The successful Urban Living Partnership pilot projects commenced in June 2016. Each pilot completed a twelve month progress report (Summer/Autumn 2017) for the Partnership and Advisory Group to highlight work progressed, challenges identified and also opportunities that have arisen throughout their diagnostic stage. The below provides a brief overview of work completed within the last twelve months.
Urban-ID has gathered considerable momentum over its first 12 months, establishing:
Work completed to date has helped to reveal valuable systemic insights and illustrative narratives about how the region's citizens interact with and derive benefit from the urban systems and infrastructures. These perspectives are helping to inform key city stakeholders who are closely engaged with the ongoing strategic development planning in Bristol.
An associated significant impact is the unique opportunity that Urban-ID has created for a diversity of influential local actors across the academic, policy, planning, business and third sectors to spend sufficient time working and learning together to investigate fundamental and higher level strategic issues, supported by the resource of skilled researchers who are able to dig into detail.
Within the last 12 months, a project team have been appointed, a website created and a concerted coproduction process developed to foster an innovation space within the city that has attracted growing numbers of business interests. Work has been accompanied by an intense dissemination and communication campaign to embed the partnership ethos, and translate the methods from the ULP nationally and internationally to other cities and universities.
The team have:
Impact to date of the pilot project include:
Five research work packages have been undertaken and completed in parallel within the last 12 months:
The main evidence of impact from the true project to date is demonstrated through the usefulness and feedback from local authority led teams who they have engaged with to undertake the three Breakthrough Project Routemaps. Local authority team leaders expressed that the projects methodology has been extremely useful to them to identify blocks barriers and to help with strategic project set up.
Three work steams are in development by the York project team:
Findings from various stakeholder events and surveys carried out in WP1 will help to further refine the co-design of the Observatory.
Efforts in WP2 have concentrated on increasing the amount of data and datasets on the City of York Council's Open Data Platform, and on developing a bespoke YCEO section of this platform. Engagement with partners has ensured data availability, responding to specific partner requests and ensure partner's accessibility needs were met.
Focus of WP3 has been the development of a series of case study workshops to explore in more depth aspects of York's Environment, and in particular the relationships these case studies have to health, wellbeing and the data available to support decision making around air quality, heritage and urban design and planning.
WP4 constitutes three main threads of work: Modelling, Data and Infrastructure, with six discrete outcomes emerging over the previous six months. Future activities will focus on the development of a design for the YCEO.
Impacts of the project include:
Urban Living Birmingham (ULB) aims to catalyse and transform the provision of urban services and governance, producing better outcomes for people. It seeks to transform citizens into co-creators and co-innovators of urban services, and to transform the City Council from services provider to services facilitator.
The first six months focused upon developing and executing an approach to diagnose the critical challenges facing Birmingham. A mixed methods approach was developed, incorporating quantitative and a qualitative data and information analyses. In addition to contributing to the identification of Birmingham's critical challenges, the evidence analysis also identified a disconnect between academic studies and the evidence base used to support policy development across the city.
The focus of months 6-12 has been upon advancing work packages. This second stage explored the interdependent nature of Birmingham's critical challenges and understanding how end-user innovation can be brought to bear upon the delivery of city services. The primary purpose is to identify (and potentially exploit) opportunities for innovation (the innovation spaces) that will produce better outcomes for people living and working in Birmingham.
Project engagement has spanned policymakers, practitioner, academia and Birmingham residents. Interest continues to grow, evidenced in part by the membership of the Touchstone Group which has grown from 21 to 77 active members who are helping to promote the arts-led initiative.
Impacts of the project include:
