Dr James Simpson

I arrived in Sheffield in 2008 to study Landscape Architecture with Planning and graduated three years later with BA 1st Class (Hons), whilst also receiving the Wardell Armstrong Prize for best landscape and planning portfolio as well as Y+H Landscape Institute Prize for best design project.

This provided the foundations for my time spent in practice, at Applied Landscape Design, where I gained invaluable insight on the ground at some of the biggest development projects being undertaken in Europe at the time, notably – 2012 Olympic Athletes Village, London; 2012 Olympic Hospitality Centre, London; Kings Cross Redevelopment, London; Eastside City Park, Birmingham.

I returned to Sheffield in 2012/13 to complete my Master of Landscape Architecture during which I became attracted by the prospect of undertaking research.

Having become interested in urban experience, notably within the context of streets, I formulated a supervisory team comprising Dr. Kevin Thwaites (Landscape) and Dr. Megan Freeth (Psychology) with a focus towards using mobile eye-tracking outdoors to understand how people visually engage these multifaceted socio-spatial settings.

I was successfully awarded ESRC funding to undertake a 1+3 Pathway Development Scholarship commencing with a MA in Landscape Research, which I graduated from with Distinction whilst also receiving the IAPS Young Researchers Award in 2014. The following four years were spent undertaking a PhD and in 2018 I become a Lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield.

When walking through urban environments our senses are continually stimulated by the multisensory assemblage of our surroundings. My research attempts to unpack such sensory experiences. This is whilst comprehending how these human-environment interactions are often impacted by a combination of everyday social actions and material considerations.

As a result, I am interested in understanding how urban places become physically established, at a human scale, through a combination of professional intervention and actions of territorial appropriation and personalisation. This is particularly within the context of streets and in relation to their indoor / outdoor edge interfaces, which when socially and experientially responsive, have the capability to provide vibrant and engaging urban settings for people to inhabit and use during their everyday lives.

Alongside this, I am interested in how peoples’ everyday tasks and mind-set influences the way in which they engage with the materiality of these settings. In order to gain insight into the experiential impact of such interconnected socio-spatial factors my work seeks to capture and analyse how human urban experience, which often evades verbal articulation or easy observation, is structured.

To do this I employ methods such as outdoor mobile eye-tracking, along with progressive data visualisation techniques, to understand and show how people visually engage urban contexts. Such insights subsequently inform not only academic output but also undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, which intersects landscape architecture and urban design.

During this, the focus is upon equipping students with evidence-based ideas and approaches that they can explore at university as well as take with them into professional practice in order to help deliver socially and experientially responsive design solutions.

Along with Dr Kevin Thwaites, I lead the Socio-Spatial Urbanism Unit.

Awards

• 2014 International Association of People Environment Studies Young Researcher Award
• 2011 Wardell Armstrong Prize for best landscape and planning portfolio
• 2011 Y+H Landscape Institute Prize for best final project