There is a proven evidence base for the benefits of both walking and art on physical health and mental wellbeing. Our project addresses the lacuna between the arts and those working to promote walking well in the wider community. Walking organisations need rapidly to find new ways to support their members during social restrictions, and to diversify membership to support more people to walk well in and beyond a pandemic. COVID-19 poses an unprecedented challenge to cultural organisations with the need to rethink practices due to physical distancing. Responses to lockdown have created the opportunity to understand how creative walking activities have been and could be used to mitigate isolation and anxiety, maintain health and wellbeing, enhance social connectivity, and facilitate cultural empowerment. This project will deliver a significant contribution to the understanding of, and response to, the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts, generate new data about a key activity, and innovate arts resources for rapid implementation to support health, wellbeing, resilience and cultural participation. Collaborating with partner organisations, artists, cultural workers, and residents, the project will capture: a) the walking experiences and creative interventions of people during COVID-19 restrictions. b) the 'lockdown' work of artists using walking activity within conditions of restriction. c) the potential of the arts to sustain, encourage and more equitably support walking during and recovering from a pandemic. Key deliverables include: i) a new data set and report on walking experiences and creative approaches to walking well and safely ii) a curated digital gallery of creative walking models, open-access Walking Toolkits and piloted prototypes iii) a Cultural Walking Summit iv) three peer-reviewed articles v) a new cross-sectoral partnership.

GALLANT's vision is to develop whole-systems solutions for a just and sustainable transition delivered at the city scale. Corporate and political leaders are committing to carbon neutrality locally and globally, often without detailed strategies in place or coordination. This will likely lead to delays and suboptimal outcomes when we need rapid, impactful transformation. Cities are increasingly seen as drivers of a carbon neutral future (e.g., Carbon Neutral City Alliance) because through shared policy and knowledge exchange it is possible for successful action in one city to be adopted by others, creating scalable and rapid change. Glasgow is a model city to lead innovation because it has the UK's most ambitious carbon neutrality target of 2030; has challenging social and environmental inequities that will need to co-benefit from proposed solutions; and is due to host COP26 in 2021. Making meaningful, lasting change requires a commitment to the environment that embeds sustainability across major policy decisions and empowers communities as stewards of their local places. In GALLANT, we seek to work with local partners and communities to transform the city into a thriving place for people and nature. Our overarching goal is to implement a systems-based science approach to solve five environmental problems that will accelerate Glasgow's ability to adapt to and manage climate change. The approach integrates natural science and social science disciplines, putting data at the heart of decision-making. We will create the Glasgow Living Lab, delivering a framework that will be readily deployable to solve emerging environmental problems that show how academic, public and private sectors can act together to make progress. The five environmental solutions that we have prioritised with Glasgow City Council are: 1. Working to transform urban river-edge land-use governance to create functional floodplains and new accessible green spaces for community use. 2. Working to deliver biodiversity benefits from green infrastructure throughout Glasgow, restoring and connecting habitats using nature-based solutions, and matching ecosystem service demand with provision. 3. Working to turn vacant, derelict, and polluted land into spaces for carbon sequestration and pollution remediation that can be returned to communities in line with local needs. 4. Working to make the most of current and planned infrastructure by understanding community perceptions of active and safe travel, use these to increase inclusive urban active travel and mobility improving air quality and reducing CO2 emissions . 5. Working to maximise the value of Glasgow green-blue-grey spaces as a Smart Local Energy System that bring heat to some of the most deprived areas of Glasgow.

There is strong evidence that natural environments within urban areas, such as parks, woodlands, lakes and beaches, have positive impacts on health. These urban green and blue spaces (UGBS) could be huge assets for protecting and equalising health if they were available, accessible, valued and well-used, particularly by less advantaged groups. The problem is that they are not. This is largely because the many policies, organisations and communities involved in designing, creating, managing, promoting, maintaining and using UGBS are disconnected. Also, the voices of less advantaged communities that UGBS could be helping most are either not heard or not persuasive. Perhaps as a consequence, those communities are much less likely to benefit from these spaces. We know that the UGBS we have are not the UGBS we need to make the best possible contribution to better and more equal health. GroundsWell aims to change that. We propose a new partnership - researchers working together with communities and those who currently create and control UGBS, to plan, design and manage it better so that it benefits everyone, especially those who need it most. The main research will take place in three cities - Belfast, Edinburgh and Liverpool. These have sufficient similarities (such as large and diverse low-income communities) but also distinct features (such as geography and culture) making them, collectively, an ideal laboratory. Each city already has policies and programmes in place to improve UGBS, but there is much room for improvement. GroundsWell will take a systems approach. This means understanding the multiple and interconnecting components of policy-making, practice, perception and people which together affect the presence, location, character and use of UGBS. It also means working to transform the system so that the components function together. To do this, GroundsWell will mix co-development of new theoretical frameworks, novel data science including simulation, health economics and policy analysis, but at its heart will be community engagement and partnership. We will develop and use meaningful community engagement, co-production and citizen science to understand the system, identify how and where it is broken, and co-create solutions. We anticipate interventions aimed at how the UGBS system operates, and small-scale interventions around actual spaces and their use. Data play an important part in understanding systems. GroundsWell will develop an accessible, trustworthy and policy-relevant system to collate, collect, house and share data on UGBS across the three cities. These data will be used to help the whole Consortium understand the UGBS there, identify possible interventions, and then assess whether they work, for whom and why, creating feedback loops to help us continually monitor, learn and adapt what we do. Novel simulation approaches will also be used to suggest interventions, and in particular what could be effective beyond the three cities. Health economics will suggest what would be best value for money. An important part of putting actions and solutions in place is understanding if they work (or not). Evaluation of our actions and the Consortium as a whole will be undertaken in partnership with our communities, drawing on the new data system we establish, and enabling them to directly see whether and how the process has benefited them. In particular, we will assess and share our impacts on health inequalities. We are realistic about the likely scale of our impacts. Small actions within existing UGBS and local communities are unlikely to affect population level health and inequalities within our funded period. That is why we are going to focus on improving the UGBS system as a whole, laying foundations for long-term benefits. We know that the use and enjoyment of UGBS is something that adults pass on to their children. If GroundsWell can improve and equalise the role of UGBS, it will achieve a lasting impact.