‘The Great Meeting Place: Bradford’s City Park and Inclusive Urban Space’ (original) (raw)
Related papers
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).