www.buildingsandcities.org/about/richard-lorch.html
Richard Lorch
Richard Lorch is an architect, researcher, writer and editor-in-chief of Buildings & Cities. He was the former editor-in-chief of Building Research and Information and executive editor of Climate Policy.
He is a visiting professor at University College London and Politecnico di Milano. He works on organisational / policy responses to climate change - mitigation and adaptation paths - and the environmental impacts of the built environment and building performance at different scales from the individual building to neighbourhood to city.
As editor, his key concerns are fair, robust peer review assessment and feedback processes, author support and the diffusion and take-up of research and new knowledge by 'end users' - promoting two-way dialogue and co-production between stakeholders, practitioners, policy makers and the academic community.
Latest Commentaries
Practitioners’ Views of POE
Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is widely valued but weakly embedded in practice. Ant Marsh, Kate van Someren, Lara Clarke and Tom Randall (Arup Building Performance and Commissioning Services) explain the findings from a survey and focus groups with UK construction industry practitioners. They identified fragmented responsibility, split commercial incentives and a persistent fear of “bad news”. Making POE routine requires a shift from producing reports to a focus on improving outcomes by owning and acting on learning.
Who is Responsible for Climate Change?
Ian Cooper (Eclipse Research) explores the questions of responsibility raised in the recent Buildings & Cities special issue ‘Climate Change Risk and Decision-Making’. Focusing here on carbon emissions and mitigation, global responses will require grounding in what can work locally. New responsibilities arise for the wide range of built environment decision-makers: clients, professionals and their institutions, central and local governments, product suppliers, financiers, insurers, etc. A framework is needed to manage the complexity of responsibilities especially for variety of actors, the time frames and spatial scales.