The Troubles describes the social-historical phenomenon occurring between 1969 and 1994 when the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland was at its most extreme. Those 25 years have had a profound impact on the social, political, economic, cultural and spatial structures of Northern Ireland ever since. The consequent reaction by government, security and statutory authorities bore witness to a profound material impact upon inner-city communities resulting in architectural and spatial disconnection and disengagement with the economic and social structures that manage, govern and regulate the built environment. This review focuses on a specific aspect of material impact, the built structures installed within the inner-city to divide streets, disconnect spatial continuity, mitigate against vehicular flow and limit pedestrian movement. These vary in implementation and include walls, bollards, landscaping and the locating of housing across the path of existing streets. This material impact is extensive across inner-city Belfast. Whilst the sociological and economic impact of The Troubles has received much research attention the impact of these built interventions has yet to be systematically assessed. This review recognises the inner-city exemplar of Ballymacarrett, East Belfast as a community of disconnected people and disconnected spaces. The considered implementation of these divisive built structures has served to fundamentally fragment and spatially disconnect this community. This review conceives of a community as an intrinsic ecosystem of people and the built environment and addresses the challenging issue of engaging a disenfranchised and disconnected community with a broad range of stakeholders and academic research. The review process is a catalyst for inclusive discussion that involves a team of project partner stakeholders, directly linking the review process with the agencies with the remit and funding to implement urban regeneration and social housing policy review and change. The aims of this review are to utilise knowledge gained from academic and practice-based research methods to inform and stimulate discussion amongst key stakeholders with active inclusion from policy makers and the community. Such discussion has the stated aim of developing a policy discussion mechanism that will continue to progress the issues highlighted by the review beyond the review period. These aims meet address the objective of engaging research with non-academic stakeholders; empowering the related community; developing a methodological framework that is transferable to other contexts. The creation of buildings and spaces is a complex scenario involving stakeholders across the social, political and economic spectrum. As a consequence built artefacts contain much embedded information pertaining to a wide variety of perspectives that concern, and have potential to engage, the community within which they are installed. The research team of an architect and a fine art photographer presents a cross disciplinary approach to analysing this context. The disciplines have been aligned to provide a historical record that is accessible to a diverse audience of community, policy, politics and academia. Architectural and spatial analysis will identify Case Studies of built structures that will be documented and illustrated through conceptual photographic representation. Built structures will be utilised as mechanisms to extract data of historical and contemporary importance, eliciting new knowledge. Disconnections will be highlighted and former connections illuminated. The key relationships that are revealed will be essential tools towards addressing the very real architectural and spatial issues within inner-city Belfast communities. Such analysis will present a new perspective to the social, political, economic, cultural and spatial factors that shaped physical change in this community in a distinct and extreme period in cultural history.

Community consultation is important for ensuring that we get a built environment that is fit for purpose and could be an opportunity for serious dialogue with the community about how best to make places for everybody, rather than the perfunctory and excluding affair it often is now. There is to date little consensus on how best to gather community responses to planning proposals to feed into the design and development of successful (high social, environmental and economic value) places. Ultimately community consultation has largely untapped potential for learning how the design of buildings and places can be done better, particularly important in the Climate Emergency and for 'building back better' in the aftermath of the pandemic. Although the focus of the project is on the UK, the problems are global and the outcomes scalable. In some parts of the country community consultation ceased during the pandemic, with decision making being delegated to pressurised Planning Officers who may not always have the interests of the community at heart. An imminent government review of planning in England is seeking to make the system more streamline. This could jeopardise community consultation which is known for being difficult and slow. A robust, inclusive, value for money format (digital and physical) for gathering data on what communities want from their buildings and places in the long term is urgently needed. To create such a platform is the aim of CCQoL. Led by the University of Reading, with Co-Investigators in all four countries of the UK, CCQoL is a collaboration with the Quality of Life Foundation, the community consultation platform Commonplace, inclusive consultation experts Urban Symbiotics and the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CACHE). It is supported by a wide range of policy and industry organisations including the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), Civic Voice and the British Property Federation. Following a review of best practice in community consultation, user experiences (face to face and digital) will be designed for piloting on real planning applications in each of the four countries of the UK. Consultations will take place in an 'urban room', a community space, disused shop or pop up in the city with parallel, but interconnected, consultations on line. Community members will be asked to contribute to the making of maps to show what they value in the area and to anticipate the potential impacts of the planning proposal. A variety of experimental formats will be used to make the consultation as engaging as possible. Locally based Community Partnership Managers will be employed to encourage inclusive participation. The platforms will be refined based on learning from the pilots. The main output will be a digital format for community consultation. This will link to the CCQoL platform, a series of digital maps which will offer a standardised format for gathering data on what communities want on an ongoing basis, scalable for use elsewhere with potential applications for other spheres of decision making. The Quality of Life Foundation and Commonplace will be responsible for the further development of the platform beyond the life of the project. Guidance for delivering face to face consultation on the ground will also be developed, as well as a series of reports on community consultation for each of the four UK planning contexts. This pragmatic project will be underpinned by robust academic research published through a series of refereed journal papers. A generation has grown up designing virtual environments in games such as Sim City. CCQoL will provide the next step towards a digitally generated and constructed, co-created built environment. The foundations of such a future need to be designed with great care to ensure that it fulfils its positive potential.

