Working together on cooperative neighbourhoods

Posted on 2nd February 2017 by Anne

On Wednesday 25 January, the School hosted a participatory workshop reflecting on the use of communities within recent policy agendas. It considered the emphasis placed on “localism” over the last nine years, the forces driving it at the national level and how it has been interpreted in northern, urban locations. It also asked how a localism agenda might be reworked to better reflect the needs of these areas.

The event was organised by Dr David Webb of the School, with partners Greening Wingrove and the CHAT Trust, and funded by the Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal and the Global Urban Research Unit. This participatory workshop is the latest output of their collaborative partnership, building on their project Reclaim the Lanes which worked with residents of an area surrounding a back lane in the Arthur’s Hill area of Newcastle.

The workshop proved extremely popular, around 85 people attended from local authorities, charities, community interest companies, Newcastle and Northumbria Universities, consultancies and arts organisations.

The morning was structured around several presentations with time for panel and table discussions. After an introduction to the themes from Dr Webb, he and Caroline Emmerson (CHAT Trust) presented their work on Reclaim the Lanes. Caroline Gore-Booth (Giroscope Ltd) talked about collaborating around self-help housing in Hull and after some initial reflections, Alan Barlow (WEA Greening Wingrove Project) presented Wingrove’s community innovation fund. Armelle Tardiveau (Newcastle University) and Cllr Marion Talbot (Newcastle City Council) talked about their experiences of co-designing Fenham’s Pocket Park.

Read the morning presentations at the links below:

The morning panel discussion was led by a presentation from Annabel Davidson Knight (Collaborate CIC) which reflected on early attempts in Oldham to use public services to support community action. She described their intention to create a virtuous circle, with learning and feedback generated from community hubs being used to adapt and update the way services were provided locally.

The afternoon presentations also focused on the use of community hubs, with Tony Durcan (Newcastle City Council) explaining the importance of digital for reducing the cost of service delivery in the city, and setting out Newcastle’s support offer for those who find it difficult to use digital technology unaided. Mark Cridge (MySociety) then explained the use of Fix My Street as a way of encouraging more efficient and transparent reporting of environmental problems. Rob Webb (Transmit Enterprise CIC) described the potential benefits of the Poverty Stoplight system and Pete Wright (Newcastle University) set out the work they have been doing to promote digital civic technologies in Newcastle. An interesting discussion was had on the use of digital to promote a culture change in public services, including the sometimes unseen benefits of face to face communication and the dangers that innovation might be driven primarily by austerity.

Read the afternoon presentations at the links below:

The event allowed for the sharing of experiences of community work from around the region, with numerous insights being offered during the morning panel session. Many of the themes raised were also relevant to Newcastle City Council’s policy cabinet meeting, which directly followed on from the event. Despite the huge challenges presented by austerity, it was interesting to reflect on the variety of responses being taken both by community organisations and local authorities. The experiences of Oldham and elsewhere show that creative ways of promoting joint working are emerging, and that future reflection on these may have much to offer for the way we seek to manage our cities and neighbourhoods.

Dr David Webb is Lecturer in Town Planning and Director of Engagement in the School
david.webb@ncl.ac.uk

Making changes through participation

Posted on 16th January 2017 by Anne

How do you get communities more involved in their local environment? What changes can be made that can really make a difference to surroundings with a limited budget?

This post from Lecturer in Architecture Daniel Mallo explains how a project in Fenham in Newcastle helped the local community realise a different vision for their public space. This post first appeared on the HASS Research Impact blog.

The Pocket Park idea came about almost by accident. Fenham Ward, in the West End of Newcastle, had received some funding for a Sustrans DIY Streets Project to involve local people in improving their area, making streets less car focused and more generally ‘help them redesign their neighbourhoods putting people back at their heart.’ Through an ESRC IAA grant we supported Sustrans’ work by strengthening community aspirations and sparked inspiration into the potential of their local environment.

