With the 'Net Zero Strategy: Build Back Greener' [1], the transport, energy, and building sectors in the UK are undergoing a paradigm shift. While this has clear environmental benefits, its potential impacts on social systems are often overlooked and there is no consistent approach for assessing equity impacts of net-zero initiatives. Yet, persistent inequalities are of significant concern in the UK, with the 10% richest households hold almost 50% of the country's wealth, in contrast to the bottom 50%, which holds only 9% [2]. Schemes and interventions that have untreated or unfair equity impacts rightly cause political issues, sometimes slowing or even stopping progress. With pressing climate change and energy crisis, it is crucial to create data products facilitating social science led research to guide an equitable net-zero transition. Social scientists have access to increasing amounts of data; however, the diversity of data structure and limited data integration tools pose challenges for effectively utilising available datasets [3]. New strategies are needed to integrate data from the UK census with the vast information collected via other channels to unlock novel research purposes. Providing research-ready data requires new methodological approaches in combining and creating data infrastructures and training resources that are specifically tailored for social scientists considering their interests and skills. The overall goal of this project is to develop methods, datasets, and training materials for facilitating social science research on impacts of UK's net-zero strategy. While the primary integration will be with the 2021/22 Census, earlier census data will also be used to analyse changes over time. The objective is to combine UK-wide socio-demographic data from the Census with metrics from existing surveys on energy use, efficiency, and mobility demand in smaller population samples. Objectives are: Define and compute metrics to track energy demand from households and individual mobility based on comprehensive evaluation of data availability in different UK regions, Develop and apply methods for generating small-area statistics at output area level (LSOA and MSOA) from energy and travel surveys. Update and augment population synthesis methods with latest census, energy, and mobility data. Demonstrate application of developed methods through case studies and publications focusing on equity in net-zero transition. Create open-source tools and training resources specifically tailored for social scientists. Execute dissemination and outreach activities to ensure researchers are well-informed about the developed data tools and methodologies, promoting wider use of Census data. This proposal fits within ESRC's funding opportunity scopes: services are in place to support researchers who wish to use UK census 2021/2 data for social science-led research. tools and research-ready datasets that enable research with census data have been created. researchers are more aware of the wide variety of census data that will become available and understand how to access and maximise their use of it.

Extending the life of existing infrastructure is one of the main aspects of sustainable construction in current civil engineering projects. Examples include the re-use of foundations in urban re-development projects, or raising the height of existing flood embankments to account for sea-level rise due to climate change. The design requirement in such projects is to quantify how much higher load the foundation soil can take in order to enable the construction of a higher flood embankment or a heavier new structure on existing foundations. In both foundation re-use and raising flood embankments the existing structure will have been in place for a long period of time (several decades) during which the foundation soil has been subjected to evolving anisotropy and to time-related processes of consolidation (dissipation of excess pore water pressures within the soil generated by the applied load) and creep (continued straining of the soil with insignificant change in effective stress). Both consolidation and creep processes cause additional ground movements dependent upon time. The consequence of these ground movements is the reduction in the void ratio which leads to the strength and stiffness increase in the soil with time. It is this enhancement of soil mechanical properties that enables an increase in applied load on existing foundation systems. However, there is currently little guidance on the degree or magnitude of increase in stiffness or strength of the founding soil with respect to the duration of creep or loading. This aspect of the time-dependant framework of soil behaviour is poorly defined, but has significant implications in terms of the sustainability of civil structures. The proposed research is very timely in addressing design needs for sustainable construction and redevelopment of existing infrastructure. It relies on the development of new experimental equipment consisting of an advanced triaxial creep apparatus, and will enable the apparatus to be properly commissioned for the first experiments to be performed. Long term experiments exploring the effect of creep on the strength and stiffness of clay have not been performed before and the lack of experimental data on this topic is hindering the ability of both research and industry to account for or quantify improvements in engineering properties due to creep processes. Project partners, Arup, have a strong interest in supporting and collaborating in research into geotechnical engineering issues and are providing soil samples in addition to settlement records and load estimates from some structures founded on the same soil that have experienced very large and long-term settlement behaviour. This input will provide am active and pertinent focus for the project. The database of experimental behaviour which can be generated by a cell designed to monitor soil sample creep accurately and stably in the long-term will enable constitutive models to be calibrated to aid design using numerical analysis methods. The principal aim of the project is to quantify the improvement to strength and stiffness from periods of creep to gain a better understanding of the effect of time on the evolution of soil behaviour which has been notably absent from previous studies. This is a novel approach in the study of the time dependant behaviour of soil and it is of note that previous studies have been unable to study the effect of significant periods of creep, due to the lack of time and capability for accurate and stable long term measurement of sample volume change. The Imperial College Geotechnics Laboratory are unique in their expertise and facilities to be able to tackle this challenge.

