Transition Design is an emerging framework that proposes collaborative design-led practices as a vehicle to create new narratives and approaches needed to address complex (wicked) problems and transitions towards more sustainable futures. It has been developed and used with Traditional Ecological Knowledge Systems (TEK) found in indigenous and local communities to re-design visions of their own development and systemic change. There is little evidence of its application in the context of displaced populations. Our interest is to explore how this framework can be used to create new, much needed, narratives about urban refugee management, to transform the narratives of assimilation; a shift from the focus of "what refugees lack" and towards "what refugees bring". War, political-economical conflicts, and environmental disasters are bringing into the present and near futures unprecedented, forced, displaced population crises. Refugees, asylum seekers, forced migrants and stateless populations are subjects of foreign policies, regarded as victims of external conflicts, vulnerable, passive agents, when on the contrary, these populations are becoming at home within the host country struggles. Their knowledge, affections, political agencies and self-supported activities, have huge potential to inform systemic-level change that can aid local and global solutions, responsive to societal and environmental issues. The notion of border becomes key here, not just as a geographical fact, but as socially produced and politically productive; not just marking territory but also imaginaries, affections, and identities. Borders maintain a sense of us and them, our world and theirs. Thus, the refugee crisis does not only refer to the tragedy of lives uprooted from their own places, but also to the destabilisation of the host country's sense of self. Understanding territories not just as a property, state, or resource, but as a site of affective natural-social encounters, defines 'the commons', as a space for re-visioning subjective relations and imaginaries of self and others. 'Commoning' extends placemaking, and is concerned with affective encounters between humans and non-humans, nurturing grounds for fostering what Donna Haraway terms 'response-ability' - the ability to respond ethically to the demands of others with whom we share worlds. We find examples of 'common' theorists and practitioners working in spheres such as knowledge commons, open-source software, urban gardens, and the reclamation of cities. Our interest is to understand and support the refugee sites as 'commons'. The network will explore how Transition Design brings about a much needed shift in which communities are not just in harmony with the environment but also with all of its members, within and across borders. Traditional design approaches that were characterised by linear processes, and whose objective was the realisation of predictable and profitable solutions, have a history not just of failing but actually exacerbating systemic and wicked problems. The transition to sustainable refugee futures calls for new ways of designing that are based upon new narratives and deep paradigm transformation.

As part of the government's response to COVID-19, 15,000 rough sleepers have now been offered self-contained temporary accommodation in England, mainly in hotels. This approach, which has involved the decanting of hostels, shelters and similar shared provision for rough sleepers, is a short-term response. When the lockdown ends, decisions will need to be taken about how to house former rough sleepers in line with the UK government's commitment to prevent people from going back to the streets - including, potentially, through the re-opening of shelter-type accommodation. Existing temporary accommodation with shared facilities might make it impossible for people to comply with government social distancing advice. So these decisions will impact on the risk of a second wave of infection from COVID-19 and possibly any mutations. This proposal outlines a unique time limited opportunity to conduct the first ever randomised controlled trial in the UK, to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of permanent housing on the risk of COVID-19 infection and housing stability for people experiencing homelessness. That many homeless people are currently waiting to be housed means they can be randomly allocated to different housing solutions at scale quickly. The insights drawn from the short-term impacts of permanent housing can be used to inform other local authorities' responses to the challenges of COVID-19 and the cost-effectiveness of accommodation alternatives more broadly.

