I’ve been down to London a few times recently and it has been very interesting as I have spent a lot more time in Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) than I thought I ever would. Partly this is because I had not realised how prevalent they have become in the UK, but specifically London.
Is thinking long-term an uphill struggle?
We’re approaching a general election. Brace yourselves for ‘changes’, ‘new’ directions and new brooms to sweep away the old. Long-term for politicians is no more than 5 years and that brings with it some real problems.
We’ve been thinking recently about the term place-keeping which we work with every day. We have grown so used it and have developed our understanding of what we mean by it so clearly that we forget it might not be so immediately obvious to others.
This event provided a hands-on opportunity for Friends and community groups to explore the range of communication tools to make and maintain contact with green space ‘non-users’...
When Nicola and I spent a month in Ahmedabad earlier this year we visited a total of 40 public open spaces including about 28 parks. Amongst these are the well-known parks...
Another update from the place-keeping conference held in the department of Landscape at the University of Sheffield in June 2014. We invited Kate Stewart from Friends of the Flyover Liverpool ...
At the summer Place-keeping conference, we were lucky enough to have Graham Duxbury, CEO Groundwork UK as a keynote speaker. Graham described Groundwork’s new initiative ‘X marks the spot’ that focuses on joint caring for everyday places, places that matter to people.
Deryck Irving is Programmes and Partnership Manager at greenspace Scotland and talked at the Place-keeping conference 2014 about his recent work on programmes relating to the role of greenspace and green infrastructure in tackling climate change.
The key questions of our event were who should own, who should manage and who should care for our urban green and open spaces? We would welcome responses, reflections on this, examples of where there have been successful partnerships that have managed green and open spaces or where this model failed.
Place-making is often the focus for funders. Money is focused on creating places and less on the long term maintenance. We invited Mark Walton from Shared Assets and Helen Batt from River Stewardship Company Sheffield to speak at our June conference 2014 on the subject of funding place-keeping (the long term management of green and open spaces). Here's a summary
Who do you think should own, manage and care for our green and open spaces?
It’s Love Parks Week and we want to celebrate our Top Ten Place-keeping places where there is management of green and open spaces for the long term is happening. Too often the focus is on creating new places - funding is put into the design without thinking about how successful places need sustained attention, or place-keeping. Below is our very biased list of great UK examples of place-keeping in action. We would like to hear your suggestions of places that just keep on getting better.
On 17th and 18th of June we held a two-day conference in the iconic Arts Tower at the University of Sheffield. We invited a range of speakers and targeted the event at interested groups, practitioners and academics from across Sheffield and beyond. Below is a much shortened summary of what went on.
Our recent book, Place-keeping: open space management in practice, takes a look at open space management techniques by focusing on a number of interrelated dimensions. These dimensions can be turned into questions about our green and open spaces: Who owns? Who pays? Who cares? Who manages
In the UK, we are spoilt with the openness of our parks and gardens. Think of your local park...it probably isn’t fenced all the way round, isn’t closed during the day, and it’s likely you can simply drift off the roadside into it, or through an obvious and clear gateway.
Do we have to go back in time over one hundred years to remind ourselves of how to think long-term?
Where can you kick a football around here?
Incredible Edible have been very successful at getting people involved and sustaining that involvement. What do they do to keep people growing?
To those with control in our urban green spaces we say ‘Loosen up! Let the grass grow!’
