Lunch Hour Lecture | Building Better

About the lecture:

Building Better: The Case for Democratic Infrastructure

This lecture is inspired by a recent (failed) attempt to introduce an amendment to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill currently working its way through Parliament. I led a group of planning academics who have individually been studying the infrastructure planning regime in the UK over the last 15 years. Collectively, we shared a concern with the way planning is often framed a source of cost and delay and how this has led the current Bill to further limit opportunities for public participation. Drawing on my own research, I will show how the alternative we suggested — mini-publics often referred to as Citizens’ Assemblies — in fact offer a form of participation uniquely suited to addressing the inherent democratic deficits in infrastructure planning.

UCL's popular public Lunch Hour Lecture series has been running at UCL since 1942, and showcases the exceptional research work being undertaken across UCL. Lectures are free and open to all and since 2020 have been held online.

About the speaker:

Dan is an Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Planning, where they also lead the Post-Growth Planning Research Cluster. Dan has researched the planning of large and controversial infrastructure projects in the UK, particularly HS2 and the (now-abandoned) proposals to construct a tunnel to the south of Stonehenge to accommodate the expansion of the A303. From 2020 to 2022, they studied the controversies surrounding the construction of the Fehmarn Belt Tunnel between Germany and Denmark, having received a Humboldt Foundation Fellowship from the German Government. Dan's research interests include the way civil society shapes the planning of infrastructure and how planning should respond to the lack of evidence that it is possible to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions and resource consumption.

About the chair:

Tse-Hui's background is in architecture and urban design. She completed her PhD research at the University College London in 2011. Prior to this she was a teaching and research fellow at Columbia University working on the Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City. She is a Fulbright scholar with a masters degree from Columbia University and first class honours degree from University of Technology Sydney. She has 10 years of professional experience in architecture, urban design and interior design in both private and government sectors. Her main research interests use a collective coevolution of actant trajectories framework. Firstly to understand the persistence and reconfiguration of urban form; and secondly to formulate new methods of public participation to create sustainable urban infrastructures. She has collaborated with archaeologists, hydrogeologists, archaeologists, artists, and engineers. She has won grants for research, public engagement, and collaborations with artists. Her research focusses on concerns about water, sanitation and wellbeing in the UK, Australia, and east-Africa. Her current research grants are as a co-investigator for CAMELLIA: Community water management for a liveable London, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC); and a principal investigator for a small grant Coevolving Sustainable Resilient Groundwater Systems in Uganda, funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering.