Within our funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) we have just over £750k, across three years of funding calls, to give to eligible institutions to explore how we might define, enact or explore Ecological Citizenship through innovative, short scale projects.
This year, 2024, we invited applicants to share their ideas around the theme of Materials and Resources and from the 92 applications we received, we are excited to be funding 7 brilliant projects in this first year of funding.

We will be announcing our next funding call in October 2024. For more information, please see our Funding Page or get in touch with the team via email, ecological.citizens@rca.ac.uk. 

A close-up of a rectangular-faced insulation block, about two feet across by one foot high, made from compressed straw-like material light-brown in colour, and held in the hands of an individual wearing a blue top.
Sweetcorn Block, Credit: Ben Bosence & Loretta Bosence, Local Works Studio, 2024. [Low: 5.83 KB. High: 428.27 KB.]

Ag. Lab.: off-season farm production of building materials
University of Exeter

This project will develop and deliver a small-scale trial of a site-specific system of manufacture that will enable arable farm workers to make low carbon, plant-based, insulating blocks out of season, for use in local construction. The project will explore the human, environmental, and infrastructural barriers and opportunities for production through collaborative dialogue with farmers and farm workers. We will investigate and test the potential to make best use of existing farm machinery and skills across all stages of the manufacturing system.
In response to an urgent need for alternatives to high-carbon materials and the destructive impacts of their extraction, the construction industry will increasingly look to agriculture to provide regenerative sources of plant-based building materials (Göswein et al 2022). Large scale, centralised, industrial production of these bio-based materials, connected to national and global supply chains, will be inevitable. However, to ensure resilience and lower collective emissions, this could be supplemented by a distributed, bioregional ‘Harvest to House’ approach offering more responsive, open systems of manufacture. There is an opportunity for smaller scale farmers to lead this change, by diversifying into growth & production of sustainable building materials for use on their own farms, or for construction in the local area, with great potential benefits to their own businesses, local economies, communities, and ecologies.

AI-Fixer: empowering ecological citizenship towards a sustainable digital society through AI-assisted consumer electronics repair
Royal College of Art

Ai-fixer aims to inform and assist national and global activities to address the e-waste problem by stimulating citizen-driven repair to support real change in industrial practices and user behaviour. We propose a framework for an AI-based tool that guides users through maintaining and repairing consumer electronics. This tool replaces traditional, underutilised repair manuals with an interactive, user-friendly interface, providing detailed assembly, disassembly, and repair instructions tailored to each product. This approach not only makes the repair process more accessible and manageable for users but also positions businesses as promoters of sustainability.
A key aspect of our vision is to scale up citizen-driven repair. AI-Fixer not only encourages individual action but also has the potential to influence collective behaviour, leading to a community-oriented approach to electronics sustainability. The project empowers communities by providing them with the tools and knowledge to carry out repairs independently. This empowerment fosters a sense of agency among users, making them active participants in environmental stewardship rather than passive consumers.

An illustration consisting of three groups of images in a horizontal line, each occupying an equal area of the total space. From left-to-right these are labelled: current situation, outcomes, and impact. A large arrow labelled AI-fixer runs horizontally across the illustration from left to right. This shows the project hopes to transform the current situation, with increasing e-waste, via citizen-led repair, to reduced e-waste and greater awareness of environmental impact
Ai Fixer: Diagram, Credit: Dr Nazli Terzioglu & Ravi Sikhwal, 2024. [Low: 2.18 KB. High: 86.34 KB.]
A poster-like image illustrating the Ecolands project. It consists of an older photo, possibly from the 1970s, with a grainy quality and a blue tint, showing three individuals standing in some green space in an urban setting, holding agricultural tools and in the process of digging some ground. Some of the ground is outlined with a yellow dashed line and in the centre of the image is a large representation of a location indicator familiar from online map tools. This illustrates how the project unifies real world locations and digital knowledge. The full title of the project is given in the top left-hand side of the image
EcoLandS, Credit: Finn Livingstone, 2024. [Low: 3.14 KB. High: 503.79 KB.]

EcoLandS: a tool demonstrator for enabling new models of citizen-led ecological land stewardship
Loughborough University

The ecological crises we face are rooted in conceptions of property rights and individual ownership that are exemplified in the context of land governance, access and use issues, our most fundamental and finite natural resource. Acute pressure on land use, now and in the near term, is a crucial and contingent issue in addressing the climate and ecological crises globally. Building Net Zero housing, restoring biodiversity and rewilding, scaling up green energy infrastructure, and recalibrating our food production to regenerative approaches comprise key land use priorities. Whilst community-led land governance models may be desirable, processes that enable their exploration and development are limited and the UK lacks an integrated framework for strategic and democratic approaches to land use.
The EcoLandS project will develop a proof-of-concept digital service to enable communities to acquire dis-used land within their localities for ecological and biodiversity purposes, working in partnership with the Greater London Authority’s Nature Recovery Programme and the charity Thames 21. By creating a digital tool our goal is to build citizen knowledge of land ownership, access and use, to enable the conditions for communities to build democratic land stewardship models. This knowledge supports ecological citizenship by (re-)centering human-land relations, challenging undemocratic land management practices, and fostering public discourse around sustainable land use.

