On a daily basis huge amounts of geospatial data and information that record location is created across a wide range of environmental, engineered and social systems. Globally approximately 2 quintillion bytes of data is generated daily which is location based. The economic benefits of geospatial data and information have been widely recognised, with the global geospatial industry predicted to be worth $500bn by 2020. In the UK the potential benefits of 'opening' up geospatial data is estimated by the government to be worth an additional £11bn annually to the economy and led to the announcement of a £80m Geospatial Commission. However, if the full economic benefits of the geospatial data revolution are to be realised, a new generation of geospatial engineers, scientists and practitioners are required who have the knowledge, technical skills and innovation to transform our understanding of the ever increasingly complex world we inhabit, to deliver highly paid jobs and economic prosperity, coupled with benefits to society. To seize this opportunity, the Centre for Doctoral Training in Geospatial Systems will deliver technically skilled doctoral graduates equipped with an industry focus, to work across a diverse range of applications including infrastructure systems, smart cities, urban-infrastructure resilience, energy systems, spatial mobility, structural monitoring, spatial planning, public health and social inclusion. Doctoral graduates will be trained in five core integrated geospatial themes: Spatial data capture and interpretation: modern spatial data capture and monitoring approaches, including Earth observation satellite image data, UAVs and drone data, and spatial sensor networks; spatial data informs us on the current status and changes taking place in different environments (e.g., river catchments and cities). Statistical and mathematical methods: innovative mathematical approaches and statistical techniques, such as predictive analytics, required to analyse and interpret huge volumes of geospatial data; these allow us to recognise and quantify within large volumes of data important locations and relationships. Big Data spatial analytics: cutting edge computational skills required for geospatial data analysis and modelling, including databases, cloud computing, pattern recognition and machine learning; modern computing approaches are the only way that vast volumes of location data can be analysed. Spatial modelling and simulation: to design and implement geospatial simulation models for predictive purposes; predictive spatial models allow us to understand where and when investment, interventions and actions are required in the future. Visualisation and decision support: will train students in modern methods of spatial data visualisation such as virtual and augmented reality, and develop the skills on how to deliver and present the outputs of geospatial data analysis and modelling; skills required to ensure that objective decisions and choices are made using geospatial data and information. The advanced training received by students will be employed within interdisciplinary PhD research projects co-designed with 40 partners ranging from government agencies, international engineering consultants, infrastructure operators and utility companies, and geospatial technology companies; organisations that are ideally positioned to leverage of the Big Data, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that are predicted to be the key to "accelerating geospatial industry growth" into the future. Throughout their training and research, students will benefit from cohort-based activities focused on group-working and industry interaction around innovation and entrepreneurship to ensure that our outstanding researchers are able to deliver innovation for economic prosperity across the spectrum of the geospatial industry and applied user sectors.

Globally, one in four cities is facing water stress, and the projected demand for water in 2050 is set to increase by 55%. These are significant and difficult problems to overcome, however this also provides huge opportunity for us to reconsider how our water systems are built, operated and governed. Placing an inspirational student experience at the centre of our delivery model, the Water Resilience for Infrastructure and Cities (WRIC) Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) will nurture a new generation of research leaders to provide the multi-disciplinary, disruptive thinking to enhance the resilience of new and existing water infrastructure. In this context the WRIC CDT will seek to improve the resilience of water infrastructure which conveys and treats water and wastewater as well as the impacts of water on other infrastructure systems which provide vital public services in urban environments. The need for the CDT is simple: Water infrastructure is fundamental to our society and economy in providing benefit from water as a vital resource and in managing risks from water hazards, such as wastewater, floods, droughts, and environmental pollution. Recent water infrastructure failures caused by climate change have provided strong reminders of our need to manage these assets against the forces of nature. The need for resilient water systems has never been greater and more recognised in the context of our industrial infrastructure networks and facilities for water supply, wastewater treatment and urban drainage. Similarly, safeguarding critical infrastructure in key sectors such as transport, energy and waste from the impacts of water has never been more important. Combined, resilience in these systems is vitally important for public health and safety. Industry, regulators and government all recognise the huge skills gap. Therefore there is an imperative need for highly skilled graduates who can transcend disciplines and deliver innovative solutions to contemporary water infrastructure challenges. Centred around unique and world leading water infrastructure facilities, and building on an internationally renowned research consortium (Cranfield University, The University of Sheffield and Newcastle University), this CDT will produce scientists and engineers to deliver the innovative and disruptive thinking for a resilient water infrastructure future. This will be achieved through delivery of an inspirational and relevant and end user-led training programme for researchers. The CDT will be delivered in cohorts, with deeply embedded horizontal and vertical training and integration within, and between, cohorts to provide a common learning and skills development environment. Enhanced training will be spread across the consortium, using integrated delivery, bespoke training and giving students a set of unique experiences and skills. Our partners are drawn from a range of leading sector and professional organisations and have been selected to provide targeted contributions and added value to the CDT. Together we have worked with our project partners to co-create the strategic vision for WRIC, particularly with respect to the training needs and challenges to be addressed for development of resilience engineers. Their commitment is evidenced by significant financial backing with direct (>£2.4million) and indirect (>£1.6million) monetary contributions, agreement to sit on advisory boards, access to facilities and data, and contributions on our taught programme.

