**Net Zero Pioneer Manchester** will develop a detailed local plan to accelerate delivery of the City's net zero targets using an innovative place-based, whole-systems approach to unlocking a range of non-technical systemic barriers to implementation. Manchester City Council, with our partners Bankers Without Boundaries, Equans, Manchester Climate Change Agency and Manchester Metropolitan University, recognise the need for significant additional investment in decarbonisation for the city to reach its net zero 2038 goals. Building on the latest innovations from the BEIS-funded 3Ci initiative and similar projects, we will adapt, refine, and test the aggregation of net zero projects (covering power, heat, mobility, product manufacture and usage) from across mixed assets (domestic, commercial, industrial, public) within a local place to attract a blended portfolio of investments that can unlock decarbonisation at scale. We will take an innovative approach by working directly with local stakeholders including regional infrastructure operators, social housing providers, transport operators and Greater Manchester Combined Authority to quantify the scale of existing, locally committed, outcome-seeking funds within a discrete location -- Wythenshawe, a town within Manchester. We will collate these investments to leverage new finance (return and outcome-seeking) by engaging both public and private sectors, creating a blended investment portfolio. Concurrently, we will collate the pipeline of locally committed net zero projects, highlighting the existing decarbonisation pathway, and develop a new pipeline of projects aligned to the blended investment portfolio and informed by the City's Local Area Energy Plan, produced by the Energy Systems Catapult, the Manchester Climate Change Framework and associated research by GMCA. The resulting net zero plan will have an estimated value of £45m. It's creation will enable us to address a range of non-technical barriers including: using outcome-seeking funds to leverage return-seeking investment; modelling revenue streams across a blended portfolio; optimising the balance of cross-vectoral interventions; valuing benefits for outcome buyers; using financial disclosure to de-risk public funds; growing local supply chains and skills opportunities; creating an enabling policy framework; designing the right governance, legal, and contractual arrangements for delivery; engaging residents, businesses, and local communities effectively; and building capacity for net zero delivery within local government and relevant stakeholders. This project will move innovation in net zero financing from theory to practice, to develop a plan that can be deployed at scale and test solutions to multiple implementation barriers, and that can be expanded across the city and replicated by other places in the UK.

**Net Zero Pathfinder, Phase 2 Manchester** will build upon the findings of the Phase 1 feasibility study towards the delivery of a local place-based net zero programme to accelerate delivery of the City's net zero targets using an innovative whole-systems approach. Manchester City Council and Manchester Climate Change Agency recognise the need for significant additional investment in decarbonisation for the City to reach its net zero 2038 goals. The net zero plan created in the Phase 1 feasibility study for the area around and including a local Town Centre currently has an estimated value of £55m. We will continue with our innovative approach developed during Phase 1 by working directly with local stakeholders including regional infrastructure operators, social housing providers, transport operators and Greater Manchester Combined Authority to further refine and develop this pipeline of net zero projects. Informed by the City's Local Area Energy Plan (LAEP), we will continue to develop a blended investment portfolio including funding from existing, local outcome-seeking finance and continue our work, started at Phase 1, to engage with both public and private sector stakeholders to attract additional private financing options to our portfolio. This will support us in continuing to address a range of non-technical barriers including: using outcome-seeking funds to leverage return-seeking investment; modelling revenue streams across a blended portfolio; valuing benefits for outcome buyers; using financial disclosure to de-risk public funds; growing local supply chains and skills opportunities; creating an enabling policy framework; designing the right governance, legal, and contractual arrangements for delivery; engaging residents, businesses, and local communities effectively; and building capacity for net zero delivery within local government and relevant stakeholders. Building on the findings of the Phase 1 feasibility study, we will adapt, refine, and test the aggregation of net zero projects (covering power, heat and mobility) from across mixed assets (domestic, commercial, industrial, public) within a local place to attract a blended portfolio of investments that can unlock decarbonisation at scale.

