Public Funding for Tranquil City Ltd

There is a global need to develop Net Zero cities which are intrinsically linked to wider United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our research has discovered that Local Authorities and NGOs face significant barriers in identifying strategic, impactful interventions and reporting on progress towards critical SDG targets. The end result is that Local Authorities and NGOs struggle to secure funding and public agreement for greener interventions because they cannot effectively demonstrate how they progress towards policy objectives and global targets. Tranquil City's core innovative geospatial data products are currently not suitable for Local Authorities and NGOs that don't have in-house data analysis expertise to turn this information into insights that help decision-making about intervention sites and spend, particularly nature-based solutions. This limits the use of strategic datasets to areas with significant funding capability, as well as in-house expertise, hindering the Net Zero transition and levelling up agenda. Our proposed project is to conduct detailed design discovery for the 'Make My City Thrive' web-based tool and package of white-labelled digital integrations (Data Toolkits and APIs) using human-centred hypothesis testing and A/B design methods. Our proposed solution transforms complex geospatial environmental and urban data into actionable intelligence that enables impact tracking and prioritisation of local infrastructure and behaviour change interventions towards Net Zero, health and wellbeing policies, ultimately fulfilling the SDGs. The solution will provide robust, in-depth analysis and insights to Local Authorities and NGOs, offering white-labelled online dashboards suitable to encourage public support and adoption. We will be conducting solution ideation and validation with four key stakeholders, including City Councils and Environmental NGOs to define an MVP priority features suitable for costing and development. The project is innovative in three ways: * Brings together multi-disciplinary environmental and urban data, reducing silos, and encouraging holistic, people and planet-centred solutions; * Applies human-centred product development methods to ensure the features address the core problem, increasing the feasibility of greener, sustainable urban interventions. * Expands the availability, production and use of environmental datasets and intelligent data analytics to empower Local Authorities, NGOs and national governments to be strategic in their coordination of local interventions that progress towards policy aims.

More and more geospatial information on environmental quality is becoming available. This emerging data has numerous applications including enabling sustainable and healthy city planning, encouraging citizen awareness and healthier behaviours as well as tracking progress towards healthy and sustainable outcomes. However, the production of these datasets is expensive and resource intensive and planners are not used to dealing with large GIS datasets. This significantly limits the realisation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing) and 15 (Life on Land). Cities without such environmental datasets are therefore limited in their ability to effectively justify, plan and track progress of significant urban interventions and citizen behaviour change. Tranquil City has prototyped an innovative, people-centred and cost-effective geospatial data product package that delivers strategic and high-resolution environmental quality and infrastructure information to promote healthier behaviours through tech platforms. Our method uses machine learning (ML) techniques to learn from 'data rich' cities and train a model to use globally available datasets to predict high-resolution data for many environmental factors (air quality, noise, green space quality, water elements, tree cover, Tranquillity and Healthy Streets Indices) in any city or area worldwide at a fraction of the cost of the standard modelling approaches used to date. This data is commercialised via our licensed data toolkits and APIs for access integration into public-facing applications that can encourage healthier, more sustainable behaviours. Our plan for the future is to support planning authorities and practitioners to work toward the SDGs. With Innovate UK's funding, we will engage with current clients and stakeholders to understand and iterate on our initial concepts of offering this data for spatial planning, including validation, scaling and delivery. The outputs will include feasibility studies of how planners would most like to use and handle the data, model and monitor the impact of interventions against SDG targets and how best to implement wide-scale data production methods.

More and more geospatial information on environmental quality is becoming available. This emerging data has numerous applications including enabling sustainable and healthy city planning, encouraging citizen awareness and healthier behaviours as well as tracking progress towards healthy and sustainable outcomes. However, the production of these datasets is expensive and resource intensive and planners are not used to dealing with large GIS datasets. This significantly limits the realisation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing) and 15 (Life on Land). Cities without such environmental datasets are therefore limited in their ability to effectively justify, plan and track progress of significant urban interventions and citizen behaviour change. Tranquil City has prototyped an innovative, people-centred and cost-effective geospatial data product package that delivers strategic and high-resolution environmental quality and infrastructure information to promote healthier behaviours through tech platforms. Our method uses machine learning (ML) techniques to learn from 'data rich' cities and train a model to use globally available datasets to predict high-resolution data for many environmental factors (air quality, noise, green space quality, water elements, tree cover, Tranquillity and Healthy Streets Indices) in any city or area worldwide at a fraction of the cost of the standard modelling approaches used to date. This data is commercialised via our licensed data toolkits and APIs for access integration into public-facing applications that can encourage healthier, more sustainable behaviours. Our plan for the future is to support planning authorities and practitioners to work toward the SDGs. With Innovate UK's funding, we will engage with current clients and stakeholders to understand and iterate on our initial concepts of offering this data for spatial planning, including validation, scaling and delivery. The outputs will include feasibility studies of how planners would most like to use and handle the data, model and monitor the impact of interventions against SDG targets and how best to implement wide-scale data production methods.