This project will establish an international research network exploring the Future of the City Centre, through a partnership between Northumbria University; University of Strathclyde; University of Newcastle, Australia; University of Paraiba, Brazil; and the University of South Africa. The research network will examine how city centres are being transformed by a number of internal, external and contextual factors and the implications of these changes for the Future of the City Centre. The theoretical perspectives will involve past, present and future. Emphasis will be visions for the post-industrial, post-commercial and post-retail city. This theme and the related sub-topics will enable the development of future city models and will help to contextualise urban change. Provision for creative industries, cultural events and different forms of entertainment may offer vitality, together with visitors and responsible tourism. City authorities are starting to realise that structural changes are happening in city centres, and are responding by establishing core groups of officers to consider these issues. This proposal will provide a distinct focus on innovation for the Future of the City Centre. It will also enable academic research to inform new policies, from an inter-disciplinary perspective incorporating views from different cities. The research network is proposed at a time when governments, communities, business, artists, entertainers, historians, sociologists and others, are re-evaluating their interactions with cities. The key aim of this research network is to explore the Future of the City Centre, informed by international perspectives of expert knowledge from a range of disciplines in each locality. Invited speakers will represent education, local government, non-government organisations, business and community groups. There will be four symposiums over 24 months. They will take place in four different continents and establish a view from developed and developing countries. While individual cities cannot represent continents or even countries, they can be indicative of responses from different geographies, governance systems, cultures, heritage and populations. The UK Government Office for Science City Futures Project established Newcastle upon Tyne as pilot city. According to the United Nations, Joao Pessoa in Brazil is the second greenest city in the world. Newcastle, Australia, has established a leading smart city approach, as part of its future. Mogale City in South Africa has created an integrated development plan, as a statement of independence from Pretoria. The universities and academics chosen from the cities for this proposal are each offering distinctive perspectives. Professor Giddings promotes the arts, architecture, and urban design in the culture of communities; Professor Silva researches sustainable urbanism; Dr Jefferies investigates public and private partnerships; and Professor Rwelamila practices city management systems. In addition Dr Rogerson will offer data and methodologies from the University of Strathclyde Institute of Future Cities. Each symposium will include selected speakers who will be asked to prepare position papers to establish the context for debates on the Future of the City Centre. Speakers will represent academia, local government, non-government organisations, businesses and communities. The outcome will be possible scenarios that may be formed into the inter-disciplinary policies. It is proposed that 20 invitees will attend each symposium over a two-day period, together with open access for all interested parties. In addition to world-wide availability of the project data through the website, publications and other outputs, participants will work with their local policy makers to develop novel scenarios. The focus on exploring a range of perspectives during an era of fundamental change will assist cities around the world to re-assess their strategies.

Temperature records are critical for understanding past and future climate. However, reconstructing past temperature dynamics is incredibly difficult. Of the currently available terrestrial archives of past temperature, these are often spatially limited, suffer from ambiguity around calibration, or require large sample sizes. These issues have prevented the development of a high resolution, high density network of terrestrial temperature records. This is now often considered the single most significant gap in the palaeoclimate archive. Here, we seek to provide a breakthrough in the field of temperature reconstruction by developing a new palaeothermometer. For this, we use speleothems (cave stalagmites). Speleothems grow in layers, which can be dated like the rings in a tree. The chemistry in each layer offers an unprecedented resolution of environmental information, constrained by an absolute age model over 500,000 years. At the Lancaster Environment centre, we have recently developed a technique which allows phosphate to be extracted from the stalagmite layers. This is a critically important advance in the research field, as phosphate-oxygen isotopes are known to be controlled by temperature dynamics. Our first measurements of the phosphate-oxygen isotope composition in cave drip waters and modern cave calcite provide clear evidence that the cave temperature signal can be captured and stored within the speleothem record. As the internal temperature of shallow cave systems are known to reflect the external average air temperature (plus or minus localised effects), this provides an exciting opportunity through which a truly independent terrestrial temperature record may be built. This research aims to build and test a modern-day calibration between cave temperature and speleothem phosphate-oxygen isotopes. This will enable a platform from which precisely dated, well preserved, independent temperature records can be confidently obtained from the global archive of speleothems at a spatial and temporal scale hitherto unprecedented.

International research suggests that in response to climate change global cities are now engaging in strategic efforts to effect a low carbon transition. That is, to enhance resilience and secure resources in the face of the impacts of climate change, resource constraints and in relation to new government and market pressures for carbon control. But significant questions remain unexplored. First, limited research has been undertaken internationally to comparatively examine how different cities in the north and south are responding to the challenges of climate change. Second, it is not clear whether the strategic intent of low carbon transitions can be realised in different urban contexts. Consequently, we propose to establish an international network, to be undertaken between leading scholars on urban climate change responses as an important step towards addressing these deficits. The network will focus on the research and policy issues involved in comparing and researching the broader dynamics and implications of low carbon urbanism. This network includes Australia, China, India, South Africa and the US and builds on existing scholars and research teams with whom we currently have bilateral and ad hoc collaborations. Our proposed collaboration is designed to create greater density of network connections and enhancing the depth of each connection by three sets of initiatives: 1. International Networking Opportunities: The first element of the ESRC initiative will be to support significant international research opportunities for UK researchers. We will undertake programmed and structure visits to each national context to: increase knowledge of one another's research and plans; to gain intelligence about the research landscape in the partner countries in this field in order to build up a global picture of research expertise; to exchange ideas about possible future collaborative research projects; and to build personal relationships that are at the heart of successful long-distance research partnerships. 2. International Comparative Collaboration: The second element of the network is to facilitate interaction between the partners in the research network and with a wider group of UK and international researchers through two connected forum that will meet four times. A. International Research Workshops (Network partners plus other relevant UK and international researchers). These meetings will focus primarily on enhancing comparison and collaboration with a wider group of researchers but will also serve as an important opportunity for developing publications in the form of special issues and edited collections. B. Network Partners Research Forum (Network partners only). The network will also sponsor a number of much smaller research forums, focused on the network partners. These workshops will enable a structured and protected space for the partners to share the findings from their ongoing work, and to explore and examine the implications of the issues and themes emerging from the larger workshops in this context. 3. International Network Infrastructure: The third element will focus on establishing the necessary infrastructure for promoting effective international research collaboration. The network will pursue two projects. A. Information Infrastructure: Durham will establish a website that facilitates collaboration among international partners. All partner researchers and institutions will have the opportunity to present and regularly update information about their ongoing research. The website will also serve as a base for communicating about events, visits, awards, etc. The website will also host audio and video recordings of workshops. B. International Network Coordinator: Additionally Durham will support a 20% network coordinator to manage and organize the visits, workshops, teleconferences and the website.