The UK is committed to a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% before 2050. With over 40% of fossil fuels used for low temperature heating and 16% of electricity used for cooling these are key areas that must be addressed. The vision of our interdisciplinary centre is to develop a portfolio of technologies that will deliver heat and cold cost-effectively and with such high efficiency as to enable the target to be met, and to create well planned and robust Business, Infrastructure and Technology Roadmaps to implementation. Features of our approach to meeting the challenge are: a) Integration of economic, behavioural, policy and capability/skills factors together with the science/technology research to produce solutions that are technically excellent, compatible with and appealing to business, end-users, manufacturers and installers. b) Managing our research efforts in Delivery Temperature Work Packages (DTWPs) (freezing/cooling, space heating, process heat) so that exemplar study solutions will be applicable in more than one sector (e.g. Commercial/Residential, Commercial/Industrial). c) The sub-tasks (projects) of the DTWPs will be assigned to distinct phases: 1st Wave technologies or products will become operational in a 5-10 year timescale, 2nd Wave ideas and concepts for application in the longer term and an important part of the 2050 energy landscape. 1st Wave projects will lead to a demonstration or field trial with an end user and 2nd Wave projects will lead to a proof-of-concept (PoC) assessment. d) Being market and emission-target driven, research will focus on needs and high volume markets that offer large emission reduction potential to maximise impact. Phase 1 (near term) activities must promise high impact in terms of CO2 emissions reduction and technologies that have short turnaround times/high rates of churn will be prioritised. e) A major dissemination network that engages with core industry stakeholders, end users, contractors and SMEs in regular workshops and also works towards a Skills Capability Development Programme to identify the new skills needed by the installers and operators of the future. The SIRACH (Sustainable Innovation in Refrigeration Air Conditioning and Heating) Network will operate at national and international levels to maximise impact and findings will be included in teaching material aimed at the development of tomorrow's engineering professionals. f) To allow the balance and timing of projects to evolve as results are delivered/analysed and to maximise overall value for money and impact of the centre only 50% of requested resources are earmarked in advance. g) Each DTWP will generally involve the complete multidisciplinary team in screening different solutions, then pursuing one or two chosen options to realisation and test. Our consortium brings together four partners: Warwick, Loughborough, Ulster and London South Bank Universities with proven track records in electric and gas heat pumps, refrigeration technology, heat storage as well as policy / regulation, end-user behaviour and business modelling. Industrial, commercial, NGO and regulatory resources and advice will come from major stakeholders such as DECC, Energy Technologies Institute, National Grid, British Gas, Asda, Co-operative Group, Hewlett Packard, Institute of Refrigeration, Northern Ireland Housing Executive. An Advisory Board with representatives from Industry, Government, Commerce, and Energy Providers as well as international representation from centres of excellence in Germany, Italy and Australia will provide guidance. Collaboration (staff/student exchange, sharing of results etc.) with government-funded thermal energy centres in Germany (at Fraunhofer ISE), Italy (PoliMi, Milan) and Australia (CSIRO) clearly demonstrate the international relevance and importance of the topic and will enhance the effectiveness of the international effort to combat climate change.

The Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) will be an independent, multi-disciplinary and multi-sector consortium of academic and non-academic stakeholders. CaCHE will be UK-wide in coverage (across all four nations and at different spatial scales within), as well as UK-level in focus. It will advance knowledge and improve the evidence base for both housing policy and practice in all parts of the U.K. CaCHE will be organised as a "hub and spoke" network with its administrative core in Glasgow and a physical presence in all 5 sub-national knowledge exchange hubs in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales & the South West, the North & Midlands, and London, East & South East. Additionally, our six research themes will cross cut the different geographies depending on relevancy and appropriateness. The management team will be responsible for overall strategy, operational delivery, co-ordination, data navigation, research and KE. The management team of three academics (Gibb, Watkins and Orford) will be supplemented by a senior non-academic lead on knowledge exchange and communications (Smart), plus a full time programme manager, KE and communications, administrative and technical support staff. The evidence centre and its management team will be accountable to a funders group and an international advisory board. The main consortium members are the Universities of Glasgow, Sheffield, Bristol, Cardiff, Ulster, Reading, Sheffield Hallam, St. Andrews and Heriot-Watt, along with the National Institute of Social and Economic Research, CIH, RICS and the RTPI. The consortium has a lengthy list of institutional and individual collaborators at regional and national level and our activity will be supported 'in kind' and direct contributions from additional partners including Crisis, the Wheatley Group, NatCen, Shelter, Rightmove and several more. Our consortium also has specific project plans with four complementary ESRC investments: Urban Big Data Centre, What Works Scotland, Public Policy Institute for Wales, and the ADRC-Scotland, and will seek to collaborate with others including the What Works Centre for Wellbeing. Initially, a five year programme, CaCHE will seek to become self-financing sustained beyond this period. It will do so by regular scanning of opportunities with partners, and by also being impactful and influential through a combination of rigorous evidencing, prioritised across six research themes, which in turn will generate a new primary research agenda to be prosecuted by the evidence centre. A key way in which relevance and credibility will be sustained is through the comprehensive nature and persistence of our knowledge exchange and collaborative working with non-academic stakeholders. We will repeatedly utilise an innovative collaborative working practice - the Tobin Project Process - in order to build a consensus through rigorous and intensive examination of the key questions and priorities exercising non-academic partners and our stakeholders nationally and in each region. In this way, we will co-produce our evidence review and research strategy priorities and will fully engage, mobilise and disseminate findings with academic and particularly non-academic groups through our network of networks (i.e. drawing on existing networks of contacts via our non-academic and academic partners). CaCHE will promote and support interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work and invest in knowledge exchange training for staff to maximise the impact of our multiple dissemination channels: non-technical briefing, summaries, academic and trade publications, targeted technical reports, high standard non technical international evidence review, blog posts, tweets, audio and visual pod casts, roadshows, seminars, conferences, workshops and media contributions. The evidence centre will support an extensive programme of staff secondments, promoting mobility between the academy and the policy and practice communi