Steve Lorimer

Steve Lorimer is a town planner-urban designer, and currently is a research associate funded by a Sustainable Cities Small Grant Award at the Bartlett School of Planning in the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment and by Professor Peter Jones at the Centre for Transport Studies in UCL Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering, and research tutor for sustainable and urban design at the Bartlett School of Architecture. In the recent past, he was supported by an EPSRC Strategic Award to do research in the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. During the summer of 2013, he will be moving to Imperial College London to research the interaction of the built environment and digital technology at the Sustainable Society Network.

He did his doctoral work at the University College London Energy Institute, Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. His thesis investigated new ways of modelling electricity use outside of heating in the residential sector. The first finding was that carefully measuring floorspace was no better at predicting energy use than counting the number of habitable rooms, meaning that the model could be tested against actual usage levels for an entire neighbourhood, city, or nation. The second finding was that non-heating electricity usage does not level off as homes get larger; instead the increase of consumption accelerates. The third finding was that consumption scales up and down depending on the entire collective of buildings in a number of urban, suburban, or rural typologies as well as the size of the building itself.

Outside of his thesis, Steve has done a variety of research work in sustainability and the built environment in the UK, including a wide-ranging review of energy research in residential and commercial buildings, how practitioners can approach urban design and climate change, the relationship of sustainability and sport, urban meteorology, the impact of hedonism on energy demand, behaviour change in the use of electronics, and the impact of locking organisations into private-finance initiaitives.

Formerly, he was an associate at the urban design and planning consultancy Urban Initiatives in London and Dublin. He was also one of the primary authors of the London Housing Design Manual, on dimensions and standards for urban design and domestic architecture for the Greater London Authority. In practice, he was project manager for urban design and planning projects ranging from large scale regeneration at the Poolbeg Peninsula in Dublin, sustainability appraisals of housing proposals at the Aylesbury Estate in South London, and training of urban designers for Urban Design London. In planning practice, he is an expert in scenario building and game-playing, with the Ashford Game being named Regeneration Innovation of the Year by Regeneration Magazine.

• Email address: s.lorimer@ucl.ac.uk

• Email address: s.lorimer@ucl.ac.uk
• Official website address: http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucftswl/
• Postal address: University College London
  Gower Street
  London
  WC1E 6BT
• Town: London
• Country: United Kingdom

Social media accounts

• Skype: stevelorimer