A Major Research Project presented for the degree of Master of Science in Sustainable Urbanism

This blog post argues for a new approach to the inflated UK housing market, inspired by public policy initiatives in Oman. It suggests a major initiative of allocating state and local authority-owned brownfield sites as pre-approved building plots, prioritising the working poor trapped in expensive private rental. This could alleviate the pressure on the housing market, reduce the demand for private rental that exacerbates the market through "buy-to-let". There is also an opportuity to use this self-building boom to implement world-leading environmental standards and develop new types of sustainable housing technologies. The blog also proposes the establishment of a British Housing Bank, offering low interest loans to develop these sites.

The backcasting approach is gaining prominence in the field of transport planning as a way of exploring scenarios to achieve desirable visions. Embracing a collaborative approach, participatory backcasting includes a broad variety of actors to explore ways of achieving goals in situations of high uncertainty. This approach is suitable to address the complex challenges of transport planning in cities in the Global South where disorganized growth and periods of socio-political instability have led to conflicting city structures and severe mobility issues. This dissertation presents an innovative bottom-up, participation-oriented, backcasting approach for sustainable transport policy in Lima and Callao, in Peru. For this purpose, a methodology was developed from other existing participatory backcasting approaches. It conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with a wide range of stakeholders in the transport sector and consisted of five distinctive phases: (i) context setting; (ii) visioning; (iii) Policies and initial packaging; (iv) policy packaging and pathways; and (v) validation. The results outline the drivers and trends affecting transport in Lima and Callao and illustrates a desirable vision common to all participants. It also does a process of policy packaging and explores two scenarios based in institutions as a source of uncertainty. This document discusses the related literature, describes the methodology, outlines the results of the process, and then it reflects in its usefulness.