Mobility, wellbeing and the built environment: Wellbeing in later life is linked to the maintenance of independence, physical mobility itself and the sense of being able to get about. Mobility is vital for accessing services, resources and facilities, for social participation, and for avoiding loneliness. Thus mobility has been described more broadly as 'engagement with the world'. The design of the built environment has a key role to play in enabling - or frustrating - mobility. Thus appropriate design or redesign of the built environment can expand horizons and support wellbeing. However, this project focuses on complements or alternatives to physical design or redesign of the built environment. Design and adaptation are time and resource intensive. Many well-understood mobility barriers remain in place because of budget constraints. Design of the built environment is just one the determinants of mobility and wellbeing. Any one environment cannot meet all needs at once, and needs can vary even for an individual, as people pass through key physical and social transitions which may alter mobility and wellbeing. Based on participatory research, this project aims to create a suite of options and tools which may be able to meet contrasting needs, support mobility and wellbeing, and do so more quickly and affordably than adapting the built environment. The research aims to: 1) Explore mobility and wellbeing for older people going through critical but common life transitions; 2) Investigate and address variation and contradictions in needs of different groups of older people (and even for single individuals over time), and between different built environment agendas; and 3) To co-create practical tools which can act as complements or alternatives to redesign of the built environment. After a foundation stage the work will commence with interviews with national experts and stakeholders. We will select three contrasting local areas in which to base the rest of the research, and interview c15 local stakeholders in each area. We will then start a pioneering quarterly tracking study of mobility and wellbeing, working with c120 older people in the three sites who are experiencing critical but common life transitions such as losing a driving license, losing a partner, or becoming a carer. These transitions are often seen as key points for deterioration in mobility and wellbeing, and as key points for support and intervention. We will then work with a series of small groups of older people in workshops and co-design sessions, to explore the potential for interventions as alternatives and complements to promoting mobility and wellbeing via redesign. Each will involve a series of day-long meetings between researchers and older people, over about a year. One set of workshops will explore how well 'crowdsourcing' and Participatory Geographical Information Systems can add to and collate information about mobility wants and needs and barriers. Another will involve older people with varying interests in relation to the built environment, to explore conflicts and the potential for consensus on some issues. There will be co-design workshops with older people to explore mobile technologies based on SmartPhones, to help people avoid key blockages to mobility in particular areas. Other workshops will work with mobility scooter users, and manufacturers and those whose mobility may be threatened by scooters, to explore the feasibility of adapting scooters to reduce problems. The impact of participation itself will be tracked. Project outputs will include: a project website, accessible annual interim and summative reports to project stakeholders and others, a summative report, articles for academic journals across team member disciplines, trade press articles for relevant professionals, potentially video or new media, a local stakeholder and older person conference and national 'Roadshow', as well as other dissemination events.

Our Phase 1 project, Accelerating York's Net Zero Transition identified significant non-technical barriers to consumer acceptance and uptake of retrofit and low carbon technologies. This proposal directly builds on those findings, by combining innovative approaches to place-based engagement, digital tools and data systems, tailored training and advice bespoke financing solutions, demonstrator homes and dissemination into a single end-to-end Retrofit-One-Stop-Shop for York. The project brings together partners specialising in each element of delivery into a collaboration that will greatly accelerate the development of an area based Retrofit-One-Stop-Shop, improving the householder experience of retrofit and contributing to better energy efficiency standards of all building archetypes across the city. Homes will be warmer and cheaper to heat with complimentary technologies to maximise energy efficiency and mobility options. The project directly benefits our community with financial savings and health and wellbeing benefits. It also supports growth in the local low carbon supply chain, generating opportunities for new investment and job creation. The One-Stop-Shop service will be available to all residents and tenure types, but specifically support vulnerable and disadvantaged groups by addressing issues with fuel poverty and homes that are unsafe due to cold, drafts and damp. The scheme will be supporting the ambitions of the York Climate Change Strategy, Health and Wellbeing Strategy and Economic Development Strategy, as well as contributing to regional and national targets for net zero. It will provide a replicable and scalable model for expansion into other areas of UK, offering the One-Stop-Shop-In-a-Box Toolkit, drastically reducing the time and cost associated with other area-based One-Stop-Shops.

