RESILIENCE THROUGH INNOVATION: CRITICAL LOCAL TRANSPORT AND UTILITY INFRASTRUCTURE

The physical infrastructure that facilitates the transport of people, freight, waste and utility services, and thus provides the essential support to civilised life, is under threat from numerous sources: deterioration through (often extreme) ageing, adverse ground chemistry, surface loading or stress relief due to open-cut interventions; severely increased demand; ever changing (different, or altered) demands; terrorism; the effects of climate change; funding constraints and severe natural hazards (extreme weather events, earthquakes, landslides, etc.). Such vulnerability, and the need for resilience in the face of such threats, is recognised widely - see Building Britain's Future17 and the ICE's State of The Nation Report: Defending Critical Infrastructure18 (both 2009), and the aims of the new Infrastructure UK delivery body18. This feasibility study seeks to explore radically different ways of conceptualising, designing, constructing, maintaining, managing, adapting and valuing the physical infrastructure to make it resilient no matter which threats are manifested or how the future develops. In this context resilience refers to the symbiosis existing between infrastructure, management systems and end users.Recent years have witnessed a shift to a more transdisciplinary concept of resilience that integrates the physical (both built and natural) and socio-political aspects of resilience. This change has been crucial because the socio-political and managerial aspects are arguably as important to the attainment of resilience as the physical aspects; resilient engineering also demands a more resilient infrastructural context with regard to the professions and the structures and processes which govern engineering activity.This proposal explores the engineering and social dimensions of resilience research needed to bring about radical changes in thinking and practice for an assured future in the face of multiple challenges. The following represent two core resilience themes at the interface of engineering, spatial planning and social science, from which feasibility studies to address key challenges will emerge via a series of workshops. The tangible manifestation lies in Local Area Agreements - a set of 32 centrally-approved and locally-implemented performance indicators linking engineered solutions, mechanisms for adoption, behavioural adaptation and education.1. Bespoke local utility infrastructures for resilient communities2. The role of transport in societal resilienceThe research team draws from five major research groups at the University of Birmingham, all of whom are addressing core themes of infrastructure and resilience. The team is supported by innovative thinkers drawn from the stakeholder community, both practitioners and policy makers. The primary themes to be studied are the creation of local utility infrastructures and transport to deliver resilience, recognising the UK shift towards enhancing innovation in the public/private sectors and local decision-making and delivery. Our team will deepen trans-disciplinary research by overcoming the tension that exists between the engineering focus on solutions and the social scientists concern with problems by developing realistic solutions to local problems. This requires exploration of the interface between four communities of practice: engineering and physical sciences, social sciences, private firms and local government. The intention is to identify solutions that reduce costs and enhance delivery, but also to identify new projects that have the potential to create innovative products that have commercial value.

The potential impacts of feasibility studies such as these are enormous, yet are impossible to quantify at this stage. It is widely appreciated that transport and utility services infrastructures represent an enormous capital investment, are wearing out and are being maintained and replaced at a rate that will leave future generations with very large legacy costs. This bid proposes research that could lead to an alternative paradigm; one in which the services are valued by individuals and responsibility for their continued maintenance and operation is, to some degree, shifted towards the members of the society that relies upon these services. This shift towards collective 'ownership' will influence user behaviour, and behavioural change is important as one feature of bringing about resilience. A simple analogy is water metering: usage without meters is largely unrestricted, yet with meters installed water usage is valued (driven here by a direct cost penalty for overuse) and usage markedly drops. In very difficult economic times, this research will offer potential alternatives and society will be the main beneficiary. However, behavioural change will not happen without societal and individual willingness to embrace it, hence the necessity of the cross-disciplinary approach. Moreover, these feasibility studies are needed urgently as governments are desperately struggling to find acceptable solutions that can protect these vital national assets; the case for timeliness is unarguable. These studies provide a vehicle for direct extrapolation, albeit via major leaps in thinking, of the combined research of the consortium and deliver efficiency in all sorts of ways, not least the potential to reach the numerous stakeholder groups associated with our current projects. The deliverables from the project will aid policy makers, planners and other high-level decision makers in creating more sustainable and resilient cities and city regions, and ultimately benefit the societies that they serve and the national economy. In the far future, the beneficiaries of follow-on research from the project are: - City Councils, who are responsible for managing the sustainable redevelopment of the areas under their control and who will be able to make direct use of the findings to deliver more resilient infrastructures. - The infrastructure owners, which is likely to include a public-private mix, and one that might change from the present given that road privatisation features as a possibility in the new coalition government's plans. - Practitioners in the field of urban resilience, ranging from developers, architects, consultants, contractors, planners, environmental scientists and utility service providers to economists and businesses. - The regional development agencies - one of their stated objectives is to 'engender sustainable practices'. - Local authorities and equivalent international bodies in the process of seeking effective transport and utility solutions, who may wish to adopt the project outcomes and identify best approaches to implementation. - The developing UK environmental technologies industrial clusters, which will gain insight into the needs and potential for new technologies in the context of urban resilience, as identified by the feasibility studies. - Policy makers, regulators and non-governmental bodies with interests in resilience issues, who will gain insight into means of bringing about more resilient, and therefore sustainable, practices.