DIY Streets Fenham

To begin with we used various methods to find out how residents felt about their local area. We built a basic scale model encouraging locals to interact with it, helping them imagine what could be possible. Temporary wooden seats were also placed along the street where cars normally parked so residents could see the impact of making these changes in a more physical way.

Later we conducted a focus group using large photographs of the street that could be sketched over, to foster further discussion amongst participants. During these different stages local people identified a need for a place where they could sit and watch the world go by. Many residents also commented that the library, swimming pool and doctors surgery on Fenham Hall Drive formed a community hub but that there was nowhere to wait for their children. Taking these ideas into consideration the project concluded with a pop-up public/play space between the library and pool for four days, which gave members of the public, residents and other stakeholders the opportunity to experience the potential impact of a public space in the area. This temporary space showed, more than a model or image could ever do, the way in which people could change their environment for the better.

All of these experiences strengthened the desire for the community and all the various partners involved – members of the City Council, local residents, Fenham Association of Residents, Fenham Library, Fenham Swimming Pool, Sustrans, Your Homes Newcastle, Newcastle University and Fenham New Model Allotments – to seek funding for what they now call a hub for Fenham Hall Drive. A group of local people, in partnership with Fenham Association of Residents, were successful in being awarded £15,000 from the Department of Communities and Local Government to build a Pocket Park, which opened on Saturday 21 May 2016.

Pocket Park Opening

After the park had been created, participants in the project formed the Friends of Fenham Pocket Park, a community group that helps promote the use of the space by local residents and visitors of all ages, alongside a chance for people to volunteer, learn new skills and help support the Pocket Park’s maintenance and future development.

Cllr Marion Talbot, a City Council ward member for Fenham who was involved in the project from the beginning, was interviewed about the Pocket Park when it was opened this year. She said that “it has been refreshing the way residents, community groups and organisations have all joined together to make this project happen; and unite with a common goal of providing something extra special for the area and forging invaluable working relationships that could prosper in years to come.” You can also read Cllr Talbot’s blog post about her experience of working with the University.

From a research point of view the process of collaboration between various groups throughout this project was thought-provoking. It put the different participatory design approaches we use to the test and at the same time helped local people plan a useful space that is beneficial to the whole community. The project only ran for 18 months however it has had a lasting impression on Fenham and its residents: that is the best kind of impact any research can have.

Daniel Mallo is Lecturer in Architecture in the School.
Daniel.Mallo@ncl.ac.uk

Exploring the Southbank Undercroft: heritage film wins national award

Posted on 28th November 2016 by Anne

You Can’t Move History is an in depth account of the 2013 battle to save the Southbank Skate Park. On Monday 14 November 2016 the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) awarded You Can’t Move History Best Research Film of the Year.

In this post project team member Dr David Webb reflects on what makes places valuable.

The campaign to save the South Bank undercroft revealed important insights into what makes places valuable, and why that value is often so difficult to recognise and legitimise. The recognition offered by winning the AHRC’s Best Research Film of 2016 award will help us explain these insights to a wider audience and champion the value of social and environmental campaigning.

Long Live South Bank

Today’s system of heritage conservation has its roots in a reverence of the past and its most majestic and well preserved remains. However it has evolved to recognise that our towns and cities have an in-built bias towards offering up the most durable heritage, which is often that of the rich and powerful. Twentieth Century bids to popularise and democratise heritage reacted to this by expanding and pluralising what counts as heritage, but left us questioning the basis on which we recognise and care for the past. The notion that heritage is not just given to us but actively created through our choices about what to conserve opens up questions about

why it is that we focus so much on place?
what would happen if we made place subservient to broader questions about how we should relate to the past?

The dominant approach to conservation planning rests on two assertions which, at first sight, appear self-evident but which, once we have broadened our thinking about how we relate to the past, can be seen to bias particular aspects of that relationship.

The first assertion is that some places are better than others. Some feel cold, windswept, empty, artificial or derelict while others invoke warm feelings of history, intrigue, social connotation or awe. This statement seems hard to disagree with; the next one takes it further. Because of the value stored up in good places, these places deserve to be protected from wholescale redevelopment or insensitive alteration. Places can be put in a hierarchy, with better places subjected to ever stronger legislative protection.

