The physical infrastructure that facilitates the transport of people, freight, waste and utility services, and thus provides the essential support to civilised life, is under threat from numerous sources: deterioration through (often extreme) ageing, adverse ground chemistry, surface loading or stress relief due to open-cut interventions; severely increased demand; ever changing (different, or altered) demands; terrorism; the effects of climate change; funding constraints and severe natural hazards (extreme weather events, earthquakes, landslides, etc.). Such vulnerability, and the need for resilience in the face of such threats, is recognised widely - see Building Britain's Future17 and the ICE's State of The Nation Report: Defending Critical Infrastructure18 (both 2009), and the aims of the new Infrastructure UK delivery body18. This feasibility study seeks to explore radically different ways of conceptualising, designing, constructing, maintaining, managing, adapting and valuing the physical infrastructure to make it resilient no matter which threats are manifested or how the future develops. In this context resilience refers to the symbiosis existing between infrastructure, management systems and end users.Recent years have witnessed a shift to a more transdisciplinary concept of resilience that integrates the physical (both built and natural) and socio-political aspects of resilience. This change has been crucial because the socio-political and managerial aspects are arguably as important to the attainment of resilience as the physical aspects; resilient engineering also demands a more resilient infrastructural context with regard to the professions and the structures and processes which govern engineering activity.This proposal explores the engineering and social dimensions of resilience research needed to bring about radical changes in thinking and practice for an assured future in the face of multiple challenges. The following represent two core resilience themes at the interface of engineering, spatial planning and social science, from which feasibility studies to address key challenges will emerge via a series of workshops. The tangible manifestation lies in Local Area Agreements - a set of 32 centrally-approved and locally-implemented performance indicators linking engineered solutions, mechanisms for adoption, behavioural adaptation and education.1. Bespoke local utility infrastructures for resilient communities2. The role of transport in societal resilienceThe research team draws from five major research groups at the University of Birmingham, all of whom are addressing core themes of infrastructure and resilience. The team is supported by innovative thinkers drawn from the stakeholder community, both practitioners and policy makers. The primary themes to be studied are the creation of local utility infrastructures and transport to deliver resilience, recognising the UK shift towards enhancing innovation in the public/private sectors and local decision-making and delivery. Our team will deepen trans-disciplinary research by overcoming the tension that exists between the engineering focus on solutions and the social scientists concern with problems by developing realistic solutions to local problems. This requires exploration of the interface between four communities of practice: engineering and physical sciences, social sciences, private firms and local government. The intention is to identify solutions that reduce costs and enhance delivery, but also to identify new projects that have the potential to create innovative products that have commercial value.

The first phase of the SUE Programme has focused necessarily on the present, assessing current solutions and their application in the near future, thus providing a strong empirical base on which to build. There now exist both the need and a sufficient body of work to extrapolate the findings to establish and test alternative urban futures: to create a variety of scenarios, building on prior and new work, and predicated on different fundamental assumptions and priorities; to assess those scenarios in terms of design, engineering implementation and measurement of performance; to refine them, in terms of mitigation and adaptation measures, incorporating novel solutions; and ultimately to provide alternative solutions with an associated evidence base and strategies for their implementation. This bid seeks to integrate the outputs of three current SUE consortia (Birmingham Eastside, VivaCity 2020 and WaND) and complementary research on the use of trees to mitigate the effects of atmospheric pollution. The team will work across disciplines to envision and establish alternative futures (using extensive literature on this subject and prior WaND consortium work) and construct scenarios that might flow from each alternative future. The various work packages will then focus on testing specific dimensions of each alternative future vis a vis their design, implementation and performance in the context of case history sites. Each project will engage an expert panel of influential stakeholders who will meet six-monthly to test and help shape new ideas, the chairs of each of the expert panels forming the higher level project steering committee. Panel consultation will be followed by interviews of stakeholders on motivations and the decision-making process, and specific empirical research and modelling. The following high level questions will be addressed via this process: - How does the ab initio conceptualization of sustainability influence design outcomes (e.g. form, density)? How would outcomes change if urban renewal were predicated on either environmental or social or economic overriding drivers? - How does development impact on its environs, and vice versa (e.g. is a 'sustainable' site good for the city / region / country and, if so, in what ways?) and is there an optimum development size to yield optimally sustainable outcomes? - Push versus pull to achieve sustainable outcomes. Much of what is done is thought good (for individuals, society, the environment), what might be wanted (push). Thus decisions are made and people must decide whether or not to take ownership. Might more sustainable outcomes follow if those who must take ownership dictate what is created (pull)? Birmingham Eastside will be used both to develop sustainability ideas and to test them on sites at various stages of planning and development (the research team has unparalleled access via its partnerships with key stakeholders involved in Eastside). Lancaster (with Morecambe, population 96k) and Worcester (94k) will be used to test the outcomes at the scale of smaller urban areas (e.g. market towns) but no attempt will be made to build comprehensive databases as at Eastside. Several other UK and international urban areas (including Sao Paulo, Singapore and an urban area in India) will be used to test a sub-set of the project's findings to assess the transferability of the scenarios to a variety of contexts and thus their general applicability.

