Christina Bristow is a doctoral researcher at the University of Reading whose work is co-supervised by the University of Louvain. Her research uses urban metabolism to investigate the infrastructural dynamics of domestic heat supply and the wider resource requirements of UK cities.

The project develops a taxonomy of urban areas based on energy, water, material and food demands and on their relationship with local building and infrastructure systems. Spatially and temporally explicit metabolic models are applied to contrasting UK case-study cities to understand how urban form, economic activity and existing stocks influence transition options. A particular focus is the move toward carbon-free heating and the question of which technologies and infrastructure pathways are appropriate in different local contexts. The research aims to support decision-making by connecting city classification, changing building stocks and long-term regional planning for low-carbon systems.