Flow. Walk. Drag.
Liverpool Hope University

Flow. Walk. Drag is a participatory art-science collaboration with water as the source of life and activism in Liverpool and Margate. This joyful and queer exploration uses drag performance, interactive maps and walking tours to reimagine ecological citizenship through a lens of biodiversity and playful species-crossing.
The project examines historical cholera outbreaks and current sewage pollution, inviting communities to connect hidden (hi)stories and new narratives inspired by water-based kinships. Working with local groups and organisations, the team will devise local tours led by performers in “microbial drag,” embodying water-dwelling microorganisms to provoke new perspectives on human-nature relationships.
Through community workshops, participants will co-create digital and printed maps, audio tours, and colourful memorabilia that highlight ecologically significant locations. These creative outputs aim to make the perspectives of non-human beings accessible, challenge extractive views of water, and generate jubilant methods for eco-care and social justice. By engaging underserved groups in both cities, the project fosters a sense of ecological allyship that transcends human/non-human divides. Flow. Walk. Drag ultimately seeks to inspire a more inclusive, joyful, and biodiverse understanding of ecological citizenship, rooted in local histories and contemporary environmental challenges.

A head and shoulders photograph of a fat, femme white person, wearing pale foundation, black lipstick, and a smokey dark eye in a 90’s goth look, laying on the mossy and leafy forest floor. They have curly teal green hair, which is flicked up on the ground behind them, like curly tendrils in the moss. In one hand, they hold a number of tarot cards, with roughly printed designs of mushrooms and roots abstractly overlapping in bright yellows and blues. In the other hand, they hold the handset of an old-fashioned telephone, in shiny cherry red. Their expression is scandalised, as if they’ve just heard a very juicy piece of gossip over the phone.
Mycorrhizal Networks, Credit: Conway McDermott from the Endosymbiotic Love Calendar 2021. [Low: 2.98 KB. High: 8.27 MB.]
A serene dusk settles over the campus of the University of Glasgow, with the silhouette of the Kelvingrove Museum's distinctive roofline etched against the radiant hues of the sunset sky. In the foreground, a classic campus lamp post adds a touch of historical elegance to the view.
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Argyle Street, Glasgow, UK, Credit: Johnny Briggs, 2024. [Low: 4.28 KB. High: 233.61 KB.]

Open Air: citizen science air quality monitoring
Glasgow School of Art

The core aim of this project is to engage and mobilise a community of people, in this case the trail running community in Scotland, to engage with ‘beyond activism’ and contribute to a prototype citizen science project to monitor air quality.
Air pollution is a public health issue in the UK, including for young people, those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and older people who are at higher risk. For real progress in improving air pollution-related public health, action is needed at multiple levels, from national policy changes to individual behavioural changes. Through this project, we will raise awareness of the quality of the air we breathe and promote ways to make individual and wider changes that support cleaner air.
Our project aim is to develop a citizen science project, using the trail running community as the focus, to collect and monitor air quality on trail running routes. We will design and produce open-source air monitoring equipment that can be used by runners to monitor air quality along running routes. Empowering them as a community to collect data, raise awareness in communities, and contribute to a national picture of our environment.

Social Housing Retrofit: energy house types and citizen participation
Royal College of Art

Buildings account for 37% of global CO2 emissions. With 78% of UK homes built before 1980, nearly 60% currently have poor energy efficiency ratings. The project will explore how to enhance the reliability of data used in social housing retrofit planning by integrating physical, material, and behavioural analyses. Focusing on two London boroughs, the project will develop “retrofit archetypes” using machine learning and data from local councils.

By conducting a visual analysis of buildings in parallel to tenant interviews and workshops with housing stakeholders, the project compares retrofit measures to tenant needs and expectations, promoting better engagement to reduce the gap between predicted and actual energy savings. Expected outcomes include a methodology to improve retrofit planning and a report on data integration challenges. The project aims to improve retrofit strategies for social housing by ensuring effective, sustainable upgrades that meet both technical and occupant requirements.

A rectangular image consisting of a mosaic of photos, of a variety of housefronts, arranged in a grid five squares across by four squares tall. The top half of the mosaic consists of broadly modern red-bricked properties of similar age whilst the bottom half consists of broadly late Victorian terraced houses of shared design with conspicious bay windows. This illustrates a sample of the types of properties that the Social Housing Retrofit tool might be expected to encounter and analyse.
Social Housing Retrofit, Credit: Dr Sam Jacoby, 2024. [Low: 5.52 KB. High: 250.64 KB.]
The backdrop to the image is a washed-out colour tinted view through some reeds in a wetland habit. On top of this, and in the centre of the image is a line drawing of the exterior of a two connected semi-detached houses, the right one of which has solar panels on its roof. This is labelled the wild house. To the right of this is a family group illustrated in silhouette who are the implied inhabitants of the house. Surrounding the house are illustrations of various natural habitiats (eg. woodland, heathland) with arrows running to and from the wild house to show how the project intends to interconnect the built environment of the house with the natural world through sound, building methods etc.
Wilder Homes, Credit: Nick Gant & team, 2024. [Low: 4.24 KB. High: 224.53 KB.]

The ‘Wild House’: making connections between habitats for people and nature through an Ecology of Things [EoT]
University of Brighton

Regenerative Design approaches to material resourcing are often considered ‘niche’, at the ‘fringes of design culture’ and therefore not available to everyone. ‘Nature-first’ design and making methods can help support wild habitats but can also create built environments that are restorative for human users - therefore such approaches should be available to all citizens including users within the social housing sector.

Our project will create a pioneering ‘regenerative retrofit’ and ‘show home’ social house fitted out with innovative objects and ecological experiences that connect inhabitants to the myriad other species dwelling in the landscape from where its’ materials are sourced. The ‘Wild House’ will house co-design, prototype and user test products augmented with playful, sensorial technologies that ‘bring to life’ the relationships between every day, material things and the wider natural world from which they are derived. This interconnected network between people, products and the nature of place we are calling an ‘Ecology of Things’ (EoT). The ‘Wild House’ EoT is located within the UK’s ONLY urban Biosphere region and will give agency to everyday people to co-define regenerative futures that better connect people and wider nature.