Award-winning papers in 2022 Free

The Sir Benjamin Baker Medal, awarded to the third best overall paper, was awarded to Hammond et al. (2022).

Environmental or ‘ecological’ footprints have been widely used as partial indicators of sustainability; specifically of resource consumption and waste absorption transformed in terms of the biologically productive land area required by a population. The environmental footprint of the Unitary Authority of Bath and North East Somerset (BANES) in the South West of England (UK) has been estimated in terms of global hectares (gha) required per capita. BANES has a population of about 184 870 and covers an area of 35 200 ha, of which two-thirds are on ‘green belt’ land. The UNESCO World Heritage City of Bath is the principal settlement, but there are also a number of smaller urban communities scattered among its surrounding area (‘hinterland’ or ‘bioregion’). The overall footprint for BANES was estimated to be 3.77 gha per capita (gha/cap), which is well above its biocapacity of 0.67 gha/cap and ‘Earthshare’ of 1.80 gha/cap. Direct energy use was found to exhibit the largest footprint component (a 31% share), followed by materials and waste (30%), food and drink (25%), transport (10%) and built land (4%), whereas the water footprint was negligibly small (∼;0%) by comparison. Such data provide a baseline for assessing the Council's planning strategies for future development.

The Reed and Mallik Medal, presented to the best paper on urban design, was awarded to Romice et al. (2022).

Urban environments are complex, impacting on climate change, social justice and health globally and locally. Their spatial, social, economic, environmental dimensions are interlinked and must be studied from a complexity viewpoint. Yet, while complexity has successfully entered urban scholarship and practice in many fields, urban form, a key component of urban environments, is not yet studied in these terms and consequently they are not yet designed as complex. This paper argues that the discipline of urban design should be (re)defined as the understanding and design of urban environments as places of organised complexity. It can become the discipline best placed to manage a useful global overview of sustainable placemaking. It does so by tracing urban design's historical relationships and attitudes towards the evolution of the city, contrasting definitions of complexity in science, with the deterministic way in which the early urban design practitioners viewed design. It then looks at urban design's relationship with other design professions in the UK and suggests its lack of clarity and efficiency is an enduring consequence of this historic trajectory. Finally, it proposes urban design as the discipline concerned with the understanding and design of complex-adaptive urban environments and advocate its establishment as an independent profession.