Summary In a time of austerity and low economic growth the challenges faced by low-waged workers in earning enough to support themselves and their families to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living are immense. Identifying effective and sustainable pathways out of in-work poverty for these workers holds significant benefit for the workers, their families and the state. However for employers facing increasing expectations to view their employees' wage through a lens of social responsibility rather than purely productivity or market comparison, this can amount to another significant cost pressure, to be set against a general background of competing wage demands throughout the organisation's workforce. Understanding how effective different anti-poverty measures actually are for workers, and how sustainable they are as long-term measures to be engaged with by employers, is therefore crucial to the in-work poverty policy debate. A debate that is increasingly urgent as recent UK figures show in-work poverty to be currently outstripping that of poverty in workless households. This project provides a unique and valuable opportunity for a team of social scientists from the University of York and three important employers from the York labour market to work together on an applied research project that will help employers identify the likely effectiveness and sustainability of current measures being employed to reduce in-work poverty within their organisations. The project partners are the City of York Council (CYC), Joseph Rowntree Foundation/Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust (JRF/JRHT) and York St John University (YSJU). The research project and knowledge exchange will focus on one specific geographical labour market, York. However the challenges currently being faced by these three employers are not York specific. Therefore the investigation and development of effective and sustainable strategies to deal with in-work poverty within these three project partner organisations will have much relevance to many more employers (and workers) across the UK. To investigate which are the most effective and sustainable policies to reduce in-work poverty the project will undertake: 1. an employer and worker level analysis of the effects of the adoption of a living wage policy within the organisation and issues relating to the sustainability of the living wage commitment. Research which will not only be supporting CYC, JRF/JRHT and YSJU in their own organisation's adoption and sustainable embedding of the living wage policy but it will also provide an important evaluation of a wage policy considered to be a cornerstone of any anti-poverty employer stance, an evaluation which will have potential value to many more organisations in the UK. 2. an assessment of the constraints and challenges currently being faced by workers from the three project partner workforces will be undertaken through the design and collection of two surveys; the first will be a survey of a sample of workers (about 500 workers) earning below a particular wage rate at the three partner organisations. The second will be a survey that follows-up a sample of workers (about 40 workers) who responded to the first survey and were found to be experiencing or at risk of in-work poverty. Both surveys will allow an assessment of how effective current anti-poverty policies engaged with by the employers actually are for the workers. 3. an analysis using national and regional data on wage distributions, wage growth, and in-work poverty over time to provide a framing or background to the discussion of which are the most effective and sustainable pathways out of in-work poverty. This analysis will help to generalise the project findings beyond the York labour market and set the experiences of the project partners' York based employees into a national context.