These two assertions may seem simple, even self-evidently right, but hidden with them is a battle for the management of the built environment. The idea that some places should receive privileged treatment depends on public interest justifications that appeal to the aggregated desires of today’s and the future’s public. If some places really are better than others then we need to understand why, collectively, we believe this to be the case. The use of precise and technical terms to define the valued characteristics of place has been associated with a concern for distributional fairness. Comparing places against fixed criteria, or universally agreed principles, can help to justify why certain places are privileged and help make decisions appear less subjective or less spurious. Such principles or criteria provide an immediate way of making sense of the built environment, one that offers the promise of advance judgement and with it the potential to support long-term plan-making. The use of criteria within a public interest framing seeks to provide transparency and accountability to political judgements about which places are better. Where policy makers have sought to move beyond fixed criteria, by instead asking what the significance of a place is, there has been a tendency to think about significance in line with established framings and practices and to underplay the importance of conflict in revealing significance.

Attempts to use the public interest to support the management of the historic environment can come unstuck at the point of contact with people’s direct experience of place. Such experience does not always fit easily into universal categories or predefined assumptions. It is infused with things that are not driven by a concern to differentiate one place from another: human behaviour, politics, cultural norms, imagination, emotional connection all go on within places and affect how people relate to them. Very often these phenomena occur in, and bring together, multiple places and times. For different people with different experiences, place might be central or peripheral to other concerns. Battles might be over places, or they might be larger battles which go on within or are caught up with places. Ironically, the depoliticisation and technicalisation of places that tends to follow the use of public interest based framings can have the effect of excluding the very social, political and community orientated dimensions that make places valuable.

London Southbank

In February 2014 a group of researchers with backgrounds in media studies, heritage and town planning came together at a research sandpit and began to think through these issues. How could unorthodox, marginal voices be heard by those involved in the heritage system? We found relatively little research into the views of young people on heritage, and noted that the research which existed tended to assume a common definition of heritage. Joining up with film makers BrazenBunch, and the Long Live South Bank campaign, we set out to explore how skateboarders, BMX’ers, musicians and graffiti artists made use of the undercroft space beneath London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall and what it could tell policy makers about the meaning of place. By producing a short documentary and holding a workshop, we then sought to legitimise and convey understandings of place that are too often side lined.

Southbank undercroft

Our film You Can’t Move History is the product of our collaboration. It describes the connections between young people and place, and together with the project report, it explains how these meanings differed from conventional ways of understanding the place which centred on its architectural history and role within the Thames riverscape. Quotes such as “the space is also within the people” revealed the integral nature of humans in making and reproducing the value of heritage and places. Links made by participants to wider processes of gentrification highlighted the inevitably political nature of the campaign and references to the sound of the space and its emotional role as ‘home’ or ‘the vortex’ emphasised its central importance within a culture that emerged from street skating.

While the battle about how best to manage our historic environment is unlikely to go away any time soon, we hope these insights will spark people to reflect on what makes places valuable and on the importance of community, politics and attachment to our lives. The question of authenticity will remain central to ongoing debates about how to support these values on the Southbank.

You can watch the film via our website www.youthandheritage.com which also provides a guide to the project, an archive of campaign-related materials and the interim report Engaging Youth in Cultural Heritage: Time, Place and Communication.

David Webb is Lecturer in Town Planning and Director of Engagement in the School.
david.webb@ncl.ac.uk

Creating a shared vision for the Northumberland National Park Local Plan

Posted on 3rd October 2016 by Anne

In this post, Dr Paul Cowie explains how an innovative piece of theatre is helping shape Northumberland National Park.

The next phase of the Town Meeting project starts with a dress rehearsal of the new version of the Town Meeting play. Over the past year, Cap-a-Pie and I have been working with Northumberland National Park to create a version of the play that will help the National Park start the consultation process on the new Local Plan. The new version of the play aims to link the Local Plan being developed now with the actual planning decisions it will affect over the next five years. Often communities do not see the need to get involved in the process of framing the Local Plan as they see little direct relevance to their lives. Only when, a few years later perhaps, an actual planning decision has to be made using the plan do they get involved.

