Dr. Christopher Boyko

Senior Research Associate

+44 (0) 1524 592339

Christopher is a Senior Research Associate in ImaginationLancaster. His general research and teaching interests include sustainability, regeneration, decision-making processes, urban design, public space, environmental psychology, wellbeing, (qualitative) methods and urban tourism.

Christopher is currently examining density and the decision-making process on a 4-year, £3 million EPSRC project called Sustainable Regeneration: From Evidence-based Urban Futures to Implementation. This research builds on his previous work about the urban design decision-making process and its relationship to sustainability from another EPSRC-funded research project, VivaCity2020: Urban Sustainability for the 24-hour City. In between these projects, Christopher co-wrote a government report about the impacts of the physical environment on mental well-being. He is a member of the Environmental Design Research Association and the British Urban Regeneration Association.

Current research activities

The New Interaction Order: A Study of Behaviour in Public Spaces

This Lancaster University Early Career Research Grant project seeks to study and evaluate key changes (e.g. through ambient, embedded and personal technologies) in ‘the interaction order’ of public spaces. This will be achieved through interdisciplinary and collaborative ethnographic mobile methods, following in the footsteps of social scientist Erving Goffman and urban theorist and sociologist William Whyte.

Sustainable Regeneration: From Evidence-based Urban Futures to Implementation

(EPSRC-SUE 2 project, beginning May 2008) This project will work across disciplines to envision and establish alternative futures for sustainable regeneration and construct scenarios that might flow from each alternative future. The research team will then focus on testing specific dimensions of each alternative future vis-a-vis their design, implementation and performance in the context of case history sites.