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: Georgie Hook
Value
£7,380.86
Partners and collaborators
University of Bradford; Natural England
Description
The project explores 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. The project examines how people experience this site as a place of multiple habitats and how this has a bearing on their own sense of habitat or place. It will explore 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.
The project foregrounds creative, participatory research methods as a means of understanding how connection with nature through noticing, sensing and feeling our immediate environment might be fostered. This enables a hands-on ways of reconnecting with nature where participants are encouraged to consider their own unique sensory perspective on the world around them. Participants will be supported in an interdisciplinary art-based vocabulary using a range of materials to capture their experience of disused urban spaces, and through that, explore and express diverse meanings and values of co-existence with multi-species.
We will recruit participants from the area surrounding the site to take part over four Saturdays in May in one or more of four half-day workshops at the site and at the nearby Kirkgate Community Centre.
- Workshop 1 (film-making)
- Workshop 2 (scenography)
- Workshop 3 (creative writing)
- Workshop 4 (collective mapping)
The interdisciplinary research team, with expertise in community arts (Byrne), urban scenography (McKinney), transformative entrepreneurship (Grinevich), resilience and climate change (Kelly) and environment and sustainability (Amuzu) will use 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.