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Bottom-up infrastructure approach

Bottom-Up Infrastructure is an approach that delivers local, engineering based projects through working with community and industry partners to develop innovative methods that both improve community engagement and infrastructure resilience.

Bottom-Up Infrastructure is a model of infrastructure improvement that increases the engagement of communities in engineering design and decision-making to deliver resilient, sustainable systems that meet the needs of people and the environment under conditions of uncertainty.

The approach has been developed through a range of locally delivered projects including Engineering Comes Home, Energy Garden and Leathermarket Kipling Garden Design.

These projects began with the central research question: how can infrastructure design and delivery engage directly with communities and users to transform cities into sustainable, resilient, prosperous and healthy places to live?

Throughout the delivery of the projects, a range of activities have taken place to support the development of the Bottom-Up Infrastructure approach. These include:

  • Developing and testing bottom-up engineering methods and tools to support resilient infrastructure design
  • Creating a typology of community engagement for different stages and scales of infrastructure design and provision
  • Investigating best practice in community engagement and applying bespoke methods with the local communities affected by these projects, understanding the benefits and risks to participants and communities
  • Evaluating practice continually to support the learning from the application of methods and the outcomes achieved

This website shares much of the learning, methods and tools generated from the delivery of several projects.