The Centre for Digital Citizens (CDC) will address emerging challenges of digital citizenship, taking an inclusive, participatory approach to the design and evaluation of new technologies and services that support 'smart', 'data-rich' living in urban, rural and coastal communities. Core to the Centre's work will be the incubation of sustainable 'Digital Social Innovations' (DSI) that will ensure digital technologies support diverse end-user communities and will have long-lasting social value and impact beyond the life of the Centre. Our technological innovations will be co-created between academic, industrial, public and third sector partners, with citizens supporting co-creation and delivery of research. Through these activities, CDC will incubate user-led social innovation and sustainable impact for the Digital Economy (DE), at scale, in ways that have previously been difficult to achieve. The CDC will build on a substantial joint legacy and critical mass of DE funded research between Newcastle and Northumbria universities, developing the trajectory of work demonstrated in our highly successful Social Inclusion for the Digital Economy (SIDE) hub, our Digital Civics Centre for Doctoral Training and our Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC). The CDC is a response to recent research that has challenged simplified notions of the smart urban environment and its inhabitants, and highlighted the risks of emerging algorithmic and automated futures. The Centre will leverage our pioneering participatory design and co-creative research, our expertise in digital participatory platforms and data-driven technologies, to deliver new kinds of innovation for the DE, that empowers citizens. The CDC will focus on four critical Citizen Challenge areas arising from our prior work: 'The Well Citizen' addresses how use of shared personal data, and publicly available large-scale data, can inform citizens' self-awareness of personal health and wellbeing, of health inequalities, and of broader environmental and community wellbeing; 'The Safe Citizen' critically examines online and offline safety, including issues around algorithmic social justice and the role of new data technologies in supporting fair, secure and equitable societies; 'The Connected Citizen' explores next-generation citizen-led digital public services, which can support and sustain civic engagement and action in communities, and engagement in wider socio-political issues through new sustainable (openly managed) digital platforms; and 'The Ageless Citizen' investigates opportunities for technology-enhanced lifelong learning and opportunities for intergenerational engagement and technologies to support growth across an entire lifecourse. CDC pilot projects will be spread across the urban, rural and costal geography of the North East of England, embedded in communities with diverse socio-economic profiles and needs. Driving our programme to address these challenges is our 'Engaged Citizen Commissioning Framework'. This framework will support citizens' active engagement in the co-creation of research and critical inquiry. The framework will use design-led 'initiation mechanisms' (e.g. participatory design workshops, hackathons, community events, citizen labs, open innovation and co-production platform experiments) to support the co-creation of research activities. Our 'Innovation Fellows' (postdoctoral researchers) will engage in a 24-month social innovation programme within the CDC. They will pilot DSI projects as part of highly interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder teams, including academics and end-users (e.g. Community Groups, NGO's, Charities, Government, and Industry partners). The outcome of these pilots will be the development of further collaborative bids (Research Council / Innovate UK / Charity / Industry funded), venture capital pitches, spin-outs and/or social enterprises. In this way the Centre will act as a catalyst for future innovation-focused DE activity.