Clennel Street

We hope to change this by creating a fictitious planning application set within the National Park which takes place in the near future. The scenario aims to test the community’s views on certain planning principles and their vision for the National Park. The new play also has a secondary aim, which is to highlight the limits of planning. Many issues that concern communities do not fall within the domain of the Local Plan. For example issues such as better public transport links or more community activities. In the statutory planning process these are often seen as a distraction. However these ideas need to be developed and encouraged. It’s hoped our new co-production process can also capture these non-planning planning issues and connect them to resources and people that can help.

As far as we know, this is the first time this method of theatre as a tool for planning has been tried so there will be a more traditional consultation process running in parallel to the theatrical events. However we hope this will be a fun and engaging way to get involved in what can be a quite off-putting process.

If you’re in Northumberland and are interested in framing the new Local Plan for the National Park in a new and innovative way we will be holding events in Elsdon Village Hall on the evening of the 18th October and in Harbottle Village Hall on the evening of the 28th October. See the Northumberland National Park website for more info.

Dr Paul Cowie is a Research Assistant in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
Email: paul.cowie@ncl.ac.uk

Fenham Pocket Park

Posted on 12th August 2016 by Anne

In this post, Fenham Ward Councillor Marion Talbot reflects on her experience of working with the University and other partners to develop and build a Pocket Park in the heart of her ward.

The Pocket Park came about almost by accident!

Fenham ward, in the west end of Newcastle, had received some funding for a DIY Streets Project to involve local people in improving their streets and making the environment people, rather than car, focused.

The project was coordinated by Sustrans, working closely with Newcastle University’s Architecture, Planning and Landscape Department.

As ward councillors we were able to build relationships with lecturers from the School, particularly Armelle Tardiveau and Daniel Mallo, which gave us access to expertise, skills, knowledge and a degree of challenge, which was such an advantage and pretty unusual. To be honest I didn’t know that academics got stuck in and got their hands dirty. Literally in this case!

Our joint discussions helped shape the consultation for the DIY Streets and ensured that residents played a significant role in the final design.

Many residents had commented that the library, swimming pool and doctors’ surgery on Fenham Hall Drive formed a community hub, but that there was nowhere to sit, wait for their kids, or just generally hang about. The temporary intervention, designed, built and installed by Armelle, Daniel and their students, proved very successful. It showed, better than a map or diagram could ever do, the way in which people could change their environment for the better.

There was not enough money to change the temporary to permanent, but we had a sense of what could be done if we could identify more funding.

Then DCLG announced funding for Pocket Parks and, in a fit of enthusiasm, we applied.

We were successful and awarded £15, 000, of which £10,000 was revenue and £5,000 capital. We were pretty excited…then reality kicked in.

The timescale was very challenging. We had to produce plans, check land ownership, agree a steering group, design the park, source and cost materials and plants, find a project manager, build the park, produce and deliver a communication plan, all the while remaining calm and reassuring DCLG and local residents that we could deliver.

It was fraught and the budget was tight but we had planned for contingencies, the project manager was brilliant and the park opened on time on May 21st. It looks like an oasis in a sea of concrete and is really popular.

Pocket Park Opening

This Pocket Park not have happened without the relationships we had already built up over the 18 months we had spent working together on the DIY Streets Project. Those relationships built trust, joint commitment and a better understanding of what we were trying to do.

Ian, Karen and I, as councillors, really appreciated the practical implementation of the theoretical and had seen how that had already worked so well.

We could not have delivered this without the skills the University contributed.

Cllr Marion Talbot, Fenham Ward, Newcastle upon Tyne
Cllr Ian Tokell, Fenham Ward, Newcastle upon Tyne
Cllr Karen Kilgour, Fenham Ward, Newcastle upon Tyne

To find out more about how the Pocket Park was developed take a look at the Storify for #FenhamPocketPark

YES: Planning with Young People

Posted on 4th July 2016 by Anne

It is often said amongst the planning profession that it is hard to explain exactly what town planning means. During this last academic year, 15 undergraduate planning students at Newcastle University have been rising to that very challenge.

