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Connected Places Catapult
The new name for the Future Cities and Transport Systems Catapults

About Us

Working with cities, communities and businesses to create connected places

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Find out how you can connect with us at Connected Places Catapult

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Who we are

The new Connected Places Catapult accelerates smarter living and travelling in and between the places of tomorrow. We focus on growing businesses with innovations in mobility services and the built environment that enable new levels of physical, digital and social connectedness. The Connected Places Catapult operates at the intersection between public and private sectors and between local government and transport authorities. We convene the disparate parts of the market to help innovators navigate the complexity of doing business, creating new commercial opportunities and improving productivity, socio-economic and environmental benefits for places.

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Work with us

We work with people and places to define, create, test, and deploy products and services that help secure wellbeing for us all.

We want to work with you.

Connection is what drives innovation in placemaking: connected citizens, communities, public and private stakeholders; connected infrastructures and systems; connected data and information; connected languages and standards.

By embedding intelligent connection at every level of our social infrastructure and transport systems we can make places that work holistically for all of us, and the world we live in. The exponential evolution of digital technology is delivering the tools needed to create connected places fit not just for the future wellbeing of people and the environment – but also for innovative infrastructure and entrepreneurial economies.

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Connected Places Catapult opens office in Leeds

The Catapult specialises in bringing together businesses, universities, Local Authorities and investors to commercialise and exploit innovation for the good of people living in the UK.

The Connected Places Catapult will help the North west and Yorkshire regions access a £1.5 trillion global market opportunity to develop smart cities and transport technologies, such as self-driving cars. The region’s world leading tech businesses and Local Authorities will also benefit from links to the Catapult’s London, Milton Keynes and Glasgow offices.
17 May 2019

Systems-thinking and housing

An important longstanding complexity theory idea is what has come to be known as Ashby’s principle of requisite variety. This essentially says that confronting a complex problem or system requires an equivalent or sufficient range of responses. Trying to break the problem down into manageable components will likely fail. The failure to balance complex problems and responses has come to be known as the complexity gap.

What do we mean by systems-thinking? Systems-thinking is not a unified approach but rather a set of multidisciplinary ideas and practices that have evolved, split into sub-disciplines and often become entangled with other innovative traditions, such as design-thinking. It is both a broad orientation that operates holistically and considers the system as a whole but is also a diverse set of specific tools and techniques for thinking about how systems operate. Here, we focus on a leading way in which systems-thinking is deployed – embracing ideas of complexity but we also allude to other mental models such as systems archetypes.
16 May 2019

Ground-breaking driverless car project showcases vision for a connected transport future

These findings focus on data and connectivity and consider how data can be leveraged to optimise the functionality of the road network and provide an enhanced user experience.

Tracey Poole, FLOURISH Project Manager and Transport Planning specialist at Atkins, a member of the SNC-Lavalin group, says:

“Throughout the last three years, the FLOURISH team has been committed to exploring how innovative new technologies can be used to keep our cities moving and people connected.

 
13 May 2019

Housebuilders and barriers to modern construction methods
07 May 2019

It’s time to build homes fit for ageing generations now

By our late 80s, more than one-in-three people will have difficulty with five or more basic daily activities, like washing and dressing. And actually, ill health for many starts in mid-life, with 50-64-year olds having a long-term health condition such as high blood pressure, arthritis or breathing problems.

A suitable home is crucial for our health and wellbeing as we grow older. It can keep us safe and free from injury and falls, enable us to remain active and independent, and help us avoid costly health and social care. This will become ever more important as the number of people living into their 70s, 80s and 90s continues to grow.
29 April 2019

Future-proofing our train stations

They connect cities and places. Buses, tubes, tramways, passengers and pedestrians all converge towards them turning them into hubs of mobility. Stations are permanent structures at the core of the mobility shift we are currently experiencing. While innovation within train stations has mainly had an impact on the design of public spaces or infrastructure expenditures, there has been much less focus on the customer’s well-being or the improvement of their experience. However, this trend is about to change as the government has just announced a record £48 billion investment to modernise England and Wales’ rail network between 2019 and 2024. Rail Minister, Andrew Jones MP, said: “By improving trains, tracks and stations right across the country, we will deliver more reliable, frequent and comfortable journeys for passengers and better connect our communities.”
24 April 2019

Understanding local housing markets

There is widespread public and political recognition that we are in the midst of a crisis in housing and local authorities will play an important role in fixing it.
23 April 2019

April's PlanTech Show & Tell Breakfast: A bebrief

The Connected Places Catapult accelerates smarter living and travelling in and between the places of tomorrow. We operate at the intersection between public and private sectors and between local government and transport authorities. Bringing the disparate parts of the market together to help innovators navigate the complexity of doing business, it creates new commercial opportunities and improves productivity, socio-economic and environmental benefits for places.
18 April 2019

Transforming housing construction

Construction is labour intensive. It relies on the availability of skilled workers, and these are in decline due to the age profile of the workforce and the reliance on migrant labour, mainly from the EU. To boost production, the sector needs to adopt more productive methods of constructing houses.
15 April 2019

Accelerator seeking new applicants in transport innovation arena

The IM Accelerator is a partnership between Connected Places Catapult and Wayra UK, the world-leading start-up accelerator that is part of Telefónica Open Future_ based in Milton Keynes. The programme is designed to attract disruptive start-ups with high-growth potential into the UK transport industry, helping them grow into world-leading companies.

