‘The Great Meeting Place: Bradford’s City Park and Inclusive Urban Space’ (original) (raw)
The Great Meeting Place: A Study of Bradford's City Park.
2014
A year after its opening, in the summer of 2013, our research study set out to explore how members of the public from all sections of society use and share City Park. We were interested in their experiences and feelings for the site and what they think it has contributed to the City of Bradford. We also aimed to explore the experiences and perceptions of local businesses and workers who share the site, and the way the space is regulated and managed. This report details our research findings.
The Sustainable City XII, 2017
The Bologna Adaptation Plan, recently adopted by the City authorities to address the way the city of tomorrow will coop with climate change effects, suggests some effective measures to mitigate and reduce the impacts of urban heat island [UHI] and heat waves. Among the suggested actions, the greening of in-between spaces of the dense built environment and the introduction of new green surfaces (roof and facades) seem to offer interesting perspectives. The paper describes a research activity run by the Department of Architecture and the Municipality of Bologna to investigate how to define the best arrangement of greening with the aim to optimize the impact on outdoor comfort conditions. After analysing UHI, the related parameters and the mitigation effect produced by green surfaces, some demo sites were assumed as test bed to simulate different green layout. Models and simulations were performed using ENVIMET, a software recognized in the scientific literature as one of the most used tool at urban scale. Once boundary conditions were modelled and all the main features of the sites were properly modelled, simulations were run in order to compare different scenarios coming from a number of architectural, economical and practical constraints. The results are then compared with other factors, related to the social aspects, the use of the spaces, the perception of the sites, etc. Two demo sites were investigated in two of the densest parts of the city of Bologna and one in the historic city center was definitely implemented as a temporary initiative coupling the environmental challenge with the opportunity to socially reshape a fragment of old city. This microintervention represents the first experimental phase to strengthen the urban transition of the historic city center in the perspective to realize no-disruptive transformations of the open public spaces, improving the users' wellbeing and comfort.
Can a Park Save the City?: Hopes and Pitfalls of the London National Park City
Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, 2020
This article enquires into the transformative potential of the London National Park City. In doing so it situates the vision for, the becoming, and the Charter of an urban national park in relational thinking about metropolitan nature and sustainable urbanisation. It looks at hopes and pitfalls of the London National Park City in the face of growing socio-environmental injustice and the climate crisis. First, the article explores the National Park City as a form of ecological reflexivity and social practice in the context of relational concepts of nature and the city. Second, it examines opportunities offered by the Park City with respect to urban environmental sustainability, health and wellbeing, connected diversity, socio-economic inclusion and political agency. Third, it looks at pitfalls of the National Park City relating to environmental gentrification, as well as to trade-offs between grassroots creativity and capability to bring about material change. Last but not least, the...
Land
With the signing of the Belfast Agreement, Belfast (Northern Ireland, UK) entered a new phase of urban development. Moving away from notions of division, Belfast City Council envisaged an inclusive and accessible city. Over a 20-year period, there have been significant changes in Belfast’s physical, socio-cultural, and political structure, reframing the city as a post-conflict space. However, there has been limited analysis of the role of parks in this process. This paper examines perceptions of parks, asking whether the promotion of a “shared spaces” policy aligns with local use. Through a mixed-methods approach, park users were surveyed to reflect on the meanings of parks in the city. We argue that although residual interpretations associated with historical socio-cultural divisions remain, parks are predominately multi-community amenities. The analysis illustrates that although destination parks attract greater patronage, there is visible clustering around ‘anchor’ sites at the l...
The Future Prospects of Urban Public Parks: Findings - Informing Change
2017
Public parks are long-standing and familiar features of the urban environment. For many people, visiting parks is an integral part of everyday life in the contemporary city. Yet parks in the UK are at a possible 'tipping point', prompting important concerns about their sustainability. Parks face essential challenges over funding and management, as well as questions of unequal access and competing demands on use. This study of public parks in the city of Leeds focused on how they have changed through time, how they are used today, and what their future prospects might be.
