Dexter Hunt

Birmingham's Eastside story: Making steps towards sustainability?

Abstract Sustainability has come to play a dominant discursive role in the UK planning system, particularly relating to urban regeneration. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the role that sustainability plays in a major regeneration programme, known as Eastside, currently underway in Birmingham, the UK. That this £6 billion redevelopment is now widely talked about by such key players as Birmingham City Council and the Regional Development Agency, Advantage West Midlands, as having a central sustainability agenda points to the growing importance of the ideal of sustainability in planning and regeneration agendas. In this paper, we investigate in detail how and why sustainability has become part of the planning discourse for Eastside and critically evaluate what impact, if any, this is having on public policy decision-making.

Substructures and underground space

Abstract This paper gives a brief overview of the 43 papers that were submitted to the ‘Substructure and Underground Space’ theme of the International Association for Engineering Geology and the Environments (IAEG) 10th International Congress held in Nottingham, UK. The contributions within this theme are truly international, reflecting the global contribution that substructures make with respect to underground space. Papers within this theme have been submitted from 13 countries including Australia, China, the Czech Republic, Germany, Iran, Japan, South Korea, Nepal, the Netherlands, Turkey, the UK and the USA. The papers are diverse in nature, covering the many contributory facets that are encompassed within the theme. The papers discussed here include 13 papers that relate to tunnelling, two papers on piling, 20 papers on minimizing risks related to underground construction, nine papers on numerical modelling and three papers on laboratory testing. In all, more than 20 case studies were described, relating to a wide range of materials (from London Clay to red-bed soft rocks). Where appropriate the paper has been supplemented with additional information gathered during the question and answer sessions undertaken during the afternoon presentations.