Volunteers for the YES Planning project have been learning how to discuss planning issues with young people, to help them understand the processes that change our planned environment, and to allow them to feel that their opinion about the environment is important.

In October 2015, Kevin Franks, from Youth Focus North East trained the student volunteers to work with young people using engagement and participatory techniques.

Building on the tried and tested planning activities that the YES Planning project had developed over the previous two years, this year’s volunteers have worked with around 100 young people in schools and youth councils on local planning issues. Projects have included a controversial planning application for a hot food restaurant; town centre provision for young people; designing an eco-town; and research funded by the Catherine Cookson Foundation which has explored young people’s visions for Tyneside in 2030.

The sessions have been well received by the young people and their leaders. As one youth leader explained: “The sessions were centred around them and their future which is great; their opinions were really valued”.

Yes Planning volunteers trialing their resources

The student volunteers have also enjoyed the experience of being involved in the project. One volunteer shared: “I enjoyed getting younger people involved in discussions around planning – and gaining their opinions on planning topics”.

YES Planning will continue during next academic year, offering young people in the region the chance to take part in exploratory planning projects relating to their local area; and for the student volunteers, an opportunity to develop skills of working with the community, which are after all, a large part of what being a town planner is about.

The Yes Planning project was initiated and directed by Teresa Strachan,
Lecturer in Town Planning in the School.

For more details please contact Teresa.Strachan@ncl.ac.uk.

Towards creative and integrated responses to demographic ageing in north east England

Posted on 17th June 2016 by Anne

Professor of Ageing, Policy and Planning Rose Gilroy reports from the British Society of Gerontology (BSG) sponsored event held on May 26^th at Newcastle University.

On a cold and miserable day in May more than 30 people from the University and the third and health sectors joined with older activists to consider how we can get more energy into our work on making the north east region more responsive to demographic ageing in a time of institutional and economic change.

Professor Tom Scharf from the University’s Institute of Health and Society set the scene in the first keynote. He challenged us to consider what we mean when we say the phrase `age friendly places`. Are we talking about places that work for older people; that pay attention to inter-generational concerns, or that are dementia friendly? Can we really talk about any place as age friendly if people there have poorer life expectancy than the UK average? It was this demographic data that propelled Manchester to become an age friendly city. He suggested that inequalities need to be embedded into every age friendly vision and that every place, no matter how difficult the context, can make progress in some areas.

Prof Tom Scharf

Tom analysed both the Manchester and Galway examples of age friendly action, suggesting that the first was more bottom up while the latter represented a more top down approach with limited opportunities for the voice for older people. In conclusion he suggested that both responses can work but adopting a strategic approach helps and responses should involve all sectors. There is a need to strengthen the evidence base for developing age-friendly programme(s) and a reorientation of programme(s) required to ensure that the voice of a diverse population of older people is prioritised. More support is needed for older people who wish to become engaged in age-friendly initiatives and the Touchstone programme in Galway (and hopefully coming to Newcastle) is an example of this.

Following Tom, we heard from presenters who discussed place based approaches to ageing.

Patsy Healey and Jane Pannell of the Glendale Gateway Trust and Jane Field of the Bell View Service Centre talked about the way they had made alliances to both spread knowledge of their work, but also to lever in seed corn funding and influence key policy makers in Northumberland County Council. The problems facing all people, but particularly older people, in such a remote rural setting include extreme fragmentation of services and poor public transport which isolates people from services and support. Their goal was to develop a one stop shop to overcome this.

On a very different theme, Andy Ball from the Alzheimer’s Society talked about the need to develop a broad based approach to supporting people living with dementia to live as well as they can. Andy set out how the Society worked with a diversity of industry players, from supermarkets to the fire service, to develop a greater understanding of dementia in those organisations.