This project will create an interdisciplinary network of scholars and heritage professionals who share interests in Britain and Ireland's two greatest Viking towns; York and Dublin. It will foster and enhance interdisciplinary, international collaborative research, heritage management practice, public outreach and creative enterprise. Since the 1970s, a new appreciation of the role of towns, urbanisation and trade has transformed our understanding of the Viking Age from Scandinavia to Russia, as well as in Britain and Ireland. Although international trading and manufacturing sites played crucially important economic, political and social roles, they were also relatively rare - no more than a dozen are known from across the Viking world. In this context, Dublin and York - by far the best documented and best excavated urban centres in the Viking West - are of exceptional international importance. Contemporary sources are relatively well-studied, and half a century of urban excavations has produced exceptional evidence. The towns constitute vital resources for archaeologists and heritage professionals alike, but with some exceptions, communication and collaboration between specialists and practitioners, and between the two modern cities, has been limited. This lack of communication between contemporary professionals is particularly significant because the political relationship between Viking York and Dublin was once very close: they shared a ruling dynasty, the 'grandsons of Ivarr', for a significant period in the 9th and 10th centuries. However, the impact of this political link on the social and economic development of the two towns is under-researched and largely unrecognised by the public. Our understanding of life in Viking-Age York and Dublin has been transformed by archaeological research, but this has developed in subtly different ways in each city, and has not always informed discussions of broader historical narratives. New scientific methods and interpretative models offer huge potential for future research, and new systems of data management and public outreach offer both challenges and opportunities. Our network will bring together academics, field archaeologists, artefact specialists, heritage professionals, and public historians and archaeologists to explore the relationship between the two towns in this seminal period, comparing and contrasting the relationships between the living cities and their Viking heritage. How close - or different - is the evidence they have produced? How can new research techniques inform our understanding of systems of trade, manufacturing and economy? Does this transform long-standing models of the cities' development? Can the research and management experiences of each city inform best practice? Can the cities benefit from shared approaches to new digital technologies? And how can new discoveries best be communicated to the general public? Our workshops will provide a forum to plan future activity, and an authentic platform for meaningful public engagement. Our key aims are to re-examine the evidence in detail, to situate this evidence in its broader context, and to consider the potential for future collaboration. To this end, we will organise three workshops. The first, 'New Evidence' (York Spring 2021) will provide a forum for new research; the second 'New Approaches (Dublin Autumn 2021) will challenge existing models of urban development; and the third, 'New Engagements' (Dublin Spring 2022) will examine the relationship between the modern cities and their Viking past. A strategy document will be produced, and the results will be disseminated in a range of media. By stimulating discussion between key stakeholders and knowledge-makers, this project will reinvigorate the study of both Viking towns, draw fresh attention to the connections between them, reengage with debates on Viking-Age urbanism, and lay the groundwork for future research and outreach.

The digital games market is an enormous and fast-growing industry with extraordinary impact, particularly on young people and increasingly on other segments of the population. The importance of the UK games industry (3rd largest in the world) was underlined in the Chancellor's Autumn statement (5th December 2012), which confirmed substantial tax reliefs for the digital games industry, saying that "the Government will ensure that the reliefs are among the most generous in the world". Enthusiasm for digital games is underlined by a 2012 Forbes magazine article suggesting that, by the age of 21, the typical child has played 10,000 hours of digital games. How can we harness widespread enthusiasm for digital games to contribute to advances in society and science in addition to economic impacts? For example, we can test economic theories by analysing the artificial economies in online games, or we can improve the motor skills of recovering stroke patients by using games based on motion detection devices such as the Wii controller, Kinect or simply the mobile phone. In this proposal we will bring the UK digital games industry closer to scientists and healthcare workers to unlock the potential for scientific and social benefits in digital games. The numbers of games sold and the numbers of game hours played mean that we only need to persuade a small fraction of the games industry to consider the potential for social and scientific benefit to achieve a massive benefit for society, and potentially to start a movement that will lead to mainstream distribution of games aimed at scientific and social benefits. In order to do this we need to understand the current state of the digital games industry, by engaging directly with games companies and with industry network associations like the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network. We have a group of 12 games companies and 9 network organisations, all of whom have pledged their support, to get us started. Then we need to build simulation models that will allow us to investigate what might happen in the future (e.g. if government policy were to encourage the development of games with scientific and social benefits). We need to conduct research into sustainable business models for digital games, and particularly for games with scientific and social goals. These will show us how businesses can start up and grow to develop a new generation of games with the potential to improve society. Every action in an online game, from an in-game purchase to a simple button push, generates a piece of network data. This is a truly immense source of information about player behaviours and preferences. We will explore what online data is available now and might become available in the future, investigate the issues around gathering such data, and develop new algorithms to "mine" that data to better understand game players as an avenue for making better games, societal impact and scientific research. It is an ambitious programme, but the potential benefits if we are even partially successful could have a huge impact on children, science and wider society.