Abstract
Policymakers and practitioners working in urban greenspace management want to know what kind of interventions are effective in promoting mental wellbeing. In practice, however, they rely on multiple forms of knowledge, often in unwritten form. This paper considers how such knowledge is interpreted and used by a range of stakeholders to identify greenspace interventions to support residents’ health and wellbeing in one UK city. It examines the interface between academic research, policy and practice, drawing on the findings of a three-year study in Sheffield, UK. The Improving Wellbeing through the Urban Nature project investigated the links between ‘urban nature’ and mental health. One strand of the research sought to influence policy and practice, and this article presents findings and reflects on some of the processes of this exercise. It highlights the role of tacit knowledge in practice and its influence on practitioners’ choice of greenspace interventions and the challenges in drawing on such knowledge to influence policy. The findings affirm practice-based knowledge as socially situated, interpretively fashioned and politically weighted. This paper concludes by demonstrating the importance of considering the local context when devising policy prescriptions for greenspace provision and management.
Highlights
The city of Sheffield in the north of England used to be famous for its steel-making
While we were aware of the extensive academic evidence on the wellbeing benefits of urban greenspace, we wanted to explore how this aligned with practitioners’ tacit knowledge and experience of local context and how this tacit knowledge and contextual understanding influenced their views of which interventions would work in practice, and how
In considering the range of potentially appropriate interventions, we bore in mind—and were frequently reminded of by practitioners—the diversity contained within a single city—diversity of habitat, from the moorland of the Peak District National Park to wooded valleys and floodplains, and diversity of population in terms of culture and socioeconomic status
Summary
The city of Sheffield in the north of England used to be famous for its steel-making This former industrial city boasts of nearly one thousand publicly accessible green spaces, 4.5 million trees [1], and a national park on its doorstep. The city has above-average levels of ill-health: 6.1% of residents rate their health as poor or very poor compared with 5.5% nationally [2]. It is profoundly unequal: life expectancy is nearly ten years lower for women who live at the eastern end of the 83 bus route than those who live at its western terminus [3]
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