Transitioning Towards Urban Resilience and Sustainability (TURAS) is a European-wide research and development programme. The “TURAS” project aims to bring together urban communities, researchers, local authorities and SMEs to research, develop, demonstrate and disseminate transition strategies and scenarios to enable European cities and their rural interfaces to build vitally-needed resilience in the face of significant sustainability challenges. To ensure maximum impact, the TURAS project has developed an innovative twinning approach bringing together decision makers in local authorities with SMEs and academics to ensure meaningful results and real change are implemented over the duration of the project. Eleven local authorities or local development agencies are involved as partners in the project and they will orient research and development from the outset towards the priority sustainability and resilience challenges facing their cities. Nine leading academic research institutions and six SMEs will work with these cities helping them to reduce their urban ecological footprint through proposing new visions, feasibility strategies, spatial scenarios and guidance tools to help cities address these challenges. The specific challenges addressed in TURAS include: climate change adaptation and mitigation; natural resource shortage and unprecedented urban growth.
Over the five year duration of the project, the feasibility of these new approaches will be tested in selected case study neighbourhoods. One of these potential neighbourhoods is the redevelopment of the Poplar HARCA housing estate site known as Aberfeldy Village in Bromley-by-Bow, East London (http://www.turas-cities.org/urban_regions/London/en/csa/51).
The following report comprises guidelines on a multidisciplinary approach to landscape design for transitioning the Poplar HARCA estate into a new sustainable community