After lunch a session on service based approaches showcased Declan Baharini and Jonny Tull from the Tyneside Cinema who talked passionately about why the Cinema had engaged with dementia as an issue and developed the dementia friendly screening programme (funded by the Ballinger Trust).

A short film they shared with us showed older people living with dementia and their carers singing along and dancing in the aisles to the films in the pilot programme. An evaluation by attendees demonstrated unequivocally that, as an activity to share and enjoy, the pilot was hugely successful. A full programme has now been scheduled with regular screenings of films chosen by older people and their carers. A key message was to not be scared but to make a start!

Paul Hemphill of Age Inclusive talked about the need for businesses to confront the shift in working populations. He told us that an increasing number of cases on age discrimination are now coming to industrial tribunals and that good business leaders needed to be aware of the need for change and the key generational differences in their work place. Business must take action to prevent and manage chronic conditions and must adopt flexible practices in recognition of a greater proportion of employees who might be care givers for older relatives. There is a fundamental need for leadership and attitudinal change.

Our final keynote was Anna Round from IPPR who gave a data rich presentation on the ageing workforce – startling us with statistics on poor health in the north east and the implication for work, wealth and well-being in the face of extended working lives.

To what extent is there awareness of the needs of a growing body of older clients that older employees might serve more effectively? There is evidence that older workers exhibit high performance in jobs needing high levels of knowledge-based judgement, time-critical performance and social skills because mental characteristics such as reasoning, using experience, analysis and verbal skills strengthen with age. Contrary to popular myths, the productivity of older workers matches younger workers in ‘skill demanding’ and ‘speed demanding’ tasks. Anna argued that in the North East Combined Authority effective responses needed to consider the holistic impact of work and to liaise closely with employers, communities, skills providers and trades unions. There were interesting and workable models elsewhere in Europe such as Finland and the Netherlands. The region needs to capitalise on the growth of older entrepreneurship by providing start up advice and more support.

BSG workshop

Following the presentations delegates broke into three discussion groups: demography and the economy; the role of civil society and age friendly place. To close the day, I asked the participants what issues they felt further seminars could tackle.

We closed with the following thoughts:

There is a need to consider inter-generational learning to create attitudinal change in society as well as real issues of intergenerational equity
We talk about design that works for older people working for everyone but what is the evidence for this?
What would new models of the life-course look like?
Current narratives of ageing focus on success and a glamourised image of the baby boomer – we need to acknowledge there are other narratives
Newcastle is a party city but who is invited? How do we diversify the cultural offer?
How do we address the issue of those who are ageing without children?
If the state is hollowing out what should be in its place?
What is the potential for bottom up solutions, particularly those led by older people?

By the end of the day we felt that there was both the energy and commitment to build a north east regional chapter of BSG with two events a year.

Watch this space for progress!

Rose GIlroy is Professor of Ageing, Policy & Planning at Newcastle University

Email: r.c.gilroy@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 7864

Digital Civics in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape

Posted on 1st June 2016 by Anne

In the School we’re developing new ideas about future forms of citizen participation in the built environment.

This theme is associated with the concept of ‘digital civics’ coined at Newcastle’s OpenLab. In conjunction with OpenLab and other departments around the University, the School is actively exploring the consequences of digital technologies for the built environment. One goal is to find forms of more relational citizen participation whereby the public sector moves from one of delivery of services to commissioning services.

But what is digital civics? How did it come to be? What are its drivers? As a new area, nuanced answers are yet to be found. Projects so far involve a diverse number of motivations, such as overcoming the distance of ‘big data’ to everyday life, addressing collective ownership of data and urban infrastructure. Perhaps most importantly, digital civics addresses the rise of ‘issue-based’ civics, for example, on social media platforms. Through designing, prototyping, and testing digital interventions directly with end users in their everyday lives, digital civics encourages novel interactions between participants and their city.