The programme is also supported by Hyundai, Stagecoach Group and Ferrovial, who will all provide support to start-ups at the Accelerator, including mentoring, coaching, and access to their high-level expertise and networks.
12 April 2019

Local plans... Where do they hide them? And why?

Yet, most people probably don’t know a local plan even exists, still less its importance. This may be due to the dry and jargon-heavy language used by the gatekeepers of planning, purposefully or otherwise. Or perhaps they just don’t know where to find it.

A survey released last year by Society for IT practitioners in the public sector (SOCITM) helps us to quantify just how inaccessible the local plan is. I’ll let the results speak for themselves.
08 April 2019

Blog - Welcoming innovation in housing: If not now, when?

According to UN-Habitat, housing accounts for over 70% of land use in most cities. In the narrow sense, housing refers to our homes where we spend most of our family and private time. From a broader perspective, housing is a multifaceted industry covering a wide range of activities, from land identification to planning, design, construction, sales/leasing, property management, refurbishment, etc. Playing a pivotal role in our economic development and culture of living, housing has frequently featured at the top of the political agenda, as well as in media and our daily life.
08 April 2019

Connected Places Catapult set to accelerate smarter living and travelling

The Connected Places Catapult, a new organisation which combines the Transport Systems and Future Cities Catapults, has officially begun operations. The new Connected Places Catapult will accelerate smarter living and travelling, in and between the places of tomorrow. The new Catapult will grow businesses with innovations in mobility services and the built environment, that enable new levels of physical, digital and social connectedness – driving even faster growth for the UK economy.

The Connected Places Catapult will focus on working across boundaries, bureaucracies, public and private sectors, on a whole system approach to achieve this goal. Like the legacy organisations before it, the new Catapult will engage academic networks, diverse SME ecosystems, business and government departments as it seeks to foster new markets, boost demand for innovation and increase the supply of proven products and services across transport, cities, towns and villages.
01 April 2019

The Transport Systems and Future Cities Catapults will unite to form the Connected Places Catapult.

The Connected Places Catapult will be led by Nicola Yates OBE who was appointed Chief Executive of the new organisation in February.

Nicola Yates said: “I am delighted to be leading this exciting new Catapult. We have developed an ambitious strategy to build on the expertise of our two previous organisations by removing the boundaries that will enable us to explore more confidently new projects and areas of growth. Our new name, Connected Places, encapsulates this ambition at the intersection of urban and transport innovation.”
04 March 2019

Future Cities and Transport Systems Catapults awarded investment to create innovation powerhouse

The investment is part of £215 million committed to the Digital, Medicines Discovery, Future Cities and Transport Systems Catapult centres as part of the government’s modern Industrial Strategy.

It builds on the announcement made in August by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond, of nearly £1 billion for the Catapult network and fully funds all centres for the next 5 years.

Future Cities Catapult and Transport Systems Catapult will unite to create a new organisation that will bring together their skills and expertise to tackle the problems of modern city living and address the future of mobility. The new Catapult will drive even faster growth for the UK economy by exploiting the strong synergies between the two organisations.
23 October 2018

Latest News and Insights

Discover the latest updates and blogs from the Connected Places Catapult as we help shape a connected future for the places we live.

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PlanTech - May Breakfast Show & Tell

A webinar option will be available too, click the appropriate ticket when registering.

Speakers

  • Representative from MHCLG – presenting work on digitalising local plans
  • Representative from GLA – presenting upcoming version of infrastructure mapping­­­
  • Representative from Plan X – presenting Plan X status
  • Representative from Future Gov – presenting the Viability tool

Agenda

08.30 Registration

09:00 Talk starts & questions from the audience

10:00 Event ends

Complimentary breakfast will be provided.
21 May 2019

Modelling World 2019

For a full agenda and to register to join, follow the link below.
04 June 2019

Lunchtime Lecture: Car parking in cities: immobility and infrastructure

Cars provide us with flexible mobility, freedom, comfort and experience of progress. But these aspects of automobility are based on cars in movement – a partial picture which misses the fact that usually they remain stationary. As such, they are problematic for drivers, create obstacles for people in public places and have to be managed, often at a great cost, as they take up large portion of urban space.

