinary urban researchers at RMIT University to successfully execute global and local initiatives with universities, industry, not-for-profits, media and government.

Post-Carbon Research Centre

The Post-Carbon Research Centre tackles complex challenges of decarbonising the built environment and infrastructures to transition to a sustainable, equitable and resilient future. The Centre brings together multi-disciplinary research capabilities across the built environment and infrastructure sectors, combining expertise from Design, Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Computer and Geospatial Science, and the Social Sciences. Researchers from the Centre execute real world applications that enable both innovation and impact and stay connected to social and political context for implementation at scale.

Sustainable Building Innovation Laboratory

The mission of SBi Lab is to accelerate the shift towards sustainable building through the production and dissemination of high quality research and education. The lab focuses on the development of new materials, building systems, design methods, regulations and policies and the effect of these factors and human behaviour on sustainability performance of buildings.

News

Australia's clean energy transition is creating a new waste challenge

Australia is accelerating its transition to a low-carbon future with electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels and other renewable energy technologies becoming a part of everyday life. But what happens when these products reach the end of their useful life?

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Building community capability to understand and respond to urban heat

What happens when people are given the tools to measure heat in their own neighbourhoods? RMIT researchers helped more than 1,200 Australians investigate local heat conditions, building community capability to understand how surface materials, vegetation, shade and urban form shape local microclimates.

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Australia’s social housing sector is falling behind

Much of the public housing debate focuses on property values and mortgage affordability. New RMIT-led research highlights another declining area of the housing system that needs urgent policy attention – the long-term decline of social housing.