Dr. Lorraine D'Arcy:

I want to add to that. The multidisciplinary group is fantastic, welcome and needed, but it is important that it have some environmental psychologists or urban designers who understand the relationship between how something is designed and how someone behaves in space. This is something I experienced when I moved from working as a civil engineer. Where civil engineering is concerned, professional training influences the approach in that the changing of the built environment involves a very structural change. An urban designer can be much more subtle in the changes, which might involve planters or trees. “Sense of enclosure” is the term used, the feeling being that if a place is narrower, you will move slower through it. It is important to have urban psychologists or urban designers on the team. In local authorities, we do not have enough of this kind of collaboration. One of the main drivers for us in setting up the master of science degree in sustainable transport and mobility in TU Dublin was to have interdisciplinary viewpoints regarding how we deliver the schemes.