Introduction
- Building In My Back Yard (BIMBY) is a project which has started out as a collaboration in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds
- This page is for organising information about BIMBY, to record a history of it, and to be a useful resource for the collaboration.
- Contents
People
Documentation
Data
- GLUD and NLUD
- Survey
- Census
- Remote sensing
- Areal photographs
- Satelite Imagery
Notes
- Project Name
- BIMBY
- BIMBY sounds similar to NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) which is now common in the vernacular.
- My Backyard is the much larger spatial context that we live in, not literally private land at the back of a property!
- What is actually happening at a physical level that we want to address?
- Urban infilling and its environmental and social impacts (Land cover/use change implications for biodiversity, hydrology and quality of life):
- Biodiversity:
- Habitat change
- Endangering of species
- Ecological fragmentation
- Hydrology:
- Runoff and infiltration/drainage implications
- Quality of life:
- Access to green space (both physical and visual)
- Decrease in total urban lung size
- Decrease in number and availability of allotments and growing space (less potential for people to "grown their own" food)
- Other:
- Insidious increase in urban heat island effects.
- Decrease in air quality?
- What do we want to do?
- Apply for a small research grant:
- Choose a small area to run a pilot study and work towards an investigation of larger scale implications in a follow on longer term project.
- Study Area Selection
- Leeds
- London
- Somewhere that has a political impetus and may have recently had significant land cover/use change.
- A number of local small becks in the region have flooded repeatedly in the last few years although the last major river in the region (at the time of writing in 2007-07) was in Autumn 2000.
- Perhaps worth liaising with the Environment Agency to identify such problem flooding areas and base a study area selection on this.
- BUGS study areas?
- Identifying catchments that lie within, or predominantly within urban areas and the suburbs in particular.
- Meanwood Valley
- Gledhow Valley
- Kirkstall Valley
- Key things to address:
- What to measure and how:
- Urban land cover change (by area,type and by rate - needs a time series of data);
- Use of EO data and surveys.
- Bidodiversity impacts in terms of urban land cover change.
- Can we map the land cover change to an environmental factor such as biodiversity?.
- Initial Project Scope
- A feasibility study.
- We are suggesting that infilling by it's nature is small scale and that many such changes are under the planning radar and there is no data set that can be readily used to assess how much this is happening.
- Roofs of buildings are a significant proportion of the area of urban land
- Mostly roofs simply function as a cap to buildings insulating them from weather, but the space on top of buildings can be developed and have multiple uses.
- The potential for differnt types of roof depends on the buildings alignment, size and the nature of other nearby buildings.
- Many roofs can be changed so that they generate electrical energy and are greened and provide some general use water.
- Classifying roofs and buildings is an interesting topic addressed in a UK Building Geometry Project funded by the Ordnance Survey.
- Miscellaneous notes
- Let us recognise that landcover is a multilayered thing.
- Consider for example a tree surrounded by pavement and one in a meadow and the differences in infiltration, runnoff and biodiversity.
- Consider collaboration with BUGS researchers from Sheffield.
Blog
- 2007-07-03
- Correspondence Louise and Andy
- 2007-06-22
- Correspondence Louise and Andy
- 2007-06-21
- Brainstorm Louise and Andy
- 2007-06-15
- Discussion Kamie and Andy
- 2007-06-06
- Discussion Louise and Andy
- 2007-05-14
- Discussion Gordon and Andy
References/Bibliography/Links
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