Author Archives: Richard

Lord Deighton launches the new iBUILD #infrastructure research centre

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Visit www.ibuild.ac.uk for more information.
 
Understanding how our key infrastructures interconnect – from a technical, economic and social perspective – will improve the way we finance and deliver them across the UK.

Experts at Newcastle University will lead a £3.5 million Centre set up to investigate how technical and market interactions between our energy, water, transport, waste and digital technology systems can be exploited to get better economic, social and environmental value from our infrastructure.

Brian Collins (Director of ICIF, UCL), Lord Deighton, Richard Dawson (Director of iBUILD, Newcastle), Martin Donnelly (Permanent Secretary for BIS), Adrian Alsop (Director of Research at ESRC), Dave Delpy (Chief executive of EPSRC)

Working with Leeds and Birmingham universities and 27 industrial partners, the new i- BUILD (Infrastructure Business models, valuation and Innovation for Local Delivery) Centre is part of the National Infrastructure Plan, published by the Government in 2011.Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) the Newcastle University-led project is one of two national centres being announced today in London by Lord Deighton, Commercial Secretary to the Treasury.  The second will be led by UCL.The Centres will create an interdisciplinary environment in which social scientists, engineers, industrialists, policy makers and other stakeholders can research and collaborate. They will consider how to deliver infrastructure, and the services it provides, to stimulate jobs and economic growth but also deliver wider environmental and social value.Richard Dawson, Director of i- BUILD and Professor of Earth System Engineering at Newcastle University, explains: “A growing population, modern economy and proliferation of new technologies have placed increased and new demands on infrastructure services and made infrastructure networks increasingly inter-connected.“Meanwhile, investment has not kept up with the pace of change leaving many components at the end of their life.  Furthermore, pressures associated with global environmental change require infrastructure to be less polluting and more resilient to extreme events such as flooding.

“These challenges place further pressure on the UK’s existing business models for infrastructure delivery that are in many cases already providing poor value.”

Professor Dawson said the key aim of the new Centre was to develop new business models that are able to reduce costs but also provide better value for people and the environment throughout the design, construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning or conversion of the infrastructure systems.

“While national scale infrastructure planning remains important, it is at the scale of neighbourhoods, towns and cities – the focus of i-BUILD – that infrastructure is most dense and interactions between infrastructures, economies and society are most profound.

“We aim to harness the power of the Localism Act, City Deals and Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and the innovation of communities to stimulate local economic growth through infrastructure delivery.

“After all, our national infrastructure and economy are only as good as the sum of their parts and this project offers us a real opportunity to innovate the way we deliver infrastructure and consequently stimulate economic growth.”

In Newcastle, i-BUILD will have a focus around Science Central, the country’s largest inner-city regeneration project that is set to become an exemplar of Sustainability research for the UK.  The site will be used as a pilot for the i-BUILD project to demonstrate how infrastructure can be planned and financed in a smarter way to better support local communities and to stimulate growth.

Similar case studies will be developed in Leeds, Birmingham and elsewhere.

Seminar by Prof. Pascal Perez on urban simulation and planning

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TransMob: A micro-simulation model for integrated transport and urban planning
Prof Pascal Perez, SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong, NSW

 

4-5pm, 24th May, Room 2.32: Cassie Building, Newcastle University

To book your place please register online

 

How will current socio-demographic evolution affect future transport patterns and traffic conditions?

How will urban development and transport policy influence the quality of life of various segments of the local community?

 

The ‘Shaping the Sydney of Tomorrow’ Project (StSoT) was commissioned by Transport for NSW (Australia) to better understand the interactions between transport and land-use dynamics as experienced by individuals and households over extensive periods of time (15-20 years). Stepping away from traditional optimisation, our model focuses on anticipating short and long-term emergent consequences and feedbacks resulting from interactions between people and their urban environment, through the creation of ‘what-if’ scenarios (risk assessment approach).  The innovative design and development of TransMob aims to challenge three traditional but highly limiting modelling assumptions:

•Long-term steady-state equilibrium of the system: in fact, transport services and urban development co-evolve along with socio-demographic changes in highly dynamic ways and out of equilibrium.
•Feed-forward effect of urban development on transport networks: in fact, evidence suggests that there is a strong feedback effect of transport solutions onto land-use changes.
•Homogeneous and utility-based social responses to transport and land-use planning: in fact, there is more to decisions on transport modes or residential locations than pure micro-economic reasoning; most unintended consequences stem from unexpected heterogeneous individual considerations.

TransMob is made of six modelling components: (1) synthetic population, (2) perceived liveability, (3) travel diaries, (4) traffic micro-simulator, (5) transport mode choice and (6) residential location choice. The model is applied to the inner south-east area of Sydney metropolitan area and simulates the evolution of around 110,000 individuals and 50,000 households over 20 years, according to various transport and land use scenarios.

i-BUILD: Infrastructure BUsiness models, valuation and Innovation for Local Delivery

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EPSRC and ESRC have recently announced the funding of i-BUILD, a £3.5M research centre, led by Professor Richard Dawson at Newcastle University, to develop new approaches to infrastructure business models with the ultimate aim of replacing current public-private business models that in many cases provide poor value.

