This multidisciplinary project aims to understand how urban design influenced by historical and heritage data can be used to address issues such as environmental sustainability, public health, and ethic/religious/class segregation in cities. The research brings a team of academic investigators (history, architecture, peace and conflict studies) together with local government officials (planning, environment, museums and heritage service) and social enterprise (design, digital fabrication) to collect a wide array of data that will then be used to aid the design of a multi-million pound public landscaping project in the city of Derry/Londonderry. Research by the World Heart Federation (Smith et al, 2012) has established a strong link between urbanisation and cardiovascular disease, while also identifying urban design as an essential pillar in its recommendations for improving public health in cities. In particular, the engaged development of infrastructure, parks and green corridors were outlined as an essential part of a strategy to improve public health along with public information campaigns, access to healthcare, and stakeholder engagement. Working from the premise that urban design can contribute to not only an improvement in public health, but also to environmental sustainability and community cohesion in divided cities, the project intends to build a bank of historical and heritage data that can be used to ensure that future urban design projects will reflect the cultural and architectural heritage of the area under development. In so doing, the community ownership and use of such projects and facilities can be increased through the formation of a partnership between academic researchers, local government officials, community activists, and residents. The city of Derry/Londonderry has a history of violent division stretching back hundreds of years and urban design has been at the centre of attempts to both divide and integrate from the erection of the city walls in the seventeenth century to the construction of the pedestrian Peace Bridge linking the unionist east to the nationalist west of the city in 2011. The project combines methods from history and historical anthropology (oral history interviews, archival and statistical research), geography (GIS mapping), design (digital fabrication), and the wider social sciences (walking interviews) to collate data relating to space and place, and how people have interacted with a changing built environment over time in a divided city with a violent past. Borrowing from the thinking behind the emerging discipline of design anthropology, in which ethnographic engagement leads to better design solutions for products and services, the research attempts to harness history, cultural/architectural heritage and social memory to help provide urban design solutions that are more reflective of people and their often dearly held personal and environmental histories. An official partnership between the project investigators and Derry City and Strabane District Council will result in the research data being used to inform large-scale landscape and urban design projects to be developed during the lifetime of the research project as part of the Northern Ireland Executive's Urban Villages scheme. A similar partnership with the Nerve Centre FabLab (a community based digital fabrication centre) will result in the grassroots production of 3D city model plans that will be exhibited in the Tower Museum and be further used to inform the projects due to be developed in the city in the coming years. The project will also contribute to the developing historiography of the Troubles through the production of a co-authored book and journal articles on the history of how people in the city of Derry/Londonderry interacted with their built and environmental surroundings before and since the implementation of the Londonderry Development Plan (1968) and the onset of violence at the same time.

The Covid-19 crisis is having a significant impact on the museum sector, nationally and globally. It is exposing the vulnerability of museums, their staff, projects and collections. Elsewhere, innovative programming is demonstrating the vitality and versatility of an engaged, responsive and participatory museum service, proving that museums are places of relevance even in a crisis. This research project focuses on how museums can continue to contribute to community resilience and wellbeing in a time of crisis. It addresses sector adaptability as it adjusts audience engagement and collaboration (such as new collecting practices, programming and exhibitions) in response to Covid-19. The differing responses during the Covid-19 crisis - in some museums staff were furloughed yet elsewhere they have been involved in responsive projects - uncovers deeper attitudes to the essential (or otherwise) nature of museum services. Going forward, this project will lead and inform the sector as it adapts to effective community-digital possibilities that still embraces new thinking in participation and engagement. Alongside this, the project evaluates how we adapt our practices to be mindful of audience diversity, digital poverty, and the isolation challenges for vulnerable audiences arising from Covid-19. Rising to that challenge this project: 1. identifies how museum pedagogy and practices must adapt to new audience needs; 2. explores possibilities for co-produced community-digital innovation; and, 3. investigates the offer museums can make to support community resilience during and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. The importance of this project lies in the following areas. Firstly, new knowledge about the understanding of the impact of Covid-19 on the museum sector in NI that will both inform the Department for Communities (DfC) and have national relevance. Secondly, by generating new thinking around the community-digital dynamic and leading innovation as museums adapt. Thirdly, understanding the new needs around community resilience and wellbeing, arising from Covid-19. The Museums Association's response to the Covid-19 enquiry described museums as vital in supporting communities, promoting community cohesion, enabling wellbeing, and reflection on significant public issues. Many of our museums work with vulnerable groups, who will remain cautious/shielding post lockdown e.g. the Dementia Friendly Programme (NI Museums Council). This project will investigate the impact of putting such programmes on hold, how they can be effectively adapted/reinstated, and make recommendations for immediate application/future planning.

major transformation of the food system is required, which is focused on the production and consumption of healthy and sustainable food. Change will need to be facilitated through a number of means, both direct and indirect. The Sus-Health project will establish and demonstrate a blueprint of a system that incentivises both directly and indirectly the consumption of sustainable and healthy food. The project will demonstrate to stakeholders how the use of a codesigned, combined measure of environmental impact and nutritive value (the Sus-Health Index) of foods, meals and ingredients can be used to influence the future direction of our food system and the stakeholders within it. Sus-Health will co-create a systemic strategy and innovative solution for influencing food choices and consumption, so that they better align with planetary boundaries and nutritional guidelines. The resulting consumer preferences (obtained through living lab experiments and through simulation) will feed back down the entire food chain driving the processes and raw materials used, towards more sustainable and health-inducing foods and diets. Comprising two academic partners and a range of stakeholder involvement Sus-Health will demonstrate a range of stakeholder focused communication vehicles, in a range of interventions in Northern Ireland followed by upscaling activities in the rest of the UK. The consortium comprises a mix of academic, and food industry partners with expertise in consumer behaviour, sustainability, nutrition, agri-economics, software design, agriculture, food service, and food systems. Key outputs of the project will be: - The develpment, validation and demonstration of the use and applicability of a combined measure for assessing sustainability and nutritive value in real settings (restaurants, fast food outlets, canteens and related supply chains) - A range of communication tools and approaches aimed at influencing change in consumer food choices - Interventions focused on food affordability including economic assessments of direct policy interventions that would make healthy sustainable food more affordable. - Stakeholder guidelines for using the Sus-Health index and related communication tools together with extensive stakeholder focused communication and dissemination activities