International Journal of Law in Context, 2019
In a context of hyper-diversity and social polarisation, it has been suggested that public parks constitute crucial arenas in which to safeguard deliberative democracy and foster social relations that bind loosely connected strangers. Drawing on empirical research, we offer a more circumspect and nuanced understanding of the – nonetheless vital – role that parks can play in fostering civic norms that support the capacity for living with difference. As ‘spaces apart’, parks have distinctive atmospheres that afford opportunities for convivial encounters in which ‘indifference to difference’ underpins ‘openness to otherness’. As places in which difference is rendered routine and unremarkable, the potency of parks for social cohesion derives from fleeting and unanticipated interactions and the weak ties they promote, rather than strong bonds of community that tend to solidify lines of cultural differentiation. Both by design and unintentionally, regulation and law can serve to foster or...
A new typology of pocket parks: inspiring small spaces for changing cities
Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Urban Design and Planning, 2020
The contemporary city has witnessed sweeping changes in terms of structure and image. New glittering globalised urban forms emerged, however, associated ‘anywhere’ contemporary urban spaces are often criticised as bland and meaningless. The global crisis of 2008 brought with it a heightened realisation of the need to manage cities differently and more sustainably. In recent decades, the concept of a public space/garden has changed from something largely ornamental and often to be viewed ‘passively’ to creating spaces for ‘active engagement’ as well as, relaxation and socialisation, and with resultant positive impacts on community health and well-being. Small spaces have the potential to bring people together to create places of community cohesion, but they may also hold the key to addressing broader issues such as increasing biodiversity and repairing environmental damage. This study of pocket parks suggests that 13 distinct ‘types’ of pocket park have emerged since they were first ...
Partnership in the park: exploring the past, inspiring the future in inner-city Manchester
The Archaeologist, 2011
Community archaeology is increasingly popular and it is often viewed as a straightforward endeavour: local people come together, often with the involvement of heritage professionals, tosurvey, dig and generally examine the archaeology of a site or area. Seemingly it ‘does what it says on the tin’. In reality, community archaeology is incredibly complicated (see Marshall 2009; Smith and Waterton 2009). Bottom-up projects, driven by local community groups, inevitably need expert help and the support of the heritage profession throughout the process. Thus a hierarchy of knowledge is created, complicating the community’s ownership and control over the project and their local heritage. Meanwhile top-down projects, driven by professional archaeologists, often engage with and enlist community groups for their work, but such a process can be equally alienating for the communities. Ultimately, community archaeology is always going to be an intervention into an existing social context where people are already actively producing and negotiating identities and where the past is plural and contested; constantly being remade, debated and negotiated (Greer et al 2002; Isherwood 2011; Jones 2015).
UR@UCT: Undergraduate Research, 2016
This study aimed to determine the extent and the ways in which Amber Park is perceived by its users to either facilitate or hinder play and social inclusion. The study is qualitative descriptive in nature. Purposive sampling for maximum variation was used to select the 16 participants who were interviewed. Inductive reasoning was followed through open coding, allowing for the conceptualisation of raw data. This generated 15 categories, which were further collapsed into 3 themes; (a) A space for valued play (which incorporates how the park meets park users' occupational needs in a way that provides meaning and value for the users), (b) Play: disrupting class and race (which shows how play equalises power relationships in a unique way), and (c) All welcome, but… (which speaks to latent hegemonic practices and how these dictate behaviour and inclusion). These findings provide new understandings about the way in which an urban park can support valued play by meeting occupational needs, as well as mitigate racial, class and generational divides within a diverse society, and may inform inclusive policies for public spaces.
Town Planning Review, 2019
Belfast is a city of extremes in terms of its political, historical, cultural, and urban development. Due to political unrest its spatial form has been subject to extensive redevelopment, and the imposition of defensive architecture. Within this narrative, parks have been overlooked; less evidence is available as to whether public spaces, and specifically parks, can be repositioned as spaces of inclusivity and communal interaction. To examine whether parks can facilitate a greater sense of community and identity, this paper employs a novel conceptualisation using the theoretical framing of Foucault (1991), Lefebvre (1991), Lynch (1960) and Newman (1973) to examine how representations of physical space influence the behaviour, use and value of parks. It further evaluates how each can be applied to our understanding of the value of parks using Belfast as a case study.
