Landslides are a major source of fatalities and damage related with strong earthquakes, particularly in mountain areas. Forecasting the distribution and impact of landslides induced by earthquakes is one of the greatest challenges in the earth sciences. The behavior of slopes during seismic excitation is exceptionally complex, being dependent upon geological, geomorphological, geotechnical and seismological factors. This project aims to identify the main characteristics of landslide occurrence during strong earthquakes in Chile, improving the understanding of their mechanics, spatial distribution and controlling factors, obtaining quantifiable inputs for the development of a methodology for earthquake-induced landslide hazard assessment. This will be achieved through compiling and analyzing inventories for two Chilean earthquakes (Aysén 2007 and Maule 2010) to be compared with foreign landslide inventories; running a laboratory testing scheme in UK for better understanding of the mechanical causes of seismic slope failure; and applying those results on the development of a method for assessing the seismic stability of slopes in Chile. The new methodology will be verified in the Santiago region, which presents the highest population of the country and where an active fault has been recently discovered (San Ramón Fault). The outputs will include scientific publications, advanced human resource training as well as a new technique of hazard assessment applicable to urban/territorial planning and natural disaster prevention strategies in the country.

The Palestinian liberation struggle has long been a standard-bearer for anti-colonial movements around the world. Rarely, however, have scholars investigated the historical process by which Palestinians embedded their cause within other struggles in the global south. The Palestinian Americas is the first project to document in detail how Palestinians forged such ties in a specific geographical context: that of Latin America in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Rather than assume Third World solidarities to have been produced across discrete national or regional blocs operating under Cold War logics, the project focuses on the revolutionary activism of diasporic Palestinians, emphasising forms of south-south migration and connectivity that bypassed European and North American channels. Since the early 20th century, Latin America has been home to the largest number of Palestinians in the world outside the Middle East (around 1 million), with particularly high concentrations in Central America and Chile. While these communities have long been known for their success as business entrepreneurs, significant numbers joined Latin American revolutionary movements from the 1950s onwards. Against a backdrop of rising Third World solidarity, this new generation of activists came into increasing contact with the nascent Palestinian liberation struggle as they sought to link their local activism to a global picture of anti-imperial resistance. Yet they also had to contend with hostility among fellow Palestinians in Latin America who often viewed involvement in left-wing activism as a threat to their economic interests. The project explores the complexity and specificity of these diasporic spaces, providing new insight on the struggles involved in forming south-south solidarities in the mid-20th century. From indigenous demands for land reform in El Salvador, to student movements in Chile, to the Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua, Palestinian revolutionaries in Latin America were embedded within distinctly local socio-political contexts. At the same time, their activism frequently forced them into clandestine lifestyles as they escaped persecution and sought to build new ties of solidarity. Using carefully chosen case studies, the research probes this interplay between movement, localised space and revolutionary activism through a combination of ethnographic and documentary sources, reconstructing the networks of kin and ideology that sustained diasporic Palestinians in their precarious journeys across disparate locations. The research is geared towards 3 main outputs. Firstly, an article in a leading journal of global history will look at Santiago de Chile as a hub for Palestinian revolutionary activists from across Latin America and the Middle East in order to make a broader intervention in how global historians can explore south-south solidarities in the era of Third World revolution. Secondly, an international conference and resulting special issue will establish a new, collective research agenda looking at the Arab diaspora's historic engagement with the Palestinian struggle. Thirdly, the project will digitise materials held in Chile, El Salvador and France to produce 3 new collections and 2 digital stories in the Planet Bethlehem Archive, an online resource that documents the diasporic heritage of Bethlehem - the town that produced the majority of Palestinian migration to the Americas. The project will make these outputs useful to key stakeholders beyond the academic sector through a consultative engagement programme that sees the PI partnering with archives and cultural organisations in Latin America, as well as a group of diasporic Palestinian writers and artists, to shape collectively a series of public events, educational materials and media publications. The PI will also draft a book aimed at a general readership which tells the story of Latin America's entanglement with the Palestinian struggle in the 20th century.