While national scale infrastructure plans, projects and procedures set the wider agenda, it is at the scale of neighbourhoods, towns and cities that infrastructure is most dense and interdependencies between infrastructures, economies and society are most profound – and hence the focus of our activity will be at these local and urban scales.  Balancing growth across regions and scales is crucial to the success of the national economy. The Government’s response (March 2013) to Lord Heseltine’s review of local economic growth emphasised the devolution of funding for local major infrastructure schemes that is occurring from 2015, the importance of the development of an integrated approach to local infrastructure investment and also noted the requirement for alternative funding models. This localism agenda is encouraging local agents to develop new infrastructure related business but this is limited by the lack of robust new business models with which to do so at the local and urban scale.

To develop a new generation of business models the i-BUILD research programme is structured around three main research streams:

(i)   Reducing the costs of infrastructure delivery by understanding interdependencies between systems and alternative finance models;

(ii)  Improving the way we value the wider benefits of our infrastructure by identifying and exploiting the social, environmental and economic opportunities; and,

(iii) Reconciling local scale priorities with regional and national strategic needs – because no locality is disconnected from its surroundings.

New approaches developed through these research streams will be tested and demonstrated on integrative case studies in partnership with an extensive stakeholder group from academic, private, public and voluntary sector organisations. 

An official launch event will take place on the 7th June.  Details to follow.

About the i-BUILD team:
The i-BUILD Centre brings together a highly integrated and multi-disciplinary team embracing many of the UK’s leading researchers in infrastructure engineering, business modelling, economic analysis and social science, alongside an extensive stakeholder group.  The Centre will have its headquarters at Newcastle University (Director: Professor Richard Dawson, CESER; Deputy director: Professor Andy Pike, CURDS) in collaboration with leading academics from the University of Birmingham (Deputy directors: Professor Chris Rogers; Professor John Bryson) and the University of Leeds (Deputy directors: Professor Phil Purnell; Professor Andy Gouldson). 

About the Newcastle team:
i-BUILD draws together expertise in civil engineering, urban economy, business models and societal engagement from four schools at Newcastle University: the School of Civil Engineering & Geosciences, the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University Business School and the School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development. 

The full i-BUILD team can be found here:
http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/K012398/1

Adaptation and Resilience in Cities: Final dissemination event

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Adaptation and Resilience in Cities: Analysis and decision making using integrated assessment (ARCADIA)

Final dissemination event, 2 May, London

Building upon work developed during the Tyndall Centre Cities Programme, the ARCADIA project has developed a methodological approach for looking at risks to urban systems, understanding the inter-relationships between climate impacts, the urban economy, land use, transport and the built environment, has enabled the testing of adaptation options to design cities that are more resilient. The final dissemination event will be held on Thursday 2 May, 1-5pm, at the Friend’s Meeting House, Euston Road, London. During the event, key messages from the project will be presented using the example impacts of urban heat and flood risk. There will also be more detailed presentations and demonstrations of the project’s methodological approaches: spatial weather generator, economic modelling, land-use and transport modelling.  During the event we will welcome your review, evaluation and potential use of the tools, methodologies and research outcomes that will be showcased.

To register to attend please email Claire.Walsh@ncl.ac.uk   by Tuesday 30 April.

Funded PhD in CESER available

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PhD in Earth Systems Engineering: Sustainable cities, infrastructure and catchments

Earth Systems Engineering addresses the analysis, design, engineering and management of coupled human, environmental and engineered systems. It relates to how engineering decisions can take better account of long term changes (e.g. in the climate, land use and human behaviour), societal interactions (e.g. between the built environment, transport demand and greenhouse gas emissions) and other uncertainties.

The Centre for Earth Systems Engineering Research (CESER) at Newcastle University, U.K. is seeking an outstanding candidate for a funded PhD student position in its Earth Systems Engineering programme.

Our programme brings together work on (i) natural hazards and environmental change, (ii) field monitoring and geomatics, (iii) informatics and systems modelling, (iv) decision-support tools and methods. We invite applications in the topics above, in areas related to our catchment; sustainable cities or infrastructure systems programme.

Indicative PhD topics and more information on our programme can be found: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ceser/phds/

Application details here:
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/postgraduate/funding/search/list/ci613

Funding Notes:
This award is available to the candidates who meet the ESPRC eligibility criteria. A full award covers tuition fees at the UK/EU rate and an annual stripend of £13,590 (2013-14).

Co-organisers of an EU adaptation training school for climate adaptation decision-makers in cities

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At the end of February 2013 a successful and highly enjoyable Climate Change Adaptation Training School was organised by Tecnalia, CESER and the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).  Climate change adaptation managers for cities from 13 European countries attended the Training School which was held in Bilbao, Spain. Alistair Ford travelled by train from Newcastle to lead a day on urban integrated assessment modelling based on our Integrated Systems Demonstration of  Cities .

 A mixture of sessions led by industry, government and academic representatives delivered presentations, workshops and practical exercises to disseminate expert knowledge to assist policy makers who are beginning to address Climate Change Adaptation issues in European cities.