Looking at parking as a social practice helps to understand it in the context of everyday mobility and production of infrastructure in cities. I want to distinguish parking from driving and see it immobility as it is achieved by people and that requires special set of skills, knowledge and rules. Although rarely seen in this context, parking also relates to a special kind of infrastructure composed not only from car parks and lots, but also temporary or self-made places occupied by vehicles.

The talk will draw on this twofold understanding of parking to show its relevance for everyday experiences of people as well as planning and control of urban spaces. It will discuss its problematic nature and argue that changes in how people practice immobility in cities and create infrastructure are necessary for achieving better urban futures.

Speaker: Karol Kurnicki Institute of Advanced Study, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies University of Warwick

Programme 

12.30 Registration

13.00 Talk starts

14.00 Talk ends
12 June 2019

Digital Masterplanning - London Festival of Architecture

Connected Places Catapult, together with Kohn Pedersen Fox partnered to explore what the future of masterplanning might hold over the coming decades and how emerging technologies will be instrumental in disrupting the industry and how it will help us deliver faster, more agile and future-proofed masterplans – fit for 21st Century cities.

In this session we will be presenting and discussing the speculative design of a digital tool that we developed which would turn the idea of masterplanning on its head by radically change the relationship between public authorities, consultants and developers.

Instead devising a masterplan will be a simple and easy as adding items to your Amazon ‘shopping cart’ mixing and matching different buildings until the developable site area meets the aspirations of the developer and local planning authority.

Programme

08.30 – Registration

09.00 Talk starts

10.00 – Talk ends
13 June 2019

MUSICC Symposium: The pathway to certification of CAVs

MUSICC is a Department for Transport commissioned project, being delivered by the Connected Places Catapult, which is exploring aspects of the future certification framework for HAVs. The aim of MUSICC is to create an initial implementation of a usable, living, HAV scenario catalogue. The catalogue will store scenarios that specify the critical situations which highly-automated vehicles must handle safely to be suitable for release to market.

For more information about the project, click here

At this event, the project architect will present the scenario definition language and online scenario repository created by the project, and report on the ongoing testing phase of the MUSICC system.

A keynote presentation will be given by a representative of the UK regulator, and will describe their agenda for HAVs.

Additional speakers will highlight the views of proving grounds, simulation tool providers, and HAV developers.

Two break-out sessions will allow stakeholders to input on firstly the shape of the certification framework surrounding MUSICC, and secondly the priorities for system functionality to support this.
24 June 2019

International Physical Internet Conference (IPIC) 2019

The 6th Annual International Physical Internet Conference (IPIC) aims to provide an open forum for researchers, industry representatives, government officials and citizens to explore leading edge freight transport and logistics concepts, methodologies, projects, technological advancements and start-up initiatives.

The Physical Internet concept takes freight and logistics services and aims to make them as accessible and connected as information and services are over internet. This represents a huge opportunity for the sector to improve efficiency and sustainability through connected, interoperable and shared used of resources and assets on a massive scale, whilst supporting the massive challenge of decarbonization.

Conference topics include inter-connected logistics, cross-chain control, synchromodal transportation, open logistics networks, systems & technologies for interconnected logistics, supply chain coordination & collaboration, and urban freight transport and logistics. Through these areas IPIC will touch on exciting new areas such as automated transport, robotics, artificial intelligence, internet of things and blockchain.
09 July 2019

Connections Cafe: Support and Networking Event - Milton Keynes

09:30am – 12:30pm

Connections Cafes look to explore developments and opportunities in the Intelligent Mobility Transport and Connected Places sectors, and also offer support and guidance to growing businesses to help them bridge the gap between new innovations and commercial success. You will also have the chance to network with the CPC team and other businesses from within the industry.

We welcome all SMEs and businesses who work within these exciting sectors.
17 July 2019

Connections Cafe: Support and Networking Event - University of Leeds, Nexus

Connections Cafes look to explore developments and opportunities in the Intelligent Mobility Transport and Connected Places sectors, and also offer support and guidance to growing businesses to help them bridge the gap between new innovations and commercial success. You will also have the chance to network with the CPC team and other businesses from within the industry.

We welcome all SMEs and businesses who work within these exciting sectors.
12 September 2019

Connections Cafe: Support and Networking Event - Dundee

Connections Cafes look to explore developments and opportunities in the Intelligent Mobility Transport and Connected Places sectors, and also offer support and guidance to growing businesses to help them bridge the gap between new innovations and commercial success. You will also have the chance to network with the CPC team and other businesses from within the industry.

We welcome all SMEs and businesses who work within these exciting sectors.
08 October 2019

Latest Events

Stay informed, network, learn and engage at our industry leading events across the country. Our events cover innovations in areas such as the built environment and mobility services.

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