We are excited to announce a new network designed to encourage more socially inclusive landscape decision-making to support health and wellbeing amongst diverse individuals and groups.
Including a range of activities over the next two years, the new Unlocking Landscapes Network has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and builds on much of our work within and beyond Sensing Nature.
The programme will involve a wide range of participants from both within and beyond academia, and will demonstrate how arts and humanities research can offer valuable insights into four key questions relevant to landscape policy and practice:
How is landscape sensed and made sense of by different individuals and groups?
What are the cultural historical underpinnings of landscape experience?
What are the tensions between personal and collective landscape meanings?
How can we learn from human diversity to facilitate genuine landscape inclusion that moves beyond basic access provision?
By bringing together academics, practitioners, artists and policy makers, ‘Unlocking Landscapes’ seeks to bridge traditional policy silos. It is being steered by Dr Clare Hickman of Newcastle University and Dr Sarah Bell of the University of Exeter, and includes fantastic colleagues from the Universities of Exeter and Bristol, Historic England, the National Trust, the Woodland Trust, the Sensory Trust, Sense, and Natural Inclusion.
The Network will create space for discussions with policy-makers and practitioners involved in landscape use and management. It will also organise four workshops, create a 'living' exhibition, feed into relevant policy meetings, and participate in a series of public engagement events.
Whilst we live, breathe and move with(in) diverse landscapes during our everyday lives – from nearby neighbourhood parks to settings like the coast and countryside – decisions made about the management of these landscapes are often based on narrow assumptions about how such settings are perceived, experienced and valued.
Since the 2003 Countryside Diversity Review (led by OPENSpace at the University of Edinburgh), there has been growing momentum to nurture natural and cultural heritage that is accessible and relevant to everyone.
With increasing awareness of their potential health and wellbeing benefits, it is important to understand why these landscapes fail to resonate for particular individuals and groups in society. To gain such insights we need to move beyond a focus on distance and demographics and explore the influence of other sources of exclusion.
Through the Unlocking Landscapes Network, we will consider the complex ways in which landscapes become meaningful to diverse individuals and groups; through their senses, personal memories and shared histories.
When thinking about landscape, we recognise that moments of health and wellbeing can unfold through the smallest scales of encounter (for example, within city allotment plots, urban public parks and hospital gardens), but also as part of more expansive encounters with country parks, national parks, heritage coastlines and historic estates.
Through this new network, we aim to complement traditional landscape management and decision-making approaches that foreground biodiversity with a focus on human diversity. In particular, we hope to embed more inclusive decision-making that ensures our cultural and natural heritage – and the potential to experience a sense of health and wellbeing therein – is genuinely relevant and accessible to all.
Our findings will be shared across the academic community, through an online network, via themed policy briefings and through an ethnographic film at the living exhibition.
The network launches in January 2020, so do get in touch if you would like to find out more as it develops.