Private mobility has a high carbon footprint due to the manufacturing, use, parking, and disposal of vehicles. Private cars spend 96% of their time idle and were responsible for 60.7% of total CO2 emissions from road transport. To reduce CO2 emissions, this research proposes the development of the mathematical tools needed to deliver a financially sustainable, car sharing service that nudges private car owners toward adopting shared car usage. This research will design new mathematical models that will allow optimal dynamic pricing of journeys over time and space; thus, will support shared mobility and net-zero goals. These models will combine queuing theory, stochastic dynamic programming, and simulation optimization. They will enable a more competitive pricing of journeys, a higher availability of shared cars, lower council subsidies, and reduced private car usage. They will constitute an exploratory phase of the larger scale aim of designing better demand models that support the financial sustainability of mobility as a service and investigate how these services may operate in (non-) urban contexts. They will be the prelude to the ambitious goal of designing a digital twin for car sharing systems. The increased awareness of climate change and the significant increase in fuel and living costs offer an opportunity to shift the behaviour of private car owners towards shared mobility, making this research timely and relevant. This research will determine key metrics, and a better rich understanding of the state of shared cars across the UK. Through the engagement with stakeholders, it will define the constraints, and differences imposed by rural and urban contexts. This will enhance the feasibility and implementation of proposed solutions, inspire and guide car sharing usage. It will design new mathematical models and numerical solution techniques for pricing using queuing theory and continuous time Markov chains, combined with optimization. An ambitious aim of this proposal is to experiment with frameworks for stochastic dynamic programming and their application to simple examples. A key part of the project will be simulating car share services under different scenarios; allowing us to assess the steady state versus transient behaviour of the optimal solutions of queuing models; and conduct what-if experiments to inform policy and investment scenarios, with the ultimate aim of reaching real-time simulation of services and building a digital twin framework. Finally, it will design a framework for real-time simulation and optimization of car sharing scenarios using a multi-fidelity optimization approach: a low-fidelity Markov chain model to identify a set of good solutions and a high-fidelity simulation model to refine the results. The model will find optimal pricing car-location strategies that maximize profits over a fixed time horizon. Combining these optimization techniques addresses the practical challenge and advances an exciting new interdisciplinary research area for shared cars. The algorithmic approach also has the potential to be adapted to electric and autonomous vehicles in the future. In summary, this project aims to lay the foundation for making car sharing more financially attractive to service providers by developing innovative mathematical models and simulation optimization methods that will allow its financial sustainability. This will offer direct societal benefits to the public and local authorities. If appropriately priced, it will reduce private car usage and local authorities' subsidies of the service. Thus, it will advance mathematical sciences and optimization techniques while it contributes to EPSRC's 4 economic growth and social prosperity outcomes and aligns with EPSRC's Digital Economy theme.

The idea behind this project is that the cartographic methods developed during the Monsoon Assemblages project (European Research Council Starting Grant no. 679873) provide a breakthrough innovation in the field of climate change visualisation. It proposes to offer competitive cartographic services to organisations seeking to better understand, communicate and act on the impacts of climate change in their contexts. As a way of testing this proposition, the project will undertake and evaluate four pilot cartographic projects with organisations from the public, private, not-for-profit and academic sectors. On the basis of these pilot projects and further market research, a business case will be made and an appropriate delivery vehicle for rolling out the innovation will be set up. By the end of the grant period, at least one contract will be signed in each sector for future work.

Progress towards sustainable development is gathering pace in the UK. Many government initiatives have been announced in recent years: the 2005 Sustainable Development Strategy: Securing the Future, the 2006 Code for Sustainable Homes, the initiation of the Academy for Sustainable Communities and the Communities England Agency. Activity and thinking are also being influenced by preparations for the 2012 Olympics. Targets set are challenging, aspirations are high, but there is no established or guaranteed road map to achieve them and traditionally separate and centralised delivery of water, energy and other services may not be able to deliver their share of the improvements needed. However, synergies, innovation, cost savings and environmental benefits may be achieved through more holistic thinking, different scales of provision, by greater integration between different service sectors and through different business delivery models. So far, there are few significant examples in the UK of this approach. So, this timely research will explore the extent to which more integrated urban utility service provision can contribute to this agenda and enhance the adaptive capacity of these systems, vital to ensure long-term sustainability under changing climatic, environmental, demographic and economic conditions. This will be demonstrated by working in partnership with Ashford's Future as they deliver regeneration and sustainable development in this key area.