The New Town Heritage project is a partnership project between the University of Hertfordshire, community researchers and heritage organisations. It focuses on tracing the growth and development of new towns from the garden city movement to the 'model' new town of Milton Keynes, through a programme of co-designed research activities and events. From E.M Forster's home in Stevenage to the uncatalogued papers of Milton Keynes Development Corporation, the project seeks to uncover hidden stories and sources with community researchers and then publicise the research findings through a range of channels for the benefit of a broad audience. As reflected in the costs, the project will result in a series of outputs including a New Town Heritage Festival, conference papers and publications, research workshops and events and a co-produced New Town Heritage book.

It is becoming clear that robotics will be an integral part of the design, planning and operation of future cities and urban infrastructure. This is most evident in the development of driverless cars and drones, but there is potential for a much broader application of robotics in the delivery of goods and the management of people. The use of robots in the public realm of cities has previously been constrained by technological limitations and concerns about human safety. However, that is changing rapidly as technology develops and governments recognize the potential social and environment benefits. Interest in urban robotics has certainly increased because of COVID-19 and the potential of robotics to provide essential goods and services with reduced human contact. There could be significant public benefits from using robotics in the public realm but also social and ethical concerns about employment impacts and extended surveillance and social control, especially when robotics is combined with facial recognition and profiling. There is growing interest in urban robotics but so far the research on wider urban impacts has been limited. The aim of the proposed project is to fill that research gap by undertaking new research on the unfolding development of urban robotics in the UK and internationally. The proposal is therefore for an internationally leading 30 month research project to help understand the potential impacts of urban robotics and provide the knowledge needed to inform public policy and academic research on urban robotics at this critical phase in its development. That includes supporting the development of urban robotic technology and services in the UK by linking social science and robotic engineering and understanding how innovation is shaped by opportunities for real world testing. The research will include (i) a review of international urban robotic research and development; (ii) detailed analysis of the context for urban robotic innovation in the UK, (iii) case-studies of urban robotic experiments in the USA (San Francisco), Australia (Brisbane) and Japan (Yokohama); and (iv) a structured programme of policy support and awareness-raising. The research will lead to a landmark book and other publications that will help define and develop this new and important field of interdisciplinary study.

The purpose of the New Towns Heritage Network is to share research and policy on the architectural heritage value of the Post War New Towns in the UK and Mainland Europe. The Post-War New Towns are regarded as one of the most important social, cultural and architectural experiments in town planning in the 20th century founded upon principles of Modernism in design, planning and architecture. They have left a remarkable built heritage comprising road layouts, shopping centres, iconic buildings, public spaces, and public art which are often considered to be dated and controversial e.g the road grid system in Milton Keynes or the shopping centres on Harlow and Stevenage. The Network will bring together international researchers and policy makers from universities, government, and the community sector who are studying this built heritage, and are engaged in policy debates about its value. The Research Network will meet at a critical time when many of the New Towns are reaching an age when renewal and re-invention are being considered. As they approach significant anniversaries (50 or 70 years old), they are facing difficult questions about what value to put on their Post War heritage, whether for example, to demolish 1950s shopping centres and over-ride original Master Plans. Our Research Network seminars events will be hosted by some of the towns that are celebrating their anniversaries and are undertaking this assessment; Milton Keynes, the largest and most successful of the UK New Towns is 50 years old in 2017, Harlow is 70 in 2017, Peterborough and Northampton reach 50 in 2018, and Zoetermeer in the Netherlands is 55 in 2017. The project will organise a programme of three UK based New Town Heritage Research Seminars, one European New Towns Seminar in the Netherlands, and a Plenary Conference at the conclusion of the project to be held at the University of Northampton in 2018. The seminars will be aimed at New Town researchers and policy makers, not just from Universities but also from Government and from the community sector in New Towns which has often accumulated a significant amount of original research and data. The Plenary will provide a forum for comparisons of the heritage debates in Post War New Towns in the UK and Europe. A key output of the Network will be an agenda for further research and dissemination through a dedicated web site of the findings of the Network events.