Cities, Communities and Futures Conference Proceedings Book, 2018
Livable cities must encourage social diversity in urban spaces in order to create a socially sustainable future. While housing is of primary importance for urban living, outdoor spaces, in which social interactions occur, are equally vital and complementary. Therefore, it is required to develop an understanding of inclusive urban spaces. Hence the present study aims to create an understanding of urban spaces through readings on urban parks by investigating their spatial settings with their inclusionary and exclusionary characteristics for their users. This reading on urban parks also aims to represent a projection of the community living in the neighbourhood where the parks are located. The theoretical approach of the study is based on the modernist utopia of space and its contradictions through conceptions of Lefebvre, Mike Davis and Jane Jacobs. Central Park, which displays Olmsted’s modernist vision of ideal inclusionary space and modern society, is taken as reference for the theoretical discussion. The spatial settings of parks are investigated in terms of whether they have inclusive aspects, which appeal to their users from different socio-economic backgrounds and bring them together to build egalitarian relationships, or exclusive aspects that appeal to specific users of a certain socio-economic class and impose them upon building hierarchical relationships. The case study investigates three non-historical parks from different districts with similar types of urbanisation processes that are based on an unplanned growth due to the migration to Istanbul. These parks with different extensities also represent three types of scales: city, neighbourhood and coastal. As a result of the study, design strategies and theoretical understandings of architects and urban designers are found to be overly idealised and the conceptions of inclusionary space observed to be overwhelmed by urban living that resists to comply with the regulations or projections.
International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 2010
Background: Greenspace has the potential to be a vital resource for promoting healthy living for people in urban areas, offering both opportunities for physical activity and wellbeing. Much research has explored the objectively measurable factors within areas to the end of explaining the role of greenspace access in continuing health inequalities. This paper explores the subjective reasons why people in urban areas choose to use, or not use, local public greenspace. Methods: In-depth interviews with 24 people living in two areas of Glasgow, United Kingdom were conducted, supplemented with participant photography and participatory methods. Data was thematically categorised to explore subjectively experienced facilitators and barriers to greenspace use in urban areas. Results: From the perspective of current and potential urban greenspace users, access is revealed to be about more than the physical characteristics of neighbourhoods, greenspace resources or objectively measurable features of walkability and connectivity. Subjectively, the idea of walkability includes perceptions of social cohesion at a community level and the level of felt integration and inclusion by individuals in their communities. Individual's feelings of integration and inclusion potentially mitigate the effects of experiential barriers to urban greenspace access, such as evidence of anti-social behaviour. Conclusions: We conclude that improving access to greenspace for all in urban communities will require more than providing high quality resources such as parks, footpaths, activities and lighting. Physical availability interacts with community contexts already established and a holistic understanding of access is required. A key cultural component of areas and neighbourhoods is the level of social cohesion, a factor that has the potential to reinforce existing health inequalities through shaping differentiated greenspace access between subgroups of the local population.
What Visitors Want From Urban Parks: Diversity, Utility, Serendipity
Frontiers in Environmental Science, 2020
Urban parks may provide a range of ecosystem services, but community perspectives can influence the conservation of parks and their biodiversity. Cultural ecosystem services, or the non-material benefits that people receive from nature, can prompt a park’s use and motivate a management response from local government. Our study aimed to explore why people visit urban parks, whether the tacit biodiversity of a park influenced visitation, and understand what park visitors notice, and how being in an urban park makes them feel. Combining both human and more-than-human aspects, we carried out park surveys that comprised an ecological survey and short, three-question interview with park visitors. The park surveys were carried out in six parks each in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, and Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand. While the biodiversity of species in parks differed significantly within and between cities, we found no consistent relationships between park biodiversity and the num...
SPATIUM, 2017
Urban open spaces have substantially contributed to the development of cities in terms of image, function, form, and social engagement, and thus have been a central concern of urban researchers for several decades. This paper contributes to the contemporary urban discourse as it relates to the city and its users. It demonstrates a mechanism for characterisation and systematic assessment of key urban open spaces in Glasgow City Centre. The mechanism is implemented in three layers of investigation that involve the development of space profiles through preliminary observations, an examination of functional, social, and perceptual attributes through a walking tour assessment procedure with checklists and a scoring system, and an understanding of how users perceive and comprehend these spaces through a photographic attitude survey. The paper places emphasis on key findings by conveying similarities and differences between the spaces in terms of assessment outcomes and users’ perception, while revealing their essential attributes and qualities. Conclusions are offered as reflections on the findings while suggesting possibilities for future research through additional complementary layers of investigation.