This research aims to rethink urban crisis by expanding conceptual and empirical understanding of how crises are governed across the interrelated spheres of health, social, and economic policy. As traditional forms of state service provision are disrupted through state-led restructuring under crisis, the pressure for innovative urban solutions and competition for resources increases. Using Athens, Manchester, and Santiago as case studies, this research will identify the economic, political and social stresses involved in providing spaces of care to the urban poor, who are disproportionately affected by crises, and the policies and politics involved in attempting to manage intersecting urban crises. Urban service innovation has been a key area of development for government, industry, and academia. For example, the UN Sustainable Development Goals 3 and 11, on health and urbanization respectively, have highlighted the importance of a wholistic understanding of the relationship between health, well-being, and sustainable urban environments. Urban health is one of eight key challenges set out by the European Commission's platform on the Future of Cities. Urban Health in Latin America and the Caribbean is a research priority for the International Science Council, and global consultancies such as ARUP have focused on health and care proximities as key in urban development and design. The findings of the research program will help solidify and expand the evidence base on the links between urban crises, governance, experimentation, and the politics and practices of health and social care. I will make two key contributions. First, the project will make a novel contribution to understanding the spread and effects of state-led restructuring of spaces of health and social care in cities during and after urban crisis, advancing an empirical and conceptual agenda that centres health in understanding the urban politics of crisis. Second it will identify how cities negotiate the difficult task of managing conflicting international, national and local agendas focusing on the tensions between financial stability on the one hand and social sustainability and public health interventions on the other. This research will compare how national and local governments address crisis in three interrelated spheres: health, social care, and the economy. It will examine the implications for urban politics, governance, and urban experimentation surrounding the policies and the siting of as well as access to public health facilities and spaces of care for low-income communities across the three cities. I will do so by investigating the relationship between urban politics, and the need for increasing local provision of public health services and social care in Athens, Manchester, and Santiago through a relational comparative approach. The research questions that will guide this work are: 1. What forms of urban crisis are manifest in each city? What are the processes of addressing these crises from a national and municipal perspective? 2. How have the practices, politics, and policies surrounding urban crisis and their on-going effects shaped spaces of urban public health and care in each city? 3. What forms of experimentation have emerged in the immediate wake of urban crisis and what are the ongoing effects of this experimentation on spaces of health and social care? 4. How has state provision of urban public health and care changed over time in each city? What have been the main political debates in the cities affected? 5. What, if any, alternative forms of service provision have emerged to manage the effects of crisis and crisis policies on urban health services?

Landslides are a major source of fatalities and damage related with strong earthquakes, particularly in mountain areas. Forecasting the distribution and impact of landslides induced by earthquakes is one of the greatest challenges in the earth sciences. The behavior of slopes during seismic excitation is exceptionally complex, being dependent upon geological, geomorphological, geotechnical and seismological factors. This project aims to identify the main characteristics of landslide occurrence during strong earthquakes in Chile, improving the understanding of their mechanics, spatial distribution and controlling factors, obtaining quantifiable inputs for the development of a methodology for earthquake-induced landslide hazard assessment. This will be achieved through compiling and analyzing inventories for two Chilean earthquakes (Aysén 2007 and Maule 2010) to be compared with foreign landslide inventories; running a laboratory testing scheme in UK for better understanding of the mechanical causes of seismic slope failure; and applying those results on the development of a method for assessing the seismic stability of slopes in Chile. The new methodology will be verified in the Santiago region, which presents the highest population of the country and where an active fault has been recently discovered (San Ramón Fault). The outputs will include scientific publications, advanced human resource training as well as a new technique of hazard assessment applicable to urban/territorial planning and natural disaster prevention strategies in the country.

Rural electrification is fundamental for the social and economic development and well-being of developing countries, as it supports the development of vital critical infrastructures (e.g. communication and transportation) and it provides energy to critical services to peoples' quality of everyday life, such as home appliances, health and water supply. The lack or limited and highly unreliable access to electricity still remains one of the key challenges that rural and remote communities face in these countries. In order though for the electrification to go beyond lightning, it is critical to develop energy networks that are sustainable, cost-effective, and scalable, as well as resilient, particularly in areas that are frequently exposed to natural hazards, such as floods, monsoons, etc. In this context, the ambition of this project is to develop a novel holistic techno-economic framework for supporting and enabling the decision, policy and regulatory making towards the design of transformative energy networks in developing countries. This holistic framework will be supported by the development of an options portfolio for sustainable electrification, including a mixture of infrastructure solutions (e.g. building new or upgrading existing infrastructure) and emerging low-carbon distributed energy resources that will focus on the development of sustainable microgrids (both grid-connected and off-grid). Further, integrated system simulation models will be developed to analyse the vulnerability and quantify the risk and resilience profile of these energy solutions to natural hazards and extreme weather. This is is highly timely given the latest evidence of the impact of such events worldwide and also highly critical if the rural communities are to withstand and quickly recover from such catastrophic events. Following these analyses, stochastic optimization planning techniques will be developed to support the optimal design of these energy networks, considering transformative energy technologies, to maximize the impact on the well-being of local communities. Building on this last point, the research team has developed a well-structured user-engagement strategy, bridging to wider socio-economic aspects of communities facing electrification challenges. The aims of this strategy are to get an in-depth understanding of the electricity needs of rural communities in the partner countries (China and Malaysia), enable their active role in the project and provide briefing and training sessions on the use of the new energy technologies to be applied in these communities. The UK and overseas research teams will jointly work with the local industrial partners to facilitate this active involvement of remote villages, communities and their local authorities. This project will aim to complement and further strengthen the current electrification plans of the partner countries, i.e. Malaysia and China. The research team will work closely with Sarawak Energy and other authorities in Malaysia to review and improve its Rural Power Supply Scheme that was formulated in 2015, as well as evaluate and improve the design, operability and maintenance planning of existing microgrids in Zhoushan islands, China, which also serve as excellent testbeds for validating the simulation models developed by the project. Within this context, this project will also aim to develop recommendations for changes and improvements in standards, regulatory and policy-making frameworks. We will aim to make the key findings and recommendations of this work of generic applicability and validity to accommodate its international development importance. This would also be of UK national importance, where building sustainable energy networks for reducing its carbon footprint, while being resilient to extreme weather (e.g., the storms of 1987, 2007 and 2015 which resulted in major power outages) is key for safeguarding the social and economic well-being of the country.