Helping everyone feel the benefits of green spaces
Public green spaces can be a boon for those who live in urban areas, whether it is a community garden, a fringe of woodland, or a sprawling patch of grassland. Nevertheless, why do some feel they do not belong in these spaces?
A new research project, which sees collaboration between researchers from the University of Leeds and policy professionals at Leeds City Council, is seeking to determine who can access and feel safe in the city’s green spaces and what can be done to make these more inclusive.
Understanding belonging in a local context
Integrating cultural cities through belonging in green spaces, led by Professor Gehan Selim, Professor of Architecture at the University of Leeds, is a focused project working with community members in Headingley and Hyde Park areas to explore what creates a sense of belonging.
The project addresses aspects of living within diverse communities and ways of reimagining green spaces to promote a sense of belonging in Leeds. The researchers hope to navigate and obtain better understanding on supporting social cohesion to build respect and coexistence between communities, and to drive cultural diversity in urban planning and design policy and practice.
Prof Selim says: “We aim to progress policy discussions to foster creative, interdisciplinary policy dialogue on the use, purpose and value of green spaces in promoting belonging and interculturalism as a major societal and environmental challenge in the UK”.
“We use rigorous research and evidence to address the gap in policy around utilising belonging in green spaces to influence local and national policy development”.
The project delivers a series of workshops to co-produce research knowledge and build new relationships between non-academic external partners, policymakers, and the urban design sector to propose new experiments around the form and uses of public space in Leeds.
Through the workshops, the researchers create strong channels of communications with policymakers, think tanks, and stakeholders to explore how they can promote intercultural cohesion and value the contributions of individuals to enable belonging in green spaces. What stories are developed, and what cultural activities happen in green spaces? How can collaboration secure a sustainable future for greenspaces? And, finally, how can working together in green spaces support belonging?
The research team are also running a 4-month Community Garden Project between February to May 2023, to apply best practices to implement action research plan to test the feasibility of building community cohesion and appreciation for differences in communities.
Community co-production integral to research
At a recent Workshop hosted by Rainbow Junktion in Headingley, the research team invited local community members to help map their emotional connections onto the streets and green spaces around the city.
Dr Pam Birtill, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Leeds, who led the session, explains: “We have been doing a community mapping project. This is part of a more significant project which looks at how people can belong in green spaces.
“We are interested in how people in the community feel about their green spaces, who accesses them and who does not access them, and how we can use those green spaces to build community cohesion and improve a sense of belonging to the area.”
Using large format printed maps of Leeds, the session called for contributors to colour-code their feelings about the different public spaces they use — marking areas red if they had a negative feeling about a space, green for positive impressions, and yellow for ambivalence, where people moved through an area but did not have any particular feeling either way.
Through this mapping, the team should get a sense of the complex nature of individual and community emotional experiences of public spaces — and the circumstances and experiences that enhance or diminish a sense of belonging.
With more community mapping sessions planned throughout Headingley and Hyde Park, Dr Birtill is clear about the importance of co-production to the project: “As academics, we cannot come into a community and impose our views.
“It’s absolutely important that we listen, and actually, our role in this is to facilitate for people to come together, for us to amplify, synthesise, distil and be able to take that into policy.
“What we wanted to do was to listen — that is a massive part of this project. We want to say, ‘this is what has worked here, and these are the people’s voices telling you how it worked’, so we can take their narratives and stories to pull out the overarching message.”
The Integrating cultural cities through belonging in green spaces project will hold several workshops with local communities over the next four months. If you would like to take part or share your thoughts, please contact g.selim@leeds.ac.uk
Find out more about our work with Leeds City Council and the Areas of Research Interest in our blog Partnering with Leeds City Council to identify local knowledge needs