If we don't manage rainfall appropriately, it can lead to flooding. Traditionally, urban areas have been drained using underground sewer systems. These can be expensive and disruptive to build and maintain. Storm runoff collects contaminants as it flows over urban surfaces and through sewer pipes, and is a significant cause of river pollution. In many cities, combined sewers discharge raw sewage into natural water bodies during storm events. Without intervention, growing populations and the effects of climate change will increase the frequency and severity of urban flooding and pollution events. As an alternative to building more/larger sewers, we are starting to implement SuDS (Sustainable Drainage Systems). SuDS is an overarching term for a 'toolbox' of techniques that aim to deal with the quantity of rainfall, but also to have a positive impact on water quality, amenity and biodiversity. Retrofitting SuDS into urban areas can help to improve stormwater management within our existing urban areas. Vegetated bioretention cells (often referred to as rain gardens) are one of the simplest, practical and most reproducible SuDS options. They can be fitted adjacent to urban streets, dealing directly with road runoff. Bioretention cells are emerging as a preferred option in the USA and Australia. However, we do not yet have the same understanding of their performance as for traditional measures such as pipes. This is because they have 'living' elements (i.e. plants & soil) whose functionality varies from place to place and over time. The soil has a critical role to play in supporting plant life and managing runoff. Bioretention cells typically use engineered soils or 'substrates' that need to meet specific physical requirements. To reduce the requirements for imported materials, we need to be confident of their performance with locally-sourced substrate components, thereby reducing cost and improving overall sustainability. Water usage by plants helps to reduce runoff. We will observe plant water usage (evapotranspiration rates) in six full-scale bioretention cells functioning under semi-controlled conditions as part of the Newcastle University's new National Green Infrastructure Facility (funded by UKCRIC: EP/R010102/1). Controlled tests using smaller columns at the University of Sheffield's climate controlled laboratories will allow us to explore more substrate options. We will measure plant respiration in installed SuDS systems to generate a database of evapotranspiration rates for different urban plant types. Bioretention cells slow down excess flow before it is passed to the sewer. We will carry out a detailed investigation of how the substrate and drainage outlet arrangements affect runoff detention. Information relating to maintenance needs is particularly sparse, with clogging of substrates especially poorly understood. We will use magnetic, fluorescent, tracer particles to explore the vulnerability of substrates to clogging by the dirt and fine particles present in road runoff. Drainage engineers use hydraulic models to represent catchment runoff and sewer system flows. The new data will allow us to develop a numerical model of bioretention cell rainfall-runoff processes. Our project partners include the developers of the most widely-used drainage network modelling tools. We will work with them to include bioretention cells in their software. We will also update the cutting-edge urban flood risk model CityCAT to incorporate bioretention cells. Soil and vegetation conditions change over time in response to seasonal weather patterns, and vegetation lifecycles. Furthermore, the hydrological response is sensitive to rainfall duration and intensity, as well as antecedent soil moisture conditions. Conventional approaches to sizing drainage components tend to ignore all these sources of variability. We will develop new SuDS design guidance that uses probabilistic performance functions to address this.

What will the UK's critical infrastructure look like in 2030? In 2050? How resilient will it be? Decisions taken now by policy makers, NGOs, industrialists, and user communities will influence the answers to these questions. How can this decision making be best informed by considerations of infrastructural resilience? This project will consider future developments in the UK's energy and transport infrastructure and the resilience of these systems to natural and malicious threats and hazards, delivering a) fresh perspectives on how the inter-relations amongst our critical infrastructure sectors impact on current and future UK resilience, b) a state-of-the-art integrated social science/engineering methodology that can be generalised to address different sectors and scenarios, and c) an interactive demonstrator simulation that operationalises the otherwise nebulous concept of resilience for a wide range of decision makers and stakeholders.Current reports from the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Council for Science and Technology, and the Cabinet Office are united in their assessment that achieving and sustaining resilience is the key challenge facing the UK's critical infrastructure. They are also unanimous in their assessment of the main issues. First, there is agreement on the main threats to national infrastructure: i) climate change; ii) terrorist attacks; iii) systemic failure. Second, the complex, disparate and interconnected nature of the UK's infrastructure systems is highlighted as a key concern by all. Our critical infrastructure is highly fragmented both in terms of its governance and in terms of the number of agencies charged with achieving and maintaining resilience, which range from national government to local services and even community groups such as local resilience forums. Moreover, the cross-sector interactions amongst different technological systems within the national critical infrastructure are not well understood, with key inter-dependencies potentially overlooked. Initiatives such as the Cabinet Office's new Natural Hazards Team are working to address this. The establishment of such bodies with responsibility for oversight and improving joined up resilience is a key recommendation in all four reports. However, such bodies currently lack two critical resources: (1) a full understanding of the resilience implications of our current and future infrastructural organisation; and (2) vehicles for effectively conveying this understanding to the full range of relevant stakeholders for whom the term resilience is currently difficult to understand in anything other than an abstract sense. The Resilient Futures project will engage directly with this context by working with relevant stakeholders from many sectors and governance levels to achieve a step change in both (1) and (2). To achieve this, we will focus on future rather than present UK infrastructure. This is for a two reasons. First, we intend to engender a paradigm shift in resilience thinking - from a fragmented short-termism that encourages agencies to focus on protecting their own current assets from presently perceived threats to a longer-term inter-dependent perspective recognising that the nature of both disruptive events and the systems that are disrupted is constantly evolving and that our efforts towards achieving resilience now must not compromise our future resilience. Second, focussing on a 2030/2050 time-frame lifts discussion out of the politically charged here and now to a context in which there is more room for discussion, learning and organisational change. A focus on *current resilience* must overcome a natural tendency for the agencies involved to defend their current processes and practices, explain their past record of disruption management, etc., before the conversation can move to engaging with potential for improvement, learning and change.