Charlotte Taylor

Charlotte is a researcher and structural engineer who is passionate about sustainable and innovative engineering design, natural building materials and community orientated projects. She has experience in traditional building trades, developing zero-carbon technologies and structural strategies to improve socioeconomics. She is also excited by maps, borderlands and counter cartography.

Charlotte is currently a PhD researcher of the project titled "Ecologically constrained building design: what can we build from the zero-carbon resource pool?" at the University of Bath, funded by Whitby Wood.

The construction sector faces the daunting task of meeting growing construction demand with a 'zero-emission resource pool' - materials that are compatible with a near-future emissions-free economy. Most decarbonisation roadmaps and scenario analyses for the sector depend heavily on high-risk technologies such as carbon storage that have not yet been deployed at significant scale, or favour recycling whilst overlooking likely constraints from limited supplies of emissions-free electricity. My research in structural engineering at the nexus of climate, material production, land use, and development addresses these challenges from many angles:

1. Identifying the causes and impacts of construction material production (industrial ecology and environmental science)
2. Assessing the decarbonisation strategies for key construction materials (policy and industrial analysis)
3. Understanding the oppurtunities and challenges of scaling-up production of zero-emissions construction materials (land use systems and resource mapping)

Within these broad research areas, I focus mainly on the challenge of construction material production compatible with a realistic view of delivering zero emissions in the UK by 2050. I study nine key construction materials - concrete, steel, aluminium, structural glass, timber, earth, stone, lime and straw, and their production in the UK. My research agenda also examines land use and resource availability for a national-scale transition to zero-emissions construction materials, and compares hypothetical maximum supply to current material demand.

To accomplish this diverse research portfolio, I develop my interdisciplinary training in political ecology, production studies, economics, and geography. My approach combines fieldwork, semi-structured interview along supply chains, spatial data synthesis, statistical analysis, and scenario modelling. These different components work together to generate theory, integrate a range of data types, and test and refine theory with novel empirical analyses.

I am open to collaborations, particularly with artists, research architects, and spatial-practitioners.