UCL Citizen Science Academy
The UCL Citizen Science Academy offers community-based, practice-led research training, enabling communities to generate knowledge, drive social action and shape policy change.
Research
Building evidence for a fairer, more prosperous urban future.
Saffron Woodcraft's work sits at the intersection of anthropology, urban studies and public policy. Her research develops new ways of understanding and measuring prosperity — grounded in what matters to communities — and uses citizen-led methods to generate evidence that shapes local and national decision-making.
Key projects
Prosperity in east London 2021–2031
Prosperity in east London 2021-2031 is a 10-year mixed-methods study examining the prosperity of over 4,000 households in 15 areas of east London where large-scale and long-term urban regeneration is driving rapid physical, economic, and social changes in local communities. The study has been funded and co-designed with the London Prosperity Board.
Research themes
Redefining prosperity
Developing conceptual frameworks, indices and metrics that go beyond GDP and standard wellbeing measures. This includes the Citizen Prosperity Index for east London, the Maisha Bora Index in Dar es Salaam, and the Good Life Euston Index — each built with local communities to capture what prosperity actually means in place.
Livelihood insecurity
Mapping and measuring how households experience insecure work, income, housing, food and services, and how compound insecurities shape life chances. Recent work uses secondary and administrative data to map livelihood insecurity across east London neighbourhoods.
Citizen social science
Using citizen social science to bring community researchers and policymakers together so evidence is built from lived experience. Director of UCL's Citizen Science Academy.
Cities, regeneration & housing
Long-term ethnographic, citizen science, and quantitative work on regeneration in east London neighbourhoods and comparative studies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Verticality, urban form, and sustainable communities
Editorial and theoretical work on the politics of the built environment, what counts as a sustainable community, and how architecture and urban planning are used to advance ideas about who the city is for.