Research project
Re-imagining Relationships with Urban Nature
- Start date: 18 October 2024
- End date: 31 July 2025
- Funder: Internal funder
- Primary investigator: Professor Joslin McKinney
- External co-investigators: Ute Kelly, University of Bradford; Vadim Grinevich, University of Bradford; David Amuzu, Natural England; Joanna Byrne, community artist
- Postgraduate students: Hannah Parkes, Georgie Hook
Value
£7,380.86
Partners and collaborators
University of Bradford; Natural England
Description
The project explored the interconnectedness between human activities, multi-species, natural processes and the built environment in the context of an ordinary part of Bradford: the junction of Bradford Rd and Otley Rd, Shipley, known locally as The Branch site.
The project team wanted to examine how people experience this site as a place of multiple habitats and how this has a bearing on their own sense of place. Using creative workshops, we explored how emotions, meanings and values bear on people’s ability to imagine future possibilities and act upon them to create value for individuals, communities and the environment.
We recruited participants from the area surrounding the site to take part over four Saturdays in May and June 2025:
- Saturday 10th May – Set Design – 1-4pm
- Saturday 24th May – Rewilded Filmmaking – 1-4.30pm
- Saturday 31st May – Biodiversity Mapping – 1-4pm. See the maps here
- Saturday 14th June – Creative Writing – 1-4pm. See some of the writing and the zines that participants made here.
The workshops used creative, participatory research methods as a means of understanding how connection with nature through noticing, sensing and feeling our immediate environment might be fostered. They each enabled a hands-on ways of reconnecting with nature where participants were encouraged to consider their own unique sensory perspective on the world around them.
The interdisciplinary research team, with expertise in community arts (Joanna Byrne), urban scenography (Joslin McKinney), transformative entrepreneurship (Vadim Grinevich), resilience and climate change (Ute Kelly) and environment and sustainability (David Amuzu) used the workshop outcomes to reflect on the advantages of creative methods and develop a larger research project that extends to multiple sites in Bradford and elsewhere in the UK.
Each of the workshops enabled people to experience and conceptualize the site in different ways – the mixed creative methods, reflection and sharing. The 4 workshops worked well together, providing complementary creative approaches to the same site. A common link was taking notice: really looking, feeling, experiencing, noticing and being there.
Workshops also facilitated:
- Appreciation of the site as it is (rather than intervention) and re-discovering overlooked urban space. Challenging the idea of it as a vacant site.
- Appreciation of agency of non-humans at the site and as part of the creative processes, recovery and resilience of nature.
- Imaginative engagement – the invisible (e.g. underground) or the future (unseen)
- Connecting with history of the site – layers of history - local people’s memories
- Acknowledging different people’s interpretation of the site through individual expression and sharing that with others
- Connecting with other people as well as nature, shared experience, commonalities, engagement, collaborative