Prof  Simon Guy - Postgraduate opportunities

I am happy to receive inquiries from students interested in developing their career by undertaking their PhD within MARC. Equally, students proposing collaborations with other research centres, institutions and industry partners are welcome. My research agenda aims to connect design studies and social sciences with findings that are relevant to development practice and urban policy formation. I am open to students using a range of social science methodologies and encourage the development of case-studies at different levels of scale and with contrasting geographical settings.

Topics should fall within the following remit:

• Sociological approaches to architecture and urban development: Innovative sociological approaches to the built environment that continue to move away from an understanding of buildings and cities either as only aesthetic or technical objects.
• Reinterpreting environmental design: research here could develop and apply a socio-technical methodological approach to environmental innovation. It may explore how new forms of hybrid urbanism are located in shifting design priorities. Applying the analytical approach to fieldwork would add to scholarship by identifying the alternative logics of ecological design and its roots in the framing of environmental problems.
• Identifying pathways of socio-technical innovation and urban development: By employing a co-evolutionary approach to socio-technical development, research here will bring a critical gaze to envisioning urban futures of sustainable cities.

Please take the time to explore the MARC website and listen to myself and other MARC researchers talk about their work.

I have supervised six students to completion who have been funded by bodies as diverse as the British Commonwealth, the ESRC, the ESPRC, NERC and Scottish Power. I currently co-supervise the following students:

• Ambrose Gillick (2007) Investigation into participatory design and self-build.
• Liam Heaphy (2009) The development and use of climate models for representing and communicating policy-driven scientific research
• Elisa Pieri (2010) Urban futures: How issues of security and aspirations of cosmopolitanism reconfigure the city centre.
• Viktoria Wesslowski (2009) Facilitating sustainable social practices.
• Sercan Yalçner (2010) Transferability of sustainable building codes?
• Huraera Jabeen (2009) Adaptation to climate change and climate variability by the urban poor: from built environment perspective.