The impacts of recent catastrophic disasters, including the 2013-14 UK winter flooding, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Hurricane Sandy, reach well beyond the immediate, direct structural, environmental and health risks. In a complex system, a localised initial failure may quickly spread to other systems and create "hyper-risks" or "networked risks" through "networks of networks", and cause unpredictable failures in other economic or social networks. Classical quantitative and qualitative risk management frameworks are inadequate for emerging and unforeseen threats. More specifically they cannot handle the uncertainties of low-probability and high-consequence events and of their impacts on environmental, economical and social systems due to high interdependencies between complex systems. This project will develop a shared, multi-disciplinary vision of how to build resilience into networked risk management for highly complex engineered systems. It will address the challenges encompassed in understanding of complex interdependencies, cascade effects, tipping points of engineered systems. It is expected that this project will engage the community to develop a double helix framework that integrates risk and resilience analysis for complex systems management. We will organise a series of managed events, such as workshops, sandpits, study groups, which will help frame research questions, develop collaborative projects and disseminate outcomes. We will provide resources for feasibility studies and a number of mechanisms to promote research that focuses on developing novel modelling tools and adaptive frameworks to understand the interdependencies of complex systems and enhance overall system resilience.

The first phase of the SUE Programme has focused necessarily on the present, assessing current solutions and their application in the near future, thus providing a strong empirical base on which to build. There now exist both the need and a sufficient body of work to extrapolate the findings to establish and test alternative urban futures: to create a variety of scenarios, building on prior and new work, and predicated on different fundamental assumptions and priorities; to assess those scenarios in terms of design, engineering implementation and measurement of performance; to refine them, in terms of mitigation and adaptation measures, incorporating novel solutions; and ultimately to provide alternative solutions with an associated evidence base and strategies for their implementation. This bid seeks to integrate the outputs of three current SUE consortia (Birmingham Eastside, VivaCity 2020 and WaND) and complementary research on the use of trees to mitigate the effects of atmospheric pollution. The team will work across disciplines to envision and establish alternative futures (using extensive literature on this subject and prior WaND consortium work) and construct scenarios that might flow from each alternative future. The various work packages will then focus on testing specific dimensions of each alternative future vis a vis their design, implementation and performance in the context of case history sites. Each project will engage an expert panel of influential stakeholders who will meet six-monthly to test and help shape new ideas, the chairs of each of the expert panels forming the higher level project steering committee. Panel consultation will be followed by interviews of stakeholders on motivations and the decision-making process, and specific empirical research and modelling. The following high level questions will be addressed via this process: - How does the ab initio conceptualization of sustainability influence design outcomes (e.g. form, density)? How would outcomes change if urban renewal were predicated on either environmental or social or economic overriding drivers? - How does development impact on its environs, and vice versa (e.g. is a 'sustainable' site good for the city / region / country and, if so, in what ways?) and is there an optimum development size to yield optimally sustainable outcomes? - Push versus pull to achieve sustainable outcomes. Much of what is done is thought good (for individuals, society, the environment), what might be wanted (push). Thus decisions are made and people must decide whether or not to take ownership. Might more sustainable outcomes follow if those who must take ownership dictate what is created (pull)? Birmingham Eastside will be used both to develop sustainability ideas and to test them on sites at various stages of planning and development (the research team has unparalleled access via its partnerships with key stakeholders involved in Eastside). Lancaster (with Morecambe, population 96k) and Worcester (94k) will be used to test the outcomes at the scale of smaller urban areas (e.g. market towns) but no attempt will be made to build comprehensive databases as at Eastside. Several other UK and international urban areas (including Sao Paulo, Singapore and an urban area in India) will be used to test a sub-set of the project's findings to assess the transferability of the scenarios to a variety of contexts and thus their general applicability.