Every day we see the development of new "smart" things and come closer and closer to the moment when the perfect "smart" home of the future becomes a reality. A "Smart" home, is one in which each appliance (thing) is not only controllable but is also "intelligent", ie. tailored to our individual needs. Yet, smart objects and smart homes often consider the individual as a passive entity to be 'served', rather than an empowered individual who can make smart decisions based on information. This is often because of the assumption that human cognition isn't able to take on the massive amount of information that could be generated from such smart objects. Indeed, very little is known about how people interact with data and how much of the data which we generate can actually inform our day-to-day decision making. We also do not know whether data generated within a home can change our consumption habits and behaviour. Finally, we are uncertain about whether and to what extent the data that we produce influences other decision makers in our household. Our project offers a new approach to answering these questions by observing actual household behaviour "in the wild" and developing a personal resource planning system (PRP) to support decisions made by individuals, ie. a smart 'me'. Our approach is different from existing IoT research in the following ways. First, while traditional research views the customer, who either accepts or rejects the product/service developed by businesses, to be outside the supply system, our approach offers a new perspective in which the customer is also viewed as an inside component of the supply system. This means that the customer, through his/her behaviour, becomes an inherent component of the supply system, and thereby transforms this system into a collaborative exchange system. This collaborative exchange system allows customers to interact with businesses and make decisions about how much customisation they would like to see in each product/service they themselves consume (e.g., Crowcroft et al., 2011; McAuley et al., 2011; Ng. et al., 2013). Second, since our approach has a person (customer) in the centre, the main focus of this project is to understand how "smart" things interact with human behaviour, and possibly how this behaviour can be informed by the new data from "smart" things to catalyse the appearance of a more informed "smart" consumer (e.g., Ng, 2012). Finally, our third contribution to existing research is to create data architecture through the IoT which would allow customers to make more informed "smart" decisions. In a way, the main output of this project will be a proof of concept that customers could be "nudged" into making "smarter" consumption decisions which would optimise business-customer interactions and create more value for each household.

The aim of the Sustainable Eastside Project is to explore how sustainability is addressed in the regeneration decision-making process, and to assess the sustainability performance of completed development schemes in Birmingham Eastside against stated sustainability credentials and aspirations. The incorporation of sustainability into an urban regeneration program, such as Birmingham Eastside, appears best conceptualised as a complex decision-making process carried out by stakeholders who are embedded within the development process. The barriers to and enablers of sustainability (as identified in Phase I of this project) appear at various moments or locations within this complex. The timing and context of decisions are critical (examined in Phase II), and can cause path-dependency which then limits how sustainability features in final development plans. In Phases I & II, the research set in place a framework of cross-disciplinary knowledge and key partnerships; highlighted the importance of coherent integration of the three pillars of sustainability to enable the complexity of achieving urban sustainability to be sufficiently grappled with; gained access to key decision-making forums in Eastside; built strong links with key stakeholders in the area; and firmly integrated into the policy agenda for Eastside. In addition, researchers are working to establish a cross-cutting baseline dataset of developments in Eastside rigorously to measure change over time and the impact of particular decisions on the sustainability of the overall urban regeneration programme. In so doing the foundations for a zonal urban regeneration case study site are being established, augmented by the creation of a study facility, with library and hot desking, now available for researchers from SUE / IEP consortia, to study the application of research to practice. The emerging findings of Phase II have allowed researchers to develop a series of hypotheses about the timing of decisions for sustainability in a range of decision-making forums, and the extent to which path-dependency becomes problematic. In Phase III, a suite of innovative analytical tools will be employed to elucidate further the complexities and interactions of the key elements of the sustainability vision for Eastside. First, a Development Timeline Framework (DTF), a multi-disciplinary tool that makes explicit the path dependency of