Projects involving researchers from Newcastle University manifest all of these approaches in different combinations. Successful projects so far include:

PosterVote by Vasilis Vlachokyriakos and colleagues: a low cost in-street voting device.
FeedFinder by Madeline Balaam: a location-based service to support breastfeeding mothers find safe spaces.
AppMovement by Andrew Garbett: a vehicle for non-experts to propose and vote on apps they like to see developed.
Tenison Road project led by Microsoft Research in Cambridge involving Vasilis Vlachokyriakos which focused on developing a street-level archive to support and understand the meaning of data to a community on a very granular level.

Digital civics research is delivered through action and change. Representatives of digital civics have emphasised the importance of long-term partnerships on collaborative projects strongly embedded in local contexts. Some projects focused on bespoke devices for tactile interaction in everyday life. This comes with the idea of ‘ecosystems of data’ that embed data deep within the everyday. In digital civics projects, problem solving is often approached through technical innovation with modes such as issue-focused civic hackathons. Social entrepreneurship works as a driver to scale projects and agendas beyond single locations.

As part of the ongoing investment in innovation, innovative teaching, and preparation of a new cohort of architecture and planning professionals for the future, the School has set up a digital civics module, an exciting Stage 2 elective with a ‘challenge-based’ approach to teaching.

We are looking for external partners who would like to work with our students to address a particular challenge (for inspirations see https://scenarios.organicity.eu/).

Within a safe and set framework, guided by Dr Sebastian Weise, students will learn about essential computing technologies and user-centred design approaches and respond to your challenge with propositions of service concepts and technical prototypes.

For full details please see the digital civics call for project proposals (PDF: 2.54 MB).

Dr Sebastian Weise is Lecturer in Digital Civics in the School and can be contacted at sebastian.weise@ncl.ac.uk.

Rising Waters II: Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fellowship Residency

Posted on 6th May 2016 by Anne

From Rachel Armstrong, Professor of Experimental Architecture.

From the end of April to May this year, I am participating in the Rising Waters Confab II Fellowship Residency with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (RRF). This is the second year it has convened on site at Robert Rauschenberg’s studio and home on Captiva Island, Florida, USA, where he lived and worked for 40 years on 20 acres between the Gulf of Mexico and Pine Island Sound. The site is infused with an exceptional history, beauty and serenity and was converted into a multidisciplinary artists’ community in 2012. Today it has become a “ground zero” threshold for discussions that address one of the most crucial issues of our time and hosts over 70 artists and creative thinkers annually.

The emphasis of Rising Waters II is in keeping with RRF’s focus on environmental conservation and stewardship, which stems from Robert Rauschenberg’s longstanding concern for the safekeeping of the environment and the notion of individual responsibility. The residency embodies Rauschenberg’s innovative edge and cross-disciplinary approach to artistic expression and his fundamental belief that art can change the world.

Of course, low-lying landmasses, such as Captiva Island, will eventually become paradises that are lost to us through sea-level rises. Yet, in the meantime, such locations may also become laboratories for creative planning, and deployed as experimental platforms to address the first wave of rising waters worldwide. Curated by artist Buster Simpson, the residency aims to spark new thinking and influence civic action toward finding and spreading solutions to the rising waters of climate change.

Artificial soil produced by activated gel and soluble salts moving through the matrix to produce a self-organizing system of mineral deposition. Photograph taken at the Chemistry Outreach Laboratory, Newcastle University, 2015.

During the residency I will be working with a diverse array of artists and writers in a spirit of collaboration with artists, architects, landscape architects, marine biologists, environmentalists, authors, theologians, scientists, activists, advocates, philanthropists and island dwellers from the USA, UK and Trinidad. Together we will explore how we may work towards a phased adaptation response to climate change that is proportionate to humanity’s ability to reduce its consumption of natural resources and environmentally polluting practices.

Rising Waters II takes an open-ended approach to climate change, with collective discussions and collaborative projects. Visitors including engineers, activists and scientists are also hosted throughout the month to help inform the collaborative work. Personal research and investigations into the challenges are also encouraged and may take many forms such as agit props, performances, installations, the production of artifacts, or social investigations. My own work will draw from my research on living materials and experimental architecture that takes a visionary perspective of global challenges and explores new approaches through the iterative production of prototypes. For example, I will examine how artificial soils may reveal the self-organizing capabilities of organic matrixes through pattern making processes. I will also draw on field studies that I have conducted in the city of Venice, which has weathered sea level change over the last millennium, to examine how substances may be choreographed to produce new material spaces like reefs and islands.

