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
Description
Project overview
As part of the Re-Imagining Relationships with Urban Nature project — a collaboration between the University of Leeds, the University of Bradford, Natural England, and local artists — four free creative workshops will take place May 2025 at the Kirkgate Centre, Shipley.
Each workshop focuses on an ordinary but overlooked part of Bradford: the junction of Bradford Road and Otley Road, Shipley. Activities include scenography (stage and set design), creative writing, filmmaking (using phytography), and biodiverse mapping. These hands-on, sensory, and creative sessions offer a chance to reconnect with nature and imagine new possibilities for forgotten urban spaces — places that may seem disused but are home to diverse habitats.
No creative experience is necessary — all materials and guidance will be provided. The workshops are designed to be engaging, enjoyable, and an opportunity to learn a new artistic skill!
To express your interest in attending, please email h.parkes@leeds.ac.uk
Creative workshops
The workshops will take place at the Kirkgate Centre in Shipley and include a site visit to the wasteland at the junction of Bradford Road and Otley Road, Shipley.
Saturday 10th May – Set Design – 1-4pm
With scenographer Joslin McKinney
This workshop explores how urban environments affect the way people feel and how that affects the ways we relate to other forms of life.
In theatre and film, the set design (scenography) affects how people perform and what spectators see and feel. The scenography can help us to imagine new kinds of places and new ways of being.
Using ideas and practices drawn from scenography, we will be exploring an overlooked urban environment - the Branch Site – to explore how it affects us. First, we’ll walk to the site and take a very close look at it, noticing how it affects all our senses and our feelings, and how one thing can affect another. Back at the Kirkgate Centre, we’ll share images and notes about what we have found. Then we’ll use simple modelling techniques to explore those ideas further.
Saturday 17th May – Creative Writing – 1-4pm
With Associate Professor of Peace Studies Ute Kelly
This workshop explores creative writing as a way of connecting with a site that has a complex and interesting history. It guides participants through a series of individual and collective exercises to explore how we might write about the human and non-human experiences and processes, past and present, that have shaped the site. Drawing on our own observations, archive materials (e.g. images and texts that reflect the previous uses of the site), and existing examples of creative writing that evoke abandoned or reconfigured places, we will craft and share our own responses to the site.
Saturday 24th May – Rewilded Filmmaking – 1-4.30pm
With artist-filmmaker Joanna Byrne and sound artist Alice Gilmour
In this workshop we will create a 16mm film in collaboration with the landscape of the site and the different plant species that live within it. You will have the opportunity to learn an accessible and hands-on way to make beautiful animations without the need for a camera!
We will work with phytography, an alternative photographic process that uses the power of plants and sunlight to create images on film. We will sustainably forage wild plants and expose the film in sunlight. We will create a soundtrack for our film by recording audio of ourselves and the environment at the site.
Back at the Kirkgate Centre we will fix our film, splice it together and prepare it for projection. We will also create an experimental soundtrack. The workshop will culminate with a world premiere of the collaborative short film and soundtrack – screened on a 16mm projector (popcorn provided!)
Saturday 31st May – Biodiversity Mapping – 1-4pm
With artist-filmmaker Joanna Byrne and researcher David Amuzu, Natural England
In this workshop we will explore biodiversity in a rewilded urban site in Bradford using photography, AI apps, writing and creative mapping.
We will explore the landscape close up: observing and reflecting on the many different species that thrive within the site. Together we will take photographs, make ‘field notes’ and identify what we find using freely available phone apps (Google Lens and iNaturalist).
Back at Kirkgate Centre, we will work together to create a large-scale collage of the biodiversity at the site. This will be our collaborative map of what we’ve discovered.
We’ll then reflect on what we’ve observed and created together, and think more about how we connect to nature in our everyday environments.
FAQs
How do I sign up?
To express your interest in attending, please email h.parkes@leeds.ac.uk
Who are the workshops for?
The workshops are suited for anybody over the age of 16 – everyone is welcome! You don’t need to have any creative experience to participate. We’d love to hear from Bradfordians and those local to the site.
What do I need to bring?
All creative materials will be provided. For the Mapping Biodiversity workshop on the 31st May, you will need a camera phone.
What do I need to wear?
All of the workshops include a visit to the site, around a 10–15-minute walk from the community centre. Please make sure to wear weather appropriate footwear and clothing. The site requires stepping over a small wall to enter. Please get in touch if you have any accessibility concerns.
Where shall we meet?
Please meet at the Kirkgate Centre 5-10 minutes before the workshop starts. Someone will meet you in the lobby!
How long will the workshop take?
The workshops last 3-3.5 hours. Light refreshments will be provided!
What happens after?
You will be invited to attend an exhibition of the creative work produced at the workshops at the Kirkgate Centre on the afternoon of Saturday 21st June.
Is there any paperwork?
Before the workshop, you will be provided with an Information Sheet and Consent Form, for you to access ahead of time. On the day, you will need to sign the Consent Form, which we will provide at the workshop.
Further information
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.
The workshop schedule is as follows:
- Saturday 10th May – Set Design – 1-4pm
- Saturday 17th May – Creative Writing – 1-4pm
- Saturday 24th May – Rewilded Filmmaking – 1-4.30pm
- Saturday 31st May – Biodiversity Mapping – 1-4pm.
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.
Value of funding
£7,380.86.
Partners and collaborators
University of Bradford; Natural England.