Urban Living Pilot – From Citizen to Co-innovator, from City Council to Facilitator

Duration: 06/16 - 11/17

As the largest city outside London, with a diverse and youthful population, Birmingham has the potential to set a new agenda for urban living. Yet the city has struggled for decades with economic difficulties, reinforced by declining expenditure and global forces.

Urban Living Pilot – From Citizen to Co-innovator, from City Council to Facilitator seeks to engage a spectrum of universities, research institutions and local, regional and national organisations into the Urban Living Birmingham Consortium. This will help catalyse service innovations within the city by encouraging collaborations between providers and users to create more efficient, adaptive service models in different sectors.

By combining top-down urban governance with bottom-up lay knowledge, the project will lay the foundation for a more creative and collaborative approach to service delivery, and so offering the possibility of transformative urban management in Birmingham and other UK cities.

John Bryson (Principal Investigator, Professor of Enterprise and Economic Geography)
Bjorn Birgisson (Executive Dean of School of Engineering and Applied Science)
Peter Braithwaite (Director of Engineering Sustainability)
Julie Christian (Lecturer)
Jon Coaffee (Professor in Urban Geography)
Martin Freer (Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy)
Dexter Hunt (Lecturer)
Peter Lee (Senior Lecturer)
Joanne Leach (Researcher)
John Mohan (Professor of Social Policy)
Ian Nabney (Executive Dean)
Christopher Rogers (Professor of Geotechnical Engineering)
Jon Sadler (Professor of Biogeography)
Alister Scott (Professor of Environment and Spatial Planning)
Miles Tight (Professor of Transport, Energy and Environment)

Creation of a multi-stakeholder Urban Living Birmingham Consortium, bringing together local authorities, research organisations, service providers and businesses.

Series of activities with project partners, including workshops, symposia, innovation stations and seminars.

Roundtable discussions with the Cabinet of Birmingham City Council and the Leaders and Chief Executive Officers Group of the West Midlands Combined Authority to maximise the impact of the findings.

The end (of the project) is near
2 February 2018

From Birmingham with a smile: public art, streetscapes and the ‘economic’ impacts of a liveable city
8 December 2017

The Geovation Challenge: Greener, Smarter Communities
2 November 2017

The Economic Black Hole at the Heart of the Switch to Electric Vehicles
18 August 2017

Birmingham 2040: The Ban on New Petrol and Diesel Engines, Electric Vehicles and Robotics
28 July 2017