The overall aim of the SURegen consortium is to undertake research to develop a prototype Regeneration Simulator Workbench (RSW) that meets the decision-making challenges that Sustainable Urban Regeneration (SUR) poses, i.e., multiple stakeholder interests, complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. The RSW will provide a major new training vehicle for regeneration professionals aimed at addressing the knowledge and skills gap identified in the Egan Review: Skills for Sustainable Communities (2004) and will be built around the core set of regeneration skills included in RENEW NW's development of the 8point Egan Wheel . The RSW is aimed at regeneration professionals and knowledgeable non-experts and will focus on the neighbourhood scale. It will form a multi-perspective collaborative digital workspace providing a learning laboratory and library of good practice for regeneration actors. Past experience shows that 'simulation' of SUR activity requires an open-ended, process-based, learning and gaming-like experience. A conventional technical model system, no matter how sophisticated, is unlikely to deal with the tacit knowledge, complex actor-network relationships, and strategic behaviour or entrepreneurial opportunities. For instance, an effective housing module needs technical information on density, tenure, condition and so on, but it also needs some way of dealing with the perception of different actors on, for example, the effect of gentrification on crime or property values. To address this, the RSW will enable the simulation of the regeneration programme process and help decision-makers recognise the key decision points and guide them towards appropriate evaluations that will support their decision-making. To do this the workbench will contain a number of simulation and evaluation tools and integrate the complex range of data on the sustainable redevelopment of the regeneration area. Use of these tools will enable regeneration actors to collectively simulate a range of outcomes of the longer-term regeneration programme. From this foresight they will gain insights into the impact of selected options that result from the complex interactions of political, social, economic and physical factors that will enable them to make better trade-offs between options and move towards more satisfying sustainable solutions. They will also be able retrace their steps and explore other options so that they can learn from potential mistakes .The project will be led by the University of Salford in collaboration with the Universities of Manchester, Napier, Liverpool, Dundee and West of England. Using an action research methodology the workbench will incorporate the knowledge of good practice in regeneration from the a range of public sector and industrial partners, representing both demand and supply side interests from NW England; including the regional centre of excellence for regeneration skills, RENEW North West, Sustainability Northwest, the Manchester Digital Development Agency, Cities of Manchester and Salford, Urban Vision, Arup Assoc, Wates Construction, ABRA Assoc, MASTLift, Shepherd Robson and Fusion GFX. The project is planned for four years duration. The first two years will focus on knowledge capture and structuring using action research. This will also focus on case studies in New East Manchester and Salford Liverpool Road. The last two years will address testing and validation of the prototype workbench in these case study areas as well as others, with collaborators from other regions of the UK, to validate and develop the workbench to be more generally applicable to all areas of the country.

Modernising the UK's health and social care system is a priority for government and for the country as a whole. To do this, wide ranging organisational and funding reforms are being put in place. An unprecedented investment to renew the built and technical infrastructure for delivering care is also underway: new hospitals and primary care centres are being built, information and communication technology is being upgraded and new technologies for diagnosing and treating disease are being introduced. If world-class infrastructure is to be delivered, this investment must achieve its full potential. The aim of HaCIRIC is to establish a new research centre to help accomplish this. HaCIRIC's focus is on the built and technical infrastructure for health and social care, and the interaction between infrastructure specification and the way patients are treated. Improving the way this is planned, delivered and managed is at the core of HaCIRIC's activity. What are the challenges? The health and social care system is one of the most complex and rapidly changing organisational and technical environments in any sector of the economy. Many stakeholders are involved in delivering care, funding mechanisms are convoluted, and patterns of demand and use are changing, as are government health policies. All this places new pressures on the underlying infrastructure. These are compounded by two problems. First, there is an historic legacy of out-dated buildings and cultures within the care system. Second, the life cycles of the various elements of the infrastructure / buildings, medical and information technology / are mismatched. Each involves complex supply chains, multiple users with their own needs and differing institutional and funding arrangements. All these have to be reconciled. For example, the current PFI programme for new hospitals involves supply contracts for thirty years or more, but incorporates technologies which have five year life cycles to help deliver diagnostics and therapies which are undergoing rapid evolutionary change. Modernising the health and social care infrastructure will therefore require innovative approaches. HaCIRIC will help develop the tools and processes which will embed 'innovation as normal business' amongst those responsible for delivering the investment in infrastructure. Its research programme has been developed in partnership with all the key stakeholders from the care system, including the Department of Health, the NHS, the Department of Trade and Industry and the supply industries. Seven research themes have been identified:- Managing innovation in a context of technological change- Procurement for innovation- Innovative design and construction- Care delivery practices- Delivering improved performance through operations management- Knowledge management in complex systems - Design and evaluation of integrated systems HaCIRIC is a collaboration between existing research centres at Imperial College London and the Universities of Loughborough, Reading and Salford. Additional partners from other universities, industry and the care system will be involved in specific research projects. Together this represents a resource valued at more than 11m, of which 7.0m consists of EPSRC support, 2.9m is from the four existing research centres, 500,000 is from the Department of Trade and Industry and 720,000 is from industrial partners. HaCIRIC will therefore represent a substantial resource and a unique capability in skills and knowledge to find solutions to the key healthcare infrastructure problems of the 21st century.

This proposal is concerned with the renewal of the Salford IMRC which was initially established in January 2002. This proposal will extent the life of the Salford Centre for Research and Innovation (SCRI) in the built and human environment, until 2011 and further increase the impact that the centre has created in the first five years of its lifecycle. The rolling research agenda and evolving vision of the Centre has been very well received by the industrial and academic circles, as it has been made explicit by the international assessment panels and this renewal aims to firmly establish the world class status of the centre and increase the performance of UK Plc. The centre brings together significant expertise from three research institutes within the university of Salford and aims to continue its collaboration with more that 60 partners in the industrial and academic communities internationally.