Human observers move their eyes in order to direct their attention to important aspects of a visual scene. There are models called salience maps; they predict where the eyes will move to when looking at a scene. At present, these models do not deal with video input, nor do they predict how an observer's task will affect where they look. In other words, there are no models for real-life viewing situations, where an observer has a specific task.We are proposing a new approach to this problem. We have access to video information from cameras used in urban surveillance, and to the operators whose job it is to spot abnormal behaviour in such video inputs. We shall obtain (previously unseen) video recordings of events in UK urban streets, and display them in a simulated control room to operators familiar with the town in question. We shall monitor where they look on the bank of video screens, and also when they decide that an event is abnormal and/or requires some form of intervention, e.g. calling the police. We shall use the record of eye fixations to teach a computer system to distinguish between normal and abnormal events. In this way, we shall be able to learn what is important for humans to do such surveillance by observing their eye fixation behaviour, for a realistic (and difficult) task and set of real-life video sequences. The project is important for four reasons. First, this will be the first attempt to develop a model of human attention/eye movements which will be firmly based on realistic video input and a real task. Second, this will be the first time that a computer system is able to learn from human behaviour in this way. Third, we will learn much about the ability of trained observers to cope with a demanding task as the number of TV monitors increases. Finally, we will develop an automated system which will be able to analyse the input from any urban CCTV camera in order to alert operators to look at that video stream - at present, most CCTV video streams are not observed by anyone since there are too many cameras for the number of human observers. Therefore, an automated alerting system is greatly neeeded and this project constitutes the best attempt to date to produce one.

Greater Manchester (GM), far from being a historically unified whole, is made up of ten boroughs, each with its own unique character. The Manchester Voices project investigates the ways in which people in the city-region position themselves locally, regionally and nationally, and the role of language in enacting social and regional identities. The project is structurally organised around three core strands: language use, language attitudes, and regional and social identities. It addresses a number of issues relating to the academic and non-academic treatment of regional and social varieties of language in the UK, and the role of such language varieties in the construction of identity: 1. Lack of detailed linguistic descriptions of regional variation across GM. Previous research has tended to view 'Manchester English' as a monolithic entity or has focused on specific areas within GM, thus not acknowledging the wide linguistic variation that exists. This project provides a rich and full description of language use across the region's ten boroughs, thus ensuring an accurate contemporary record of developing and changing regional varieties of language. 2. Societal and institutional disregard for regional accents and dialects. 'Regional' language varieties are often perceived in a negative way, with speakers being stigmatised. This project explores and challenges those perceptions by promoting and celebrating the linguistic and cultural heritage of GM, thereby advancing our understanding of the social, cultural, and historical factors that continue to shape the language, places, and people of the region. 3. Lack of attention to attitudes as factors mediating the relationship between language and identity. By exploring people's feelings towards their own speech and towards that of others, the project seeks to uncover deeply embedded and widely held beliefs regarding the status and value of regional accents and dialects. This attitudinal data will serve to challenge perceptions of regional accents and dialects and to promote linguistic equality and diversity as a means of nurturing a sense of social and regional pride. 4. Lack of sociolinguistic insight into existing cultural, historical, and literary resources relating to regional identity. GM, like many regions across the UK, has a wealth of resources relating to past and present society, much of which is collected by Manchester Libraries. However, the extent to which this material has been explored from a sociolinguistic perspective is minimal, despite language being at the heart of the available resources. By partnering with librarians, poets, literary specialists and cultural historians, the project will reach a fuller understanding of the linguistic context, contributing to a fuller understanding of the historical and literary landscape of GM. 5. Lack of community access and engagement in sociolinguistic research. Sociolinguistic data tends to be collected during pre-arranged meetings in neutral locations and formal contexts. To counter this, we will take our research into the community in the form of a mobile interview booth, allowing us to access groups who might otherwise be unaware of, or unwilling to be involved in, the project. In addition to majority populations, we will seek the voices of specific groups, such as young people and GM's multilingual/multicultural communities. The primary spoken data will be collected in the Accent Van, which will travel the ten boroughs of GM gathering speech and insights from people across the region. In addition, creative poetry and history workshops will gather further data and explore themes around regional identities. Dialect maps will be collected online, and attitude tests will take place online and at the University. Finally, existing audio recordings being digitised as part of the Save Our Sounds project will be housed with our data in a Voices resource area at Manchester Central Library.

The public realm is a place where urban stakeholders interact and sometimes come into conflict. Symptoms such as traffic congestion, street safety and air pollution are difficult to tackle, as they involve multiple stakeholders. Planning and implementation to improve public space can be enhanced through co-creation, but examples of co-creation approaches and tools that overarch the full planning cycle are rare. The aim of the LOOPER is to build a participatory co-creation methodology and platform, to demonstrate 'learning loops' i.e. new ways of decision-making which bring together citizens, stakeholders and policy-makers to iteratively learn how to address urban challenges. A typical loop starts with debate on topical issues, then frames the problem and collects data using participatory sensing. The platform then visualizes the data, and enables the co-design and evaluation of solutions. The selected solutions are then implemented, and the results are monitored with a second loop learning from the first. LOOPER will produce a prototype platform with demonstrations in three Urban Living Labs with different spatial, cultural and thematic contexts: traffic calming and pedestrianisation in Brussels; street safety and security in Manchester; environmental pollution in Verona. It will also provide guidance, available for to enable any city to improve its decision-making.