Explosions are a pressing and pervading threat in the modern world. Terrorist events such as the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, large-scale industrial accidents such as the 2020 Beirut explosion, and the current conflict in Ukraine, have highlighted a key gap in our knowledge: we do not we do not yet understand how blast waves propagate and interact with multiple obstacles in complex environments. Accordingly, we cannot yet predict the loading from such events, and our ability to determine the consequences relating to risk, structural damage, and casualty numbers, is severely limited. Current numerical tools for predicting blast loads in complex environments are either overly simplistic, or physics-based numerical tools which have been hitherto developed in the absence of experimental validation data. Clearly, progress in this area is limited and will remain so until we have the ability to experimentally measure the output from explosions occurring in settings of varying complexity at varying scales. This proposal will see the development of an ambitious and unique experimental facility, MicroBlast, for ultra-small-scale studies of blast propagation in complex environments, making use of rapid prototyping and 3D printing to generate true replica test specimens. MicroBlast will be a new state-of-the-art apparatus for data-rich, high spatial/temporal resolution, multi-parameter, full-field measurements of blast loading using a combination of pressure sensors, stereo high speed video cameras, and medium-wave infra-red cameras. This facility will be a step-change in our ability to perform rapid, precision experiments in explosive load quantification; the blast equivalent of a wind tunnel or shaking table test. We aim to study the fundamental mechanisms governing blast load development in complex environments, and set the agenda for future research in this area. Are explosions in crowded environments repeatable and deterministic, or are they highly sensitive to small changes in input parameters? What are the consequences for numerical modelling tools and experimental design? We aim to develop the next generation of predictive approaches for blast in urban environments, and to collectively raise the scientific benchmark of load prediction and structural damage assessment.

Analysis of the effects of high explosive blast loading on structures has applications in transport security, infrastructure assessment and defence protection. Engineers must utilise materials in efficient and effective ways to mitigate loads of extreme magnitudes, acting over milliseconds. But there is a fundamental problem which hampers research and practice in this field; we still do not fully understand the loads generated by a high explosive blast. Scientific characterisation of blast loading was a pressing issue in the middle of the last century, as researchers developed methods to predict the loading from large conventional blasts, and from atomic weapons at relatively long distances from targets. The huge amount of effort expended on this work, and the involvement of some of the world's leading physicists and mathematicians (G.I. Taylor, John von Neumann) reflected the existential nature of that threat. This work was predominately based on studying blast loading on targets at relatively long distances from detonations (far-field). Over the past few decades, whilst great advances have been made in understanding and designing materials to withstand extraordinary loads, experimental characterisation of blast loading itself has not kept pace in three key areas, which this project directly aims to address: Firstly, we don't know the magnitudes of explosive loading on targets very close to a high explosive detonation. Today's terrorist threats are frequently from smaller, focused, close-range explosions. Scenarios such as bombs smuggled onto aircraft, or targeted attacks on key items of critical infrastructure are ones in which such "near-field" loading is potentially devastating. But there is an almost total absence of high quality experimental work on characterising near-field blast loading. Predictions in these safety-critical areas currently rely on extrapolation of simple far-field models, or the use of inadequately validated numerical models. The project will provide new, properly validated, numerical models based on high quality experimental work to address this. This raises the second knowledge gap. Our current models of detonation-to-blast-wave mechanisms are based on simplified assumptions, such as that energy is released essentially instantaneously on detonation. Whilst this appears to work well for the far-field, there are major doubts over its validity in the near-field. This project will bring together blast engineers, high-temperature experimentalists, and energetic chemistry researchers to identify the role of early-stage post-detonation chemical reactions between the explosive fireball and the atmospheric oxygen in releasing energy, and how that affects the subsequent blast loading. The data gathered in the project will allow a new conceptual blast model to be created based on novel experimental analysis. The final knowledge gap is the question of whether blast loading in well-controlled scientific experiments is essentially deterministic or chaotic in nature. Addressing this issue is vital if the blast loading research community is to have the equivalent of a standard wind tunnel or shaking table test. Our preliminary work has led to the hypothesis that there is a region at the boundary between the near- and far-fields, where instabilities in the fireball will lead to large and random spatial and temporal variations in pressure loading, but that either side of this, the loading should be deterministic and determinable. The project will provide the data to validate this hypothesis, thus being able to provide guidance to other researchers in the field. Addressing these gaps, through a programme of multi-disciplinary experimental research, will produce a step change in our understanding of blast loading and our ability to protect against blast threats.