In search of common grounds: Stitching the divided landscape of urban parks in Belfast
Cities, 2015
Political and spatial contestation in divided cities contributes to strategies of self-defense that utilize physical and spatial settings to enable the constitution of social boundaries, borders and territories. Urban parks that are designed to ease division through an open transitional landscape can instead facilitate further segregation through their spatial order and facility layout. This paper investigates the role of the spatial design and material landscape of integrated parks in Belfast interface areas as instruments of engagement or division. It does so by analyzing the spatial organization of the parks' facilities and the resultant 'social voids.' Space, time and distance were found to be effective tools for the negotiation of privacy, the manifestation of power, and the interplay of dominance and self-confidence. In the context of a divided city, strong community-culture tends to reproduce new boundaries and territories within the shared landscape. Through user interviews and spatial analysis, this paper outlines the design principles that influence spatial behavior in the urban parks of contested urban landscapes. It argues that despite granting equal access to shared public facilities, social voids and physical gaps can instill practices of division that deepen territorial barriers, both psychologically and spatially.
The park and the commons: vernacular spaces for everyday participation and cultural value
Cultural Trends
Public parks were first established in the UK in the newly industrialised cities of Manchester and Salford, as nineteenth century cultural strategies for public health, regulation and education responding to moral anxieties about the changing conditions of everyday life. This article looks at public parks as vernacular spaces for everyday participation, drawing on empirical research, including ethnographic fieldwork, household interviews and focus groups, and community engagement conducted for the Manchester-Salford ecosystem case study of the 'Understanding Everyday Participation-Articulating Cultural Value' (UEP) project [Miles & Gibson, 2016. Everyday participation and cultural value. Cultural Trends, 5(3), 151-157]. It considers narratives of participation [Miles, 2016. Telling tales of participation: Exploring the interplay of time and territory in cultural boundary work using participation narratives. Cultural Trends, 5, 182-193], which reveal how parks are valued and recognised as community assets and spaces for both tolerance and distinction, where different communities can meet, become visible, and perform shared and distinct cultural identities [Low et al., 2005. Rethinking Urban Parks, Public Space and Cultural Diversity. Austin: University of Texas Press]. It draws on the conceptual device of 'the commons', defined as a dynamic and collective resource that stands in tension with commodified and privatised space [Gidwani & Baviskar, 2011.
Urban Parks as Community Places
2006
The era of pavement and concrete is an era of the past. We want to grow smart. We want to grow green and we want to enhance the quality of life for our citizens. The Chuncheon G5 Project provides a wonderful opportunity to enliven and enlarge the public realm of the city. More importantly it will provide increased access to a diverse range of open spaces for residents and visitors. In my remarks today, I would like to suggest some of the aspects of open space and public life to consider in the future development of these projects. I want to play particular attention to how these places can be designed and managed as green community places and encourage public engagement. How can designed landscapes such as urban parks and gardens become well-used and loved places? How can concepts such as ecological and sustainable design include public use and enjoyment of open space? What are appropriate design models that invite community engagement and activity?
2013
In theory bringing a diverse range of the public together into a locality in a city and satisfying a broad spectrum of expectations is what public spaces are designed to satisfy. However, in reality this has proven to be a challenging task for both designers and planners. There are predominant factors that determine who would spend their time in a public space and to what extents they would be satisfied with their time spent. Those include age, gender, ethnicity, social class, needs, wants and personal preferences to just name a few. Having encompassed a wide range of activities, all-inclusive urban spaces may impose substantial costs to the city from inception through to the completion stages. However, such spaces can successfully be launched, and reimburse their costs, if they are carefully set up to absorb the mass of their peripheral communities and inhabitants on a regular basis. Offering relief for senior citizens, amusement for the youngsters and toddlers, entertainment for the teenagers, all in chorus, provide interactive atmospheres that resonate with the initial purposes of all-inclusive public spaces. This paper aims to investigate Niruye-Havaei, an established urban square, in Tehran as one of the most successful exemplars in provision of an overarching urban public space, overcoming the aforementioned problem. The paper begins with general background information of the place and the space, and the communities in the surrounding vicinities, and how they have been formed over the years and how they are in a dynamic interaction with each other, leading to introduction of such successful pattern. Utilising overt and covert participant observation (ethnography) methods, it will then contemplate on the potentials of place and space, and explores how the entire urban district has been 'orbitalised' around this featured space and why it has found such a prominent role in the area. Finally, it concludes with a framework model for allinclusive public spaces and suggests its application to similar situations for acquiring a record of success in urban developments.