decisions toward achieving sustainability goals, and the conflicts and synergies between different sustainability objectives, will be used as the basis for further research. Second, a cross-cutting Sustainability Checklist (SC) applied to the DTF will allow each researcher to analyse the impact of timing and context of decisions for each sustainability element (e.g. biodiversity, public participation, space utilisation, local sourcing, and recycling). Third, an Industrial Ecology (IE) analysis will follow particular resources (e.g. water, aggregates) thus highlighting their interdependence, while a Social Impact Assessment (SIA) approach will enable assessment of the socio-cultural aspects of sustainability (not covered by the IE approach). This suite of tools underpins the delivery of the work package aims. This analysis will be undertaken on a case history site basis, using development sites within Eastside that are all currently 'live,' each site representing a different conceptualisation of sustainability. This provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the specific impact of early thinking about sustainability in the planning and design stages, and the impact of this timing and path-dependency on sustainability performance in the final built form.

The issue: There are currently more people over the age of 60 than ever before. The Office of National Statistics have projected that the number of people age 60 years and over will increase by 50% in the next 25 years. These demographic changes are important because people generally become less physically active as they grow older. This can be detrimental to their health and well-being and has subsequent health and social care costs. Researchers have been investigating the relationship between physical activity and health for a long time. Consequently, much is known about which diseases can be prevented through physical activity, and how much and how often activity should be undertaken. This information is useful, but it does not negate the fact that there are still lots of older people who are inactive. Recently, leading scientists have said that if we are to encourage people to integrate health behaviours like physical activity into their everyday life, conducting research to reconfirm that physical activity is beneficial is not enough. Instead, they say that we need to know more about the different environments, which can enable or deter physical activity in older age and shape how it is experienced. This includes people's physical environments (e.g. their access and proximity to woodlands, parks etc.) and also their social and cultural environments (e.g. the impact of their ethnicity, gender, interaction with healthcare etc.). Social scientists are well qualified to investigate issues like these. Our response: Our seminar series will bring together academics from different subject areas (e.g. sociology, psychology, geography, sport and health sciences), policy makers, health and social care practitioners, physical activity and sport providers, and those working within the voluntary and statutory sectors. Each seminar will focus on a specific issue relevant to the physical, social and cultural environments that can impact upon physical activity (PA) in older age. Specifically; (i)competitive sport in later life, (ii)physical activity during lifecourse transitions, (iii)how gender impacts upon physical activity involvement - and vice versa, (iv)experiences of physical activity amongst hard to reach groups (e.g. ethnic minorities), (v)community based initiatives to promote physical activity, (vi)E-health, (vii)PA in the outdoor natural environment, (viii)the process of using research to inform policy and practice. Leading experts from the UK and abroad will share their knowledge and direct discussions with seminar participants. This process will advance what we currently know about the topic and also identify aspects that we don't know about that require more research. It will also enable a large group of people (from research, policy and practice backgrounds) with a shared commitment to healthy ageing to establish themselves as a 'network'. The network members will continue to communicate and collaborate with each other both during and beyond the lifetime of the seminar series. Who will benefit and how: The seminar series is intended to have strong and distinctive impacts in academic, policy and user communities. This will be achieved by advancing understanding of (i)physical activity engagement in older age in ways that go beyond 'how much' and 'how often', (ii)the value of using different disciplines (i.e. subject areas) and research methods to generate knowledge about this topic. Policy contributions will be made regarding how best to promote healthy ageing, through physical activity involvement. Impact will also occur through the inclusion of older participants in the co-production of research knowledge, and in the training of early career researchers to continue championing this research area. Working closely with Core Partners (British Heart Foundation, Birmingham Public Health, Sporting Equals) will enhance the research teams understanding of the relationship between research and policy.