As in the first Rising Waters Residency that was held in the spring of 2015, it is likely that the public outreach effort of this residency will continue long after the event has ended and that some of the concepts that arise from this study period will become catalysts for new projects and inform ongoing environmental actions elsewhere.

Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architecture in the School and PI of the Horizon 2020 Living Architecture project.

She teaches onto the MSc in Experimental Architecture and Architecture Degrees in the School.

Reuniting Planning and Health

Posted on 18th April 2016 by Anne

On Thursday 7 April Dr Tim Townshend chaired an event that was jointly the FUSE Quarterly Research Meeting and the 4^th in the ESRC funded seminar series entitled Reuniting Planning and Health. In this post he reflects on the day…

Reuniting Planning and Health was the culmination of quite a few months of preparation and though it’s not the first such event I’ve organised it’s always a bit nerve racking on the day. Will all the speakers arrive? Will the participants enjoy themselves? Will lunch be any good?! As it was I needn’t have worried about a thing.

The day kicked off with a great overarching review of the need for planners and health professionals to work more closely together from Laurence Carmichael, Head of WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Environments – showing that while there is a lot of momentum behind the initiative there is much work still to be done. We then went north of the border with a presentation from Etive Currie, Glasgow City Council, who has been working on healthy planning initiatives for many years. Etive’s presentation was full of amusing anecdotes about how local communities are not always initially receptive to such ideas! However there were also lots of really good news stories about individual lives that had been turned around. This was followed by Lee Parry-Williams, Public Health Wales, who gave a very informative overview of progress with HIA in Wales – and also some insights into how political rivalries can stand in the way of real progress!

After a short coffee break, we had three further keynotes, Prof Ashley Cooper, University of Bristol, gave an excellent presentation setting out the complexity of linking children’s activity patterns to the built environment – it clearly demonstrated that for planning to deliver environments that are more supportive to healthy lifestyles, the research behind interventions need to be extremely robust. Lesley Palmer, Chief Architect, Stirling University’s Dementia Services Development Centre, gave a really thought provoking presentation on how to design with dementia in mind – highlighting sufferers’ altered sense of reality – while showing elegant design solutions that could be incorporated into any environment that seeks to be age-friendly. The final presentation came from Gary Young, Director at Farrells, exploring the NHS Healthy Towns Initiative, including some of the initial housing at Bicester, a great talk to end with as it brought together so many key strands.

In the afternoon there were four interactive workshops: The Casino, a theatre based workshop run by local group Cap-a-Pie, explored how a proposed regeneration project for a run-down seaside resort might impact a local community by actually asking participants to step into the shoes of the community themselves. An experimental methodology, it seemed extremely well received by those who took part. Jane Riley, Joanna Saunders and Carol Weir, a team based at Leeds Beckett University, gave a great workshop on the ‘total systems approach’ to obesity prevention – with participants asked to think about how they could make a real difference in their own work – quite a challenge! Douglas White of the Carnegie Trust did an excellent presentation on the Trust’s Place Standard tool – which I’m sure participants will be using in future projects. Finally Pete Wright’s team undertook a kind of speed dating event for participants to become familiar with various aspects of the MyPlace project based at Newcastle University’s OpenLab.

I was really impressed by how participants became quickly absorbed – all the workshops were clearly thoughtfully prepared and the feedback overwhelming positive – so my huge thanks to all the organisers.

All round it was a fantastic day and all ran very smoothly – thanks very much to Terry, Ann and Peter the FUSE support team for all their help! And to The Core – it’s an excellent venue.

Tim Townshend is Director of Planning and Urban Design and Deputy Head of School.

School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape

Research, teaching and engagement in the built environment and related fields

Category Archives: Engagement