The School was financed by the European Cost Action TU-0902 (Integrated assessment technologies to support the sustainable development of urban areas) which is Chaired by CESER Director, Richard Dawson.

Using Twitter to understand football supporting patterns

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The location of the football team that you support is often a cause for debate, with chants like “we support our local team” being heard on the terrace week in week out. And now with the influx of football fans taking to twitter to support their teams this provides another way of measuring this metric.

As a group the idea of using twitter to crowd source the location of events is not a new one. Previously we have used it to record flood events across the north east allowing for a real time map to be produced. An idea which will be used heavily in the forthcoming iTURF project (integrating Twitter with Realtime Flood modelling).

Developomg a football script it was simply a matter of applying our previously developed scripts to record the locations of tweets related to football teams. Here, the official hashtag for each team and then simply recorded the club, location and time, the actual body of the tweet is not stored.  With the script in place data feeds into a database and a webpage displaying the tweets in real-time which is available here

 

The data can also provide hotspots showing key areas of support for each team, predictably some show more spread than others.

More details, including analysis of average distance from homeground are reported on the Geospatial team’s webpages.

Geospatial team Open Source contribution recognised

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The Geospatial group within CESER are offically an OSGEO lab, and thus part of a growing number of universites globally to hold such a title. Only those universities and departments which can showcase extensive work, skills and experience in the use of open source tools and software for geospatial related research are awarded the title. The title/gorup comes after a  memorandum of understanding was signed between the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the International Cartographic Association (ICA) in 2011. For more information on the memorandum, follow this link. 

As part of becoming a OSGEO lab, we have also developed a new website to showcase our related work. This can be found at http://research.ncl.ac.uk/osgeolab/

For further information on this announcement, see the press release which can be found on our blog at https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/geospatialengineering/2013/01/08/newcastle-geospatial-engineering-part-of-the-osgeo-labs-for-research-and-education/

Richard Dawson appointed Associate Deputy Editor of Climatic Change

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Richard Dawson, CESER director, has been invited to join the editorial team of Climatic Change as an Associate Deputy Editor.

Climatic Change is one of the world’s leading environmental science journals.  It is an Interdisciplinary, International Journal Devoted to the Description, Causes and  implications of Climatic Change.

The journal’s interdisciplinary focus encourages researchers in any discipline, be it meteorology, anthropology, agricultural science, astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, geography, policy analysis, economics, engineering, geology, ecology, or history of climate, to communicate the essence of their studies to people in other climate related disciplines and to interested non-disciplinarians, as well as to report on research in which the originality is in the combinations of (not necessarily original) work from several disciplines. The journal also includes editorial and book review sections and ‘Climatic Change Letters’ which offers a space for short articles announcing new findings of timely and compelling interest to researchers in climate-related disciplines.

 

Hayley Fowler selected to give Award Lecture at the British Science Festival

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Prof Hayley Fowler, CESER Researcher and Professor of Climate Change Impacts, has been chosen to give the Joseph Lister Award Lecture (Social sciences) at the British Science Festival which will be held in September 2013 in Newcastle upon Tyne. Hayley will talk about “Climate change, extreme rainfall and flooding: what is happening to our weather?”

There is currently much public interest in extreme weather and the perceived increase in heavy rainfall and flooding over the past decade which the media has blamed on global warming. But what is happening and what can we expect to happen in the future?

Extreme rainfall is increasing around the world. This lecture will discuss what causes different types of extreme flood events and whether this is increasing based on the latest evidence. It will also look at the role of ‘atmospheric rivers’ which bring large amounts of moisture and thus rainfall, causing flooding in the UK. ARs are water vapour rich, long narrow bands at least 2,000 km long and several hundred km wide – at any given time, four or five ARs in the atmosphere will carry 90% of moisture moving towards Poles. When water vapour is forced upwards (i.e. by meeting mountainous areas), this can lead to flash flooding.

The lecture will also examine the latest projections from climate models. This will include new results from Hayley’s research group which runs very high resolution climate models (using the UK Forecast Model) to try to predict how global warming might affect convective ‘thunderstorm’ type rainfall events which cause localised flash-floods. These generally happen in summer and appear to be increasing. Current climate models cannot resolve convective processes so we do not know whether these events will become more frequent/intense? The lecture will showcase new climate model simulations from the NERC-funded CONVEX project (ready in summer 2013).

Local as well as national case studies will be used to demonstrate the above, particularly given widespread flooding in the Newcastle region in 2012 (e.g. June 28th pluvial flood – extensive flooding in city centre and gridlock, 5th Aug pluvial flood and 24/25th September fluvial flood which affected Newburn, Morpeth and parts of Yorkshire), examining how our urban areas have increased in propensity for flooding.

The lecture will finish by examining how we might start to better manage and plan for these types of flood events, showcasing new ideas and modelling techniques from the Water Resources researchers in CESER: including the use of crowd sourcing techniques (using smart phone applications) to collect improved information on where floods occur. The lecture will demonstrate examples of where crowd sourcing has successfully led to improved modelling of flooded areas and flood depths for different rainfall events using a new modelling system called CityCat developed by CESER reserachers.