European cities face a pressing challenge - how can they provide economic prosperity and social cohesion while achieving environmental sustainability? In response, new 'living labs'- sites devised to design, test and learn from social and technical innovation in real time - are being formed. Individual cases have been studied, but limited work has been done to understand how they work across different national contexts and how we can scale-up their impact or share lessons across European cities. This project brings together leading European research partners and practitioners to investigate urban living labs and enhance their potential for contributing to sustainability transitions.

We have found that soils in cities are more effective sinks for carbon than agricultural soils. Urban soils typically carry a burden of fine-grained materials derived from often a long history of demolition. These materials include cement dust, which contains calcium silicate minerals, and also lime (calcium hydroxide). What we have found is that calcium derived from these minerals combines rapidly with carbonate in solution, which ultimately is derived from two sources - plants or rainwater. The rate at which this process occurs is extremely rapid, typically 100 T CO2 are removed from the atmosphere for each hectare of ground monthly; that's in a patch of ground the size of a football pitch. The amounts of carbon stored in urban soils as a consequence of this process are around 300 T C per hectare (compared with 175 T C per hectare in agricultural soils), and this is achieved rapidly after demolition (within very few years). We want to make sure that construction activity takes advantage of these findings, to help compensate for the CO2 emissions that arise from burning fossil fuels, and to contribute to the UK's ambitious targets for reducing our emissions. The potential is there - if engineered soils are strategically and systematically designed to have a carbon capture function we believe that around 10% of the UK's 2011 CO2 emissions could be captured in this way, as part of normal construction activity. The costs involved are far less than energy and capital intensive CO2 scrubbing systems that are fixed to specific plant, such as a power station. What's more, the design involves a range of ecosystem services and involves broadening the concept of 'Carbon Capture Gardens', which we have found to be very acceptable among a wide range of stakeholders, as pleasant spaces are created that communities can enjoy and engage with. The proposed research is intended to address some significant questions: 1) Can we reproduce the soil carbonation process artificially, so we can be sure of the carbon capture value? 2) How can we validate the process, so that claims of carbon sequestration can be trusted? 3) Is the process genuinely worth doing, in the context of UK and global CO2 emissions reduction targets? 4) What effect does the process have on soils, especially their strength and ability to drain rainwater, thus preventing flooding? 5) What effect does this approach have on plant and animal communities? Will the plants that we want grow in ground that has been treated to optimize carbon capture? 6) How does this process fit in with existing regulations that affect brownfield sites? 7) Under what circumstances is the process economically viable, given the geographical controls on availability of materials? 8) Can individuals use this approach in their own gardens? During the project, we will work with a wide range of stakeholders, from industry, local authorities and environmental groups as well as academics. We will engage students in monitoring work as part of the dissemination process. All the work will be openly published in appropriate forms, and we expect to build a growing community network associated with the project.

Our national infrastructure - the systems of infrastructure networks (e.g. energy, water, transport, waste, ICT) that support services such as healthcare, education, emergency response and thereby ensure our social, economic and environmental wellbeing - faces a multitude of challenges. A growing population, modern economy and proliferation of new technologies have placed increased and new demands on infrastructure services and made infrastructure networks increasingly inter-connected. Meanwhile, investment has not kept up with the pace of change leaving many components at the end of their life. Moreover, global environmental change necessitates reduced greenhouse gas emissions and improved resilience to extreme events, implying major reconfigurations of these infrastructure systems. Addressing these challenges is further complicated by fragmented, often reactive, regulation and governance arrangements. Existing business models are considered by the Treasury Select Committee to provide poor value but few proven alternative models exist for mobilising finance, particularly in the current economic climate. Continued delivery of our civil infrastructure, particularly given current financial constraints, will require innovative and integrated thinking across engineering, economic and social sciences. If the process of addressing these issues is to take place efficiently, whilst also minimising associated risks, it will need to be underpinned by an appropriate multi-disciplinary approach that brings together engineering, economic and social science expertise to understand infrastructure financing, valuation and interdependencies under a range of possible futures. The evidence that must form the basis for such a strategic approach does not yet exist. However, evidence alone will be insufficient, so we therefore propose to establish a Centre of excellence, i-BUILD, that will bring together three UK universities with world-leading track records in engineering, economics and social sciences; a portfolio of pioneering inter-disciplinary research; and the research vision and capacity to deliver a multi-disciplinary analysis of innovative business models around infrastructure interdependencies. While national scale plans, projects and procedures set the wider agenda, it is at the scale of neighbourhoods, towns and cities that infrastructure is most dense and interdependencies between infrastructures, economies and society are most profound - this is where our bid is focussed. Balancing growth across regions and scales is crucial to the success of the national economy. Moreover, the localism agenda is encouraging local agents to develop new infrastructure related business but these are limited by the lack of robust new business models with which to do so at the local and urban scale. These new business models can only arise from a step change in the cost-benefit ratio for infrastructure delivery which we will achieve by: (i) reducing the costs of infrastructure delivery by understanding interdependencies and alternative finance models, (ii) improving valuation of infrastructure benefits by identifying and exploiting the social, environmental and economic opportunities, and, (iii) reconciling national and local priorities. The i-BUILD centre will deliver these advances through development of a new generation of value analysis tools, interdependency models and multi-scale implementation plans. These methods will be tested on integrative case studies that are co-created with an extensive stakeholder group, to provide demonstrations of new methods that will enable a revolution in the business of infrastructure delivery in the UK. Funding for a Centre provides the opportunity to work flexibly with partners in industry, local and national government to address a research challenge of national and international importance, whilst becoming an international landmark programme recognised for novelty, research excellence and impact.