Half of humanity - 3.5 billion people - lives in cities today and 68% of the world's population is projected to live in urban areas by 2050. This increase in urbanisation is contributing to biodiversity decline worldwide due to changing land use. At the same time, digital technologies are changing our cities. Innovations such as real-time bus information, smart rubbish bins, smart parking, and smart street lighting are often referred to as the smart city, and optimistically promised as a social and environmental good. But these interventions generally fail to take into account the ways in which human and non-human inhabitants of cities (such as plants, animals, micro-organisms, as well as sensors) are inter-related and interdependent in urban space. The MoSaIC: More-than-Human Sustainable and Inclusive Smart Cities fellowship will investigate the design of more inclusive, sustainable and flourishing smart cities. It will do this by exploring how digital technologies such as networked sensors, AI, and data visualisation approaches can help us plan and design smart cities for all their inhabitants - human as well as other species. The research will be undertaken in three living labs, which are real world testbeds for co-creating research and innovation in public-private-people partnerships. These will take place in three types of site: urban community gardens, buildings, and waterways. In these living labs we will co-design new prototypes that demonstrate how digital technologies can enable sustainable, more-than-human smart cities in practice and policy. We will use inclusive and creative co-design methods, working in close collaboration with key community, business, and policy partners to include the perspectives of human and non-human inhabitants. We will produce the following outputs from the research: new methods for decentering the human in smart cities, new digital and data visualisation prototypes, new artworks and a book, open source toolkit and data sets, practical guidelines for designing more-than-human smart cities in for industry, policy and with communities, an interdisciplinary workshop and cross-sector symposium for the general public. We will also conduct public engagement and dissemination activities that include art commissions and an exhibition that will help to deliver a transformational agenda to the wider public and create impact at scale.

Around one billion people across the globe live in shack settlements. Many of these settlements are at constant risk of lethal fires, due to the use of flammable construction materials and contents, open flame lighting, heating and cooking methods, the close proximity of the shacks, and the lack of effective fire services, amongst other factors. Our project focuses on this problem in South Africa (specifically the Cape Town area) where shack fires are an everyday occurrence leading to death and injuries, displacement, and damage to property, possessions, businesses, and communities. Improving fire safety is extremely difficult in a context where building regulations are largely irrelevant, where residents typically lack available or affordable electricity - forcing them to use candles, stoves or open fires for lighting, heating and cooking - and where socio-legal arrangements discourage the use of more permanent and less flammable construction materials, such as brick. Potential solutions to the problem of informal settlement fires (both in South Africa and elsewhere internationally) must not only be technically sound, but also need to take account of these broader social factors that shape the ways that residents build, maintain, and interact with their built environment. Our research is unique in its inter-disciplinary scope in that we seek to develop a systematic understanding of both the socio-political and technical factors involved in making informal settlements vulnerable to fire. By compiling existing data, undertaking multi-site surveys, carrying out comparative analysis, and conducting modelling experiments this project will develop grounded, effective solutions. Our research will assess the effectiveness and practical feasibility of 'technical fixes' like fire retardant paint, smoke alarms, and heat detectors, as well as developing guidelines that communities can use to re-structure their shack settlements to provide effective fire breaks. Being informed by technical best practice and the socio-political realities of life in shack settlements, our findings will enable residents to take action on fire safety and outline where the myriad of actors interested in such issues can most usefully contribute their time, insight, and resources.

Pedestrians represented roughly 24% of road fatalities and 22% of the seriously injured in the UK in 2015 (Department for Transport, Reported Road Casualties Great Britain: 2015, Annual Report). The most commonly recorded factors were: "in accidents where a pedestrian was killed or injured; pedestrian failed to look properly was reported in 59 per cent of accidents. Failed to judge other person's path or speed was the most typical secondary cause." (DfT, 2015) In this context, the increased use of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and new urban warning systems that can help monitor and assist pedestrians and their interactions with vehicles has the potential to dramatically reduce road deaths. A major concern, however, is that the AVs and warning systems must be designed to take into account the capabilities and limitations of pedestrians. This project will develop a new pedestrian laboratory to support safe experimental research in a repeatable fashion in which a variety of variables with respect to AV design, warning system design, and intersection configuration can be studied. The experiments can also look at the impacts of a wide range of human factors including age, vision and mobility. The pedestrian laboratory (PEDSIM) will consist of a Virtual Reality (VR) simulator that will allow a participant to experience a variety of urban configurations and interact with new vehicles and urban robots. The pedestrian laboratory will track the participant's performance in a variety of tasks to compare the effectiveness of various designs. What makes the PEDSIM unique in the world is its very high resolution displays combined with its large walkable environment (9 metres by 4 metres) and its integration with driving simulators to test interactions between pedestrians and drivers. As automated and autonomous vehicles get closer to deployment, research into their design and impact has rapidly increased. There are several studies currently funded by the EPSRC that can take immediate advantage of the new research capabilities of the PEDSIM. These include research to evaluate solutions for cooperative interaction of automated vehicles and urban robots with pedestrians and research that will test various lighting conditions and its impact on visibility, trip hazards, and understanding intentions of other pedestrians and vehicles.