This project reframes key challenges that underlie modern policing in a socio-technical world; a world instrumented with mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies, in which many citizens and communities live, work and play, but which must also manage threats to their wellbeing and their rights. The project aims to support a new engagement between authorities (such as the police) and communities of citizens in order to better investigate (and in the long term reduce) potential or actual threats to citizen security, safety, and privacy. This includes both empowering the police by opening up new ways of citizens providing data in ways that protect privacy and anonymity, and empowering citizens by using these new technologies to also hold the police to account. We will be harnessing many of the so-called Internet of Things, Smart City and Smart Home technologies to encourage and allow citizens to help the police collect and analyse disparate data to improve public safety at both local and ultimately national levels. The project will adopt a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on the disciplines of software engineering for ubiquitous systems, social and cognitive psychology, and digital forensics / policing.

Addressing theme 1 and to a lesser extent theme 2. A climate emergency has been declared by 74% of UK local authorities. As they respond to this via increased tree planting targets for carbon sequestration, it is imperative that they also realise the multiple public benefits - health and wellbeing, green infrastructure, social amenity, the green economy - that treescapes can provide. Local authorities need a vision of future societal needs and the forms of future treescapes that might meet them; we will deliver the evidence and decision making processes to realise such a vision. Most studies on the biophysical and amenity aspects of urban treescapes neglect wider social and cultural values that cannot easily be quantified. Consequently, the symbolic, heritage, spiritual and social and cultural (S&C) values of treescapes are not meaningfully accounted for. This problem is becoming increasingly acute, as protests arise around individual trees (Sheffield street trees) or woods (proposed sale of the public forest estate), exacerbated by pressure from business and housing development. 'Branching Out' will evaluate the S&C values of urban trees across three cities, and develop new ways of mapping, predicting and communicating those values to support robust, evidence-based decision making and management. The three selected focus cities purposefully have different planning histories, supporting subsequent widespread adoption of our novel approach. York (historical) and Cardiff (post-industrial) are county towns, while Milton Keynes is a post-1960s new town. Each city has particular, yet not uncommon, challenges relating to their treescapes, has declared a climate emergency, and expects trees to play a role in mitigation and adaptation. Our central tenet comprises three broad approaches: 1) co-production, using deliberative methods with citizens and stakeholders, to develop a holistic value framework; 2) storytelling, creating narrative accounts of meaning and value of the past, present and future; 3) mapping, to link biophysical features and S&C values. Our approach will map both values that are generalisable and those that are particular and highly situated. Our mapping approaches encompass the past, present and future, using historical sources to map the impact of past values on current treescape form and function. We will use our established tree citizen science platform, Treezilla, to collect biophysical data from new Urban Tree Observatories. Remote sensing will characterise tree condition and canopy properties, and scale the biophysical data across the focal cities. This project will address local authorities' need for high-resolution mapping of tree characteristics, resulting in Europe's largest, most robust urban tree dataset, accompanied by descriptors of S&C value that can be used to recreate such datasets across other urban areas using freely available satellite data. The tools we co-create will provide local authorities with useable evidence for decision making to predict the impacts of developments or changes on S&C value, and enable them to calculate more accurately the impacts of changes on ecosystem services. Such multidimensional mapping can reveal inequalities in current and future provision of benefits as treescapes change through time, providing a better understanding of how and where those inequalities can be addressed. A series of design workshops will experiment with ways of mapping S&C values in relation to the remote-sensed biophysical characteristics of our urban treescapes, producing techniques and tools for sensing and mapping values. Using these tools as provocations, we will speculate on possible futures for our urban treescapes, built around an appreciation and understanding of S&C values. Through these methods this project will embed S&C values in planning and decision-making for urban trees at local and national scales, thereby meeting society's and planning needs now and in the future.