By Sally Churchward.
We’ve all seen them: the ‘afterthought’ nods to nature as part of a new development that look great on the plans but become neglected eyesores in a short amount of time.
Incorporating nature into development can feel like a box ticking exercise, with no real thought given to the function, purpose and how the local community will interact with it. And instead of being a benefit to the area, they can become a burden.
But what if it wasn’t like this? What if communities were working with architects and planners right from the beginning, helping to create new or refurbished developments that work for everyone, that improve local people’s lives, creating a happier, healthier, more environmentally friendly place to be?
This is exactly the vision of Southampton Collective, who are holding a Building With Nature Workshop on May 28th, in association with the RSA as part of the week-long Urban Wild festival.
“The hope is that it creates momentum of people coming together to create a strong vision for the city which includes nature and people at the heart and that it leads to practical actions in terms of how to achieve that and change on the ground,” explains event organiser Rebecca Kinge.
“I’m hoping it will lead to more of a focus, bringing people together in the future, that it will lead to projects being developed together, and that people will meet who wouldn’t necessarily meet otherwise. For example, we might have strong professional networks, people involved in the built environment might know each other and connect, community organisers and residents connect, obviously public sector people work together but it’s about working with people you wouldn’t necessarily come across in your life.
“I believe that we can only address any issue by collaborating and that includes collaborating across boundaries and experiences and that local residents need to be very much at the heart of things that happen and decisions that happen for the city.
“We’ve got all the skills in the city,” she adds.
“We can go to other places and be inspired by brilliant things that are happening, but actually we have got loads of brilliant skills in the city. We’ve got the built environment professionals who are really good and want to do a lot of this. We fantastic officers at the council who really know a lot about ecology of trees and that sort of thing. We’ve got amazing community groups, wildlife organisations, like Wild Southampton which is brilliant. We’ve got all the ingredients to make a really positive change and there’s something about working together on that glue and that’s what Southampton National Park City is doing so brilliantly and having young people involved in it all is brilliant, and a lot of this is skills for the next generation.”
One of the key aspects of the vision is positivity.
One of the things that inspired it was a talk last year by the architect Owen Hatherley on architectural vision in the south.
“We asked what he thought needed to be done to make things better and he said communities need to come together and come up with positive ideas and solutions because quite often with the planning system, there’s a lot of ‘oh, we don’t like this,’ and ‘we don’t like that’ about planning applications.
“It’s the way the system is designed – people respond to things that have already been designed and then it goes to consultation, whereas actually if you start at the early stages and involve people in a meaningful way, in a co-designed approach, then you bring people along with you and you understand the issues that are relevant to a local community at the very early stages.”
This is a new project for Southampton Collective but it builds on work the group have been doing around community responses to heatwaves.
“One of the huge things is around urban greening. That came up really strongly,” says Rebecca.
“Urban greening is important for so many reasons, whether it’s to do with biodiversity or people’s access to healthier places to live, places that people want to live in and young people who come to study here and grow up here, wanting to continue to be part of the Southampton community as they continue into adulthood.
“If you ask people which urban places they like going to, pretty much always it’s places that have got a lot of greenery in them.
“This event isn’t about green spaces, it’s about the bits that relate to buildings, within the footprint of a building: pocket parks, tree lined avenues, different ways that nature can travel through, whether that’s hedgehog highways, bird boxes, places for insects to thrive, green roofs and green walls. We’re very inspired by Princess Anne hospital’s new roof garden, then we really like the work that Alice Louisa is doing on the Monday of Urban Wild which is family friendly photography and creating vision boards. We will be hearing about what came out of that session and at the end of our session will be doing some collective imagining work and create an action plan of what’s next.
“We don’t want to have one off events that don’t create momentum for change.”
The group hopes that momentum will lead to developers, builders, architects and landscape architects working together with communities, being proactive, leading to development or improvements to existing buildings or built environments that benefit everyone.
“We want people to be able to say ‘I was part of that. I was part of making that beautiful vista or that nice little spot to sit out,’ fostering the sense that we need to be stewards of our areas,” says Rebecca.
“Because one of the things that happens is a developer will put in some bit of nature or something green in their development and then it’s not looked after. People don’t know how to look after it or it doesn’t have a sense of anyone caring. We want to create a culture of caring in the city, so we actually do look after what we have got and in doing so, we all as individuals create much stronger connections with nature.
“If you look at examples where there’s been real community care built into these things, then places become more respected.”
Rebecca cites as a positive example Victoria Road in Woolston, where the local community has adopted new flowerbeds. The group has regular gardening sessions and have linked up with local businesses to adopt one of the flower beds. The group have community events centred around the flowerbeds as well as generally keeping them looking good.
Another positive example in the city centre is Friends of Town Quay Park, “It is a beautiful park. The local community looks after it and it’s lovely. It feels like a real gem and it’s because the community cares and it’s been made that way.”
Rebecca believes that it’s important to involve all the community, children and young people included, on a range of projects, from large developments to small improvements. She emphasises the importance of positivity and hope for something better.
“We need big vision ideas about what can happen but also we need smaller interventions because they can feel achievable,” she says.
“If you try to do things that are big and ambitious that’s great, but you’ve got to start with ‘lets make a small change and see what that brings’. It’s hopeful.”
- The Urban Wild Building With Nature event is on May 28th at the Sir James Matthews Building, University of Southampton. For more information, visit: community.nationalparkcity.org/events/building-with-nature
* Reproduced with permission of Southampton National Park City.
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