The haunted paddock: exploring the roots of an ambiguous urban green space

Luke Bennett

doi:10.3351/ppp.2019.6648358933

Abstract

Research on public access to urban green space tends to focus upon access-takers’ motives and meaning-making. The motives and meaning-making of the owners and managers who control such spaces are rarely examined. To address this deficit this article presents a longitudinal case study examining how an owner's ambivalent stance over public access to his public house’s exterior 'beer garden' area arose from its (and his) habitus. The case study shows how the owner came to unwittingly present this as an uninviting and ambiguous urban green space by inheriting and perpetuating a preexisting, habitual encoding of territoriality at his struggling, city-fringe commercial premises. In interpreting this ambivalence, the article examines the influence of both local and wider structural factors showing how both material traces of prior ordering and the owner’s pragmatic understandings of liability and risk shaped this place, and made it simultaneously appear both open and closed to public access.

Highlights

Myriad recent research, and policy announcements (Public Health England, 2014), have emphasised the social, environmental and wellbeing benefits of public access to urban green space
Some assistance can be gleaned from a handful of existing survey-based studies examining how landowners think about public access to their rural green spaces (Teasley et al, 1997; Gentle et al, 1999; Wright et al, 2002), albeit that most of these studies have related to the US experience and may not be directly indicative of UK motives and meaning-making
In a pub we find an industry sector built firmly upon habitus

Summary

Introduction

Myriad recent research (e.g. that surveyed in Dennis and James, 2016), and policy announcements (Public Health England, 2014), have emphasised the social, environmental and wellbeing benefits of public access to urban green space. Some assistance can be gleaned from a handful of existing survey-based studies examining how landowners think about public access to their rural green spaces (Teasley et al, 1997; Gentle et al, 1999; Wright et al, 2002), albeit that most of these studies have related to the US experience (and its different topographic and legislative context) and may not be directly indicative of UK motives and meaning-making These US studies were motivated by a concern by policy-makers that, even after legislative concessions had been made at state and federal level, rural landowners were still using stated fears of liability as a reason for prohibiting recreational access to their land. As the case study will show, whilst we might expect an owner to ‘namecheck’ risk and liability anxieties when asked about their stance to access to their green spaces – because this is a dominant discursive formulation – whether that issue has a strong motivating power over the owner’s access-related actions is far harder to establish

Towards the paddock

Interpreting the story

Findings

Conclusion