The UK Regions Digital Research Facility will build a single, high-resolution computer model of the entire country—every building, road, rail line, and factory—to test how policy changes could reshape the UK economy. This matters because the UK’s economic geography is stubbornly stuck. Despite decades of policy, wealth and opportunity remain heavily concentrated in London and the South East. The Scottish referendum and subsequent calls for devolution have made it urgent to understand what actually works to spread prosperity. Until now, policymakers lacked the tools to simulate how a new transport link, a housing development, or a business tax change would ripple through a region’s entire economy. If the facility succeeds, local and regional authorities will be able to test policy options on a digital twin of their area before committing public money. A mayor considering a new tram line could see not just travel-time savings, but knock-on effects on warehouse locations, housing demand, and manufacturing jobs. The same open-source tools will be made available to the public, allowing citizens to run their own scenarios. The project also trains a new generation of analysts who can use these models, creating a lasting community of evidence-based planners across the UK.
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The UK RDRF brings together a number of research strands funded under the DET, EPSRC and ESRC portfolios over the last decade to create a national facility to tackle the vexed question of regional competitiveness and rebalancing the UK economy. Following the Scottish referendum there have been renewed calls for greater devolution to regions and core cities. This facility will bring together the big economic data and construct the high resolution models needed to support policy makers at national, regional and local level. It will innovate by building together a model of the fixed stock of buildings, including housing, commercial, warehousing and manufacturing, with a network model of key infrastructure. This will allow analysis of which policy nudges might be expected to overcome the inertia present in the historic geography of the UK. It will allow a common framework of data and evidence ti be used by regional and local policy professionals wishing to evaluate policy options. The whole facility is built on the opportunity created by CDT funding to develop a cohort of evidence based policy professionals and analysts to support the needs of a more devolved form of planning. We aim to support the creation of a 'community of practice' based on access to big economic data and open source analysis and modelling tools. We will host workshops and networks to spread best practice and create some institutional glue amongst the people concerned. Finally, we will engage local communities in the debate and bring the same evidence and tools to the public at large through crowd science and in-the-wild research engagement.
Alan Penn (Principal Investigator)Alan Wilson (Co-Investigator)Elsa Arcaute (Co-Investigator)Michael Batty (Co-Investigator)Paul Longley (Co-Investigator)Philip Treleaven (Co-Investigator)
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