The retail sector is crucial to the economic health and vitality of towns and cities and is a core component of the national economy, but is experiencing an ongoing period of change and the challenges faced by centres are being met in different ways, with different outcomes. Consumers are behaving, shopping and using urban centres in new and diverse ways and many retailing centres have experienced falling footfall, retailer closures and a rise in empty retail units. In an attempt to reverse the cycle of decline, centres need to be multi-functional places and policy-makers are encouraging more mixed use development. Large-scale mixed-use re-development of obsolete stock, novel temporary land uses, events and public realm works are being used to try to make urban centres more attractive and increase their competitive edge. Yet, not everyone is experiencing the benefits of these changes. Mistrust, tension and conflict can arise from land use changes and become barriers to further renewal and change, limiting the effectiveness of these "town centre first" policies. A recent ESRC-funded study undertaken by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University blamed these tensions and lack of co-operation as significant contributors to the continued declined of retailing in many centres (Parker, 2015). This project seeks to explore one of the largest stakeholder groups within the sector. The objectives and behaviour of land and property owners, developers and investors are significant to the use and form of retailing centres. The project explores how ownership and the behaviour of this stakeholder group impact on the sector, by exploring issues around changing ownership and use patterns; innovations in design form; the ability of the industry to respond to change; and the ways the group engages and interacts with other stakeholders in urban centres. Thus, it aims to examine how their expectations, perceptions, practices and co-operation help or limit experimentation with new uses, building types and designs. The research will explore issues around: whether retailers and landlords in city centres are becoming more or less diverse; whether new design formats, flexible uses and large scale redevelopments can help struggling centres; the extent to which established practices and procedures in the real estate market encourage or even hinder new uses; and whether stakeholders can work together in better ways for the future health of town and city centres. These issues will be examined using five case study cities over the period 1997-2017: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Sheffield and Nottingham. The project will bring together different data that has not been available previously, to map, measure and identify any links between changes in land and building use, vacancy and ownership over the last 20 years. It will analyse and identify new developments and novel land and building uses and designs and, by talking to developers, designers, planners and occupiers, the researchers will identify the factors shaping these changes and how they impact on cities and shoppers. The project will examine established real estate market practices, such as lease lengths, rent review terms, repair obligations and use clauses to see how adaptable the industry is to change when shoppers and retailers want new and unusual property uses and forms. Finally, the researchers will talk to different centre users, managers and owners to explore how relationships might work well or badly and identify good practice for the creation of new developments and adaptions to the existing building stock to help the retail sector in cities.

Developments, such as housing estates, generally mean that more rain "runs off" the surface compared to green fields. This increased "urban runoff" often causes more river or surface water flooding downstream and also contains pollutants washed off from surfaces, such as metals and oil from cars. Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) are a drainage concept that aims to mimic the pre-development hydrology by constructing systems to pass rain water back into the ground or store it, and then release it slowly back into rivers. Often this involves creating grass channels and wetlands, which can create attractive urban areas, habitat for animals and plants and also trap and remove pollutants. SuDS are one of the components of the Green Infrastructure ideal. Research has shown that SuDS can deliver these "ecosystem services" and design guidance has been developed. However the SuDS often have a higher land take than traditional piped drainage, a concern to housing developers. They also have very different, often poorly understood, maintenance requirements. There is also uncertainty about their longevity and how to manage any long term accumulation of pollutants. Water Companies "adopt" piped drainage, but in England the long term adoption and payment for SuDS is uncertain. Planning guidance and legislation requiring SuDS to be included in schemes and adopted by local authorities has also been watered down as part of the Government's lighter touch planning policy. This means that achieving the additional benefits of lower pollution in rivers, improved urban environment and increased biodiversity are dependent on SuDS being able to be economically attractive to developers. However there are no standard guidelines for this economic evaluation and different schemes use different methods and boundaries for calculations. Therefore valuation of SuDS needs be standardised so that schemes can be compared, the appropriate amount of land allocated for high quality designs and to give confidence to property professionals in project appraisal. This project will work with stakeholders, including developers, regulators and SuDS designers to arrive at best practice guidance for calculating the capital costs of SuDS, quantifying the economic values to developments (e.g. house prices, willingness to pay for upkeep by residents) and to explore what other contributions can be sought for off-site benefits. Key partners will be the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) who provide professional guidance to quantity surveyors and valuation surveyors. We will work with RICS to create a professional Guidance Note and test this against case study projects. In addition to this valuation toolkit, training materials will be developed and delivered to surveying professionals. The overall aim is to increase the uptake of high quality SuDS designs through synthesising and translating the environmental, social and engineering benefits in a way that allows their inclusion in decision-making processes. The University of Portsmouth team is made up of engineers who have studied the technical aspects of SuDS for over 20 years and valuation surveyors who have experience of valuing social and environmental services. This multidisciplinary team are therefore well placed to deliver this innovative project.

