Built Environment Research
Jenny Elliott is an urban designer and researcher with expertise in creating sustainable, healthier public spaces. Her work focuses on urban design, placemaking, and public realm analysis, with a special emphasis on high street revitalisation, user experience and creative approaches to participatory planning. Through her PhD research at the University of Edinburgh, Jenny explores the barriers to implementing greener, socially impactful cities and public spaces, offering actionable insights for built environment professionals and policymakers.
Collaborating with interdisciplinary teams, Jenny integrates user research and evidence-based design into public space projects. Her work provides valuable recommendations to improve urban places, maximise social and environmental outcomes, and bridge the gap between theory and practice in sustainable urban design.
Urban Research: Public Life Studies, Spatial Analysis, Active Travel, User Experience
Jenny Elliott has led or supported urban research activities on various urban design projects, with a particular focus on creative placemaking installations, active travel, public space user experience and spatial analysis. For example, leading and training a team to use direct observation methods and qualitative interviews with passers-by based on a development of Jan Gehl’s methodology for analysing the ‘public life’ present in public space, to assess the current street condition and user experience to make design recommendations for 9 Public Life Studies for client City of Edinburgh Council.
Jenny Elliott has also worked with interdisciplinary teams including data scientists via the Edinburgh Living Lab to conduct user research of key Council buildings, public spaces and services via project ‘Service Design and Our Assets: Data and Design for Property Planning’. This project wove design insights, user research and data-driven findings via a robust data-and-design evidence-based approach to inform neighbourhood planning and the design of public spaces and council services.
Previous other research work includes research, write-up and graphic design of a suite of ‘Green Active Travel Case Studies’ for client CSGNT, developing a novel ‘collaborative evaluation’ approach to a co-design and prototyping project ‘Future of the High Street’ in my role as Project Lead that extended the collaborative and participatory project ethos to its reporting at all project stages, and supporting initial monitoring and evaluation of urban food growing project 3000 Acres in Melbourne.
PhD Research: realising better public space outcomes
Jenny Elliott’s PhD research at the University of Edinburgh explores the design, planning and decision-making processes and experiences of built environment professionals that ultimately lead to the reality of public realm places we see when we look out our windows or move around the city.
In particular, it aims to understand what barriers there are to implementing ‘best practice’ greener, healthier public spaces that maximise social and environmental outcomes ‘on the ground’ and how these challenges might be addressed. The research aims to provide valuable insights and robust findings to share back with the industry and policymakers that could ultimately lead to improved place outcomes for urban public spaces. Jenny Elliott’s PhD research at the University of Edinburgh is funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, in collaboration with industry partner Connected Places Catapult.
Final research findings, including insights from 62 anonymous built environment practitioners into the challenges they face in their work trying to deliver greener, healthier public spaces (and what they’d like to see change), and 3 UK-wide workshops, will be available in early 2025.
