Position:
Honorary Professor
Kevin Tayler was educated at Dursley Grammar School in Gloucestershire and then studied Civil Engineering at the University of Birmingham, graduating in 1968 with a First Class Honours degree. Periods working for a contractor, a local authority (Cardiff City Corporation) and a consulting firm followed. An MSc in Maritime Civil Engineering at Manchester University in 1973/4 led to a period with the Clyde River Purification Board, developing mathematical models to simulate the pollution of the Clyde estuary. After a period with Southern Water, Kevin spent two years in Juba, Southern Sudan as adviser on water supply and sanitation to the Regional Ministry of Housing and Public Utilities. Shortly after returning to the UK in 1983, he joined Gilmore Hankey Kirke (later GHK), a London based consulting firm and spent 18 years with the firm, working in Egypt, Pakistan and India among others. This experience introduced him to the challenges associated with urban housing and infrastructure provision in low income countries. For the last five years of his time with GHK, he managed GHK Research and Training, which carried out research, mainly for DFID on aspects of urbanisation, sanitation and participatory approaches to infrastructure provision. One outcome of this work was the book 'Urban Sanitation: A Guide to Strategic Planning', published by Practical Action in 2003. He left GHK in 2001 and since then has worked as an independent consultant. For several years, he was a member of the informal Sanitation and Wastewater Advisory Team (SWAT) established by the World Bank Water Anchor in Washington, in which capacity he provided guidance on projects in Ethiopia, Pakistan and India. He is currently working for the World Bank and WSP (the Water and Sanitation Program) on projects in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia. He has provided inputs to CPLAN’s Planning City Futures course and its predecessors for several years and has also supervised several Masters student dissertations. He is a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management.