Field advisors play a key role in enhancing the skills and development of tens of thousands of farming and land management businesses, now a key imperative for government and industry. However, advisors themselves face complex and ever changing calls on their expertise and must keep their knowledge up to date. At the same time, research funders are heavily investing in major research programmes into land use challenges, including food security and mitigation of and adaptation to environmental change, but they lack effective means and models for research delivery and processes of knowledge transfer and exchange. Through a series of knowledge exchange activities the Follow-on project will build a learning network between researchers and land-based professionals. The project will draw upon research findings from the ESRC funded 'Science in the Field' research project. Science in the Field considered three groups of specialist advisors - veterinarians, applied ecologists and land agents/surveyors - and their role as knowledge brokers between scientific research and land management. The research has shown how advisory services are facing a number of key problems: (i) The advisory landscape is now characterised by a fragmented system of field advisers which poses problems of coordination and interprofessional working; (ii) There has been a move away from state sponsored agricultural extension, but there remains a lack of a coherent model of knowledge transfer, particularly to inform the professional training and renewal of field advisers; (iii) Research agendas have become disconnected from technical dissemination capacities, and vice versa. There is a lack of institutional linkage between research and professional development. The Follow-on Project will aim to address these problems by enhancing the knowledge development and inter-professional learning of field advisors. More specifically, it will: 1. Learn from experiences of inter-professional working to identify the implications for training and professional development and the demand and scope for long term networks for knowledge exchange; 2. Identify opportunities for enhancing the knowledge renewal of advisers and test the prospects for giving greater recognition to on-the-job learning within formal training provision; 3. Highlight ways to improve knowledge exchange between the professions and research community, including systems of professional training and research decision making. The project will involve a range of knowledge exchange activities, including learning workshops, an e-learning forum, testing of CPD materials and extensive dissemination of the implications of the project through publication of a Policy and Practice Note. It will closely involve, and be advised throughout, by stakeholders and field advisers from across the professions who have expressed strong support for the project. Outcomes of the work will be improved linkages between the land-based professions and academic research communities and identification of effective approaches and techniques for knowledge exchange. Through improvements to advisor learning and training the project will lead to enhanced advice to farming and land management businesses.

Green infrastructure (GI) is recognised globally as an essential component of liveable and sustainable places. It is generally defined as encompassing most vegetated elements in the built environment, for example trees, shrubs, wetlands and other planting. It is widely acknowledged that GI provides numerous benefits to health and well-being and there is a substantial body of research demonstrating these benefits. Despite this there is still considerable uncertainty amongst the multiple stakeholders of 'what good GI is'. Currently, there is no overarching benchmark or standard for GI. This Innovation Fund will address this by developing a national benchmark for GI. The Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments at the University of the West of England, Bristol are already developing a local benchmark for GI with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership. This benchmark is, however, focussed on local priorities in Gloucestershire and the West of England. This Innovation Fund will expand the local benchmark to ensure it can be used across England in a wider range of GI initiatives. This benchmark will allow an assessment of the process of GI creation, from policy, through to planning, design, delivery and long-term management, ensuring that current good practice has been adopted at all stages. The stakeholders, or end-users, for the national benchmark include planners, property developers, ecologists, urban designers, landscape architects, engineers, public health professionals, urban foresters, community safety officers and maintenance contractors. The objectives are as follows: - To work with a range of end-users to expand the local benchmark into a national benchmark and ensure that it is fit-for-purpose and user-friendly. - To apply this national benchmark to a series of GI demonstration projects including new commercial and residential developments and retrofitting initiatives across England to demonstrate its effectiveness. The national benchmark will then be formally launched and made available online for anyone to use for free. User documentation and reports detailing the demonstration projects will be available on a website for the benchmark. The outcome of the Innovation Fund is ultimately the delivery of high quality GI. This will maximise the benefits provided by GI including to nature conservation, health and well-being, economic growth, climate change adaptation and resilience. The key impacts include: Allowing developers to demonstrate to planning authorities, stakeholders and customers that they are providing high quality GI, which will act as a selling point for their developments. Enabling local authorities to communicate their expectations for GI in new developments and retrofitting projects (e.g. of social housing) and its maintenance; easily identify those planning applications that are meeting their requirements for the GI elements of developments; and demonstrate the quality of their own GI assets. Allowing built environment consultants to demonstrate compliance with a respected and recognised benchmark to their clients. Enabling policy makers to develop more effective policies, by being able to specify their expectations for GI at a national and local level in a range of contexts. This will improve clarity on the requirements for GI. Benefit residents and communities in both new and existing neighbourhoods who will gain from the provision of high quality GI and the associated benefits. This will ultimately improve, for example, their quality of life, health and well-being, environmental quality, resilience to climate change and the local economy. Benefit broader society which will have more consistent access to high quality GI and the associated positive outcomes from this including, for example, improved population health and well-being, inward investment, biodiversity, climate change adaptation and environmental justice.

The critical challenge for contemporary urbanism is how cities develop the knowledge and capability to systemically reengineer their built environment and urban infrastructure in response to climate change and resource constraints. In the UK and elsewhere cities are increasingly confronted with, or have voluntarily adopted, challenging targets for increasing renewable and decentralised energy, carbon reduction, water savings, and waste reduction. Looking forward to 2020 and beyond to 2050, as current policy drivers and initiatives begin to bite, we need to envisage a systemic transition in our existing built environment, not just to zero carbon but across the entire ecological footprint of our cities and the regions within which they are embedded, whilst simultaneously promoting economic security, social health and resilience. Responding to this challenge in a purposive and managed way requires cities to bring together two strongly disconnected issues: what is to be done to the city (technical knowledge, targets, technological options, costs, etc) and how will it be implemented (institutions, publics, governance). We start from the perspective that the processes of urbanisation which underpin the development of cities are complex, and that urban environments can best be understood as complex socio-technical systems. Cities become 'locked in' to particular patterns of energy and resource use - constrained by existing infrastructural investments, sunk costs, institutional rigidities and vested interests. Understanding how to better re-engineer our cities and urban infrastructure, to overcome 'lock in' and facilitate systems change, will be critical to achieving sustainability. The core aim of the project is to develop the knowledge and capability to overcome the separation between the what and how of urban scale retrofitting in order to promote a managed socio-technical transition in built environment and urban infrastructure. The project will comprise a total of 5 Work Packages. Four interlocking Technical Work Packages: i) Urban Transitions Analysis: ii) Urban Foresight Laboratory (2020-2050); iii) Urban Transitions Management; iv) Synthesis, Comparison and Knowledge Exchange, and; v). the Project Management Work Package. The technical component of the research will explore urban scale retrofitting as a managed socio-technical transition, focusing on prospective developments in the built environment - linking buildings, utilities, land use and transport planning - and in so doing we will develop a generic urban transitions framework for wider application. The geographical focus will be on two of the UK's major 'city regions': Cardiff/South East Wales and Greater Manchester. Both areas have a long history of urbanisation and post industrial decline, and are actively seeking manage a purposive transition to sustainability through harnessing processes of master planning, regeneration, and economic development, and driving through significant programmes of retrofitting and infrastructural development, together with institutional and governance innovations, such as the establishment of Low Carbon Zones. The proposal brings together an experienced, interdisciplinary team of leading academic researchers, with commercial and public sector research users. The academic partners comprise: the Welsh School of Architecture (WSA), Cardiff University; Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF), Salford University; the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD) at Oxford Brookes University; and the University of Cambridge, Department of Engineering, Centre for Sustainable Development (CSD). Commercial collaborators will include Corus and Arup. Regional collaborators will include Cardiff and Neath Port Talbot Borough Councils, WAG and AGMA/Manchester City Region Environment Commission. National dissemination will take place through the Core Cities, CABE, RICS, and the national science advisor of DCLG.