Place-based Communities Research Articles

Design and implementation of blue-green infrastructure for socio-cultural benefits at community scales: The case of Wigram Basin in Ōtautahi Christchurch

Stormwater-related blue-green infrastructure (BGI) has been shown to play an important role in enhancing the socio-ecological-cultural resilience of communities under stress from climate change and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. BGI has been defined as natural, semi-natural, and artificial spaces that deliver valued bio-physical and socio-cultural benefits to communities through the facilitation of natural processes, with a particular focus on stormwater management. While studies have identified a range of benefits associated with BGI, research has only partially examined their valuation, especially concerning socio-cultural outcomes. Research has also failed to consider the ways in which BGI operates at community scales, and how this may be influenced by the design process of individual projects. This study examines the range of socio-cultural benefits associated with BGI projects, alongside the design characteristics which may influence these outcomes using a mixed-methods case study of Wigram Basin. Results show that while a range of benefits were associated with the implementation of local BGI, broader socio-cultural outcomes such as social cohesion, the facilitation of a sense of place, and the ability to practice cultural values were infrequently identified by respondents. Results also demonstrated that the transdisciplinary design team, specific project priorities, and the approach taken to community and Indigenous engagement may have influenced the range of benefits achieved by Wigram Basin. As such, this research recommends that the design of BGI considers the range of disciplines required to be involved in project design, the pathways required to provide socio-cultural benefits, early, ongoing, and place-based community and Indigenous engagement and education, and the ongoing assessment and valuation of all project outcomes to maximize BGI implementation.

Towards pluriversal community informatics

In this article we reflect on pluriversal connections for Community Informatics (CI), drawing from our collective experiences working with Indigenous Peoples in Borneo and Canada. Building on Michael Gurstein’s foundational work and situating it in relation to contemporary debates around digital equity and inclusion, we present summaries of collaborative, iterative, locally-grounded participatory action research projects that illustrate the enduring methodological, ethical and conceptual questions raised in CI. Through our interactions and shared experiences, these examples also demonstrate Gurstein’s (2012) focus on connecting across geographic and cultural boundaries in ways that respect the self-determined nature of place-based communities.

Learning through Collaboration

This article highlights the nascent efforts between College Unbound, Brown University, and Providence College—three very different types of institutions in Providence, Rhode Island—to foster cross-institutional capacity for place-based community engagement. By collectively engaging our institutions, we experimented with what collaboration around community engagement might look like within our local context. In this article, we share our approach and reflections in working to cultivate a place-based collaboration that centers community, along with limitations, lessons learned, and next steps. Through our efforts, we situate cross-institutional collaborations as an opportunity for more sustained, collaborative, and transformative work within higher education community engagement.

Building research capacity at a rural place-based community service organisation in southwest Victoria, Australia.

Building research capacity at a rural place-based community service organisation in southwest Victoria, Australia.

Harlem Health Advocacy Partners: A Local Health Department's Place-Based Community Health Worker Program.

In January 2015, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene launched Harlem Health Advocacy Partners (HHAP), a place-based initiative to demonstrate the capacity of a CHW workforce to improve the health of residents of public housing. The long-term goal of HHAP is to improve the population health of residents of public housing in East and Central Harlem and to close racial gaps in health and social outcomes. A variety of evaluation approaches have been used to assess the initiative. This paper describes the HHAP model and methods for evaluating the program.

Building a systems-thinking community workforce to scale action on determinants of health in New Zealand

This article describes findings from the evaluation of Healthy Families NZ (HFNZ), an equity-driven, place-based community health initiative. Implemented in nine diverse communities across New Zealand, HFNZ aims to strengthen the systems that can improve health and well-being. Findings highlight local needs and priorities including the social mechanisms important for reorienting health and policy systems towards place-based communities. Lessons encompass the importance of local lived experience in putting evidence into practice; the strength of acting with systems in mind; the need for relational, learning, intentional, and well-resourced community organisation; examples of how to foster place-based ‘community-up’ leadership; and how to enable responsiveness between communities and local and national policy systems. A reconceptualisation of scaling in the context of complexity and systems change is offered, which recognises that relationships and agency are key to making progress on the determinants of health.

Virtual community engagement: Engaging virtual communities for nation branding through sports

Major sporting events bring a range of social, economic, and reputational benefits for hosting nations and serve as a vehicle to showcase the nation brand. Social media engagement during sport events provides opportunities for community members to cocreate, curate and communicate their nation brand’s attributes. While research in nation branding and community engagement has examined the ways place-based communities contribute to nation branding, little is known about how and in what ways virtual communities contribute to their nation brand. This study addresses this gap by examining the virtual brand community (VBC) surrounding the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Using social network analysis and content analysis, the findings suggest that VBC contributions is dependent on the composition, participation, and cultivation of conversations focusing on the personality traits of a nation brand. Theoretically, the outcomes from this study advance understanding of leveraging the properties of VBCs in making contribution to the production and maintenance of an authentic nation brand, that values community perspectives facilitated through community engagement. For public relations, it extends the current research in digital social-level engagement in virtual settings and outlines future research in participatory approaches to nation branding. The growing use of major sporting events in supporting nation branding goals, particularly in Asian and African continents, suggests the outcome of this study has implications at regional and international levels to guide public relations managers in major events to facilitate sustainable VBCs for authentic place branding outcomes.

How can asset-based approaches reduce inequalities? Exploring processes of change in England and Spain.

Initiatives to promote health and reduce inequalities in place-based communities have increasingly adopted asset-based approaches (ABAs). However, the processes through which such initiatives might reduce inequalities are not well understood, and evidence of their impact on health is still limited. This study aimed to understand how ABAs can impact practices, relationships and the redistribution of resources to reduce health inequalities in and betweenless advantaged neighbourhoods. Qualitative research was conducted in two settings (England and Spain) where similar asset-based initiatives, aimed at training community members to become health promoters, were being implemented. Data were collected using theory of change workshops, 120 hours of observations and semi-structured interviews with 44 stakeholders (trained community members, voluntary and community sector organizations' workers and health professionals). A thematic analysis informed by systems thinking was carried out. Three main processes of change were identified: first, 'enabling asset-based thinking' defined as supporting people to adopt a view that values their own resources and people's skills and expertise. Second, 'developing asset-based capacities', described as developing personal skills, knowledge, self-confidence and relationships underpinned by asset-based thinking. Finally, 'changing decision-making and wider health determinants through ABAs' referred to achieving changes in neighbourhoods through mobilizing the asset-based capacities developed. These processes were associated with changes at an individual level, with potential to contribute to reducing inequalities through supporting individual empowerment and social capital. However, contextual factors were found key to enable or hinder changes in the neighbourhoods and acted as barriers to processes of collective empowerment, thus limiting ABAs' impact on health inequalities.

Toward (Racial) Justice-in-the-Doing of Place-Based Community Engagement

Community and campus partners benefit from place-based community engagement to enact a commitment to racial equity and community-driven decision making. Racial equity is paramount in place-based community engagement. However, very little attention has been given to the ways whiteness in the ideological foundations of higher education shapes the work lives of professionals, faculty, and the collaborations they form to address community issues. Thus, the commitment to racial equity will be no more than words without the necessary work toward the #relationshipgoal of disrupting hegemonic whiteness as a shaping force in community-university interactions. The purpose of this case study is to foreground the paradoxes of whiteness-at-work in an informal place-based community engagement collaboration between the Center for Public Life at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa and members of the historic Greenwood community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The case study design reflected participatory action research; data sources included semi- and unstructured interviews, field notes from participant observation, artifacts and documents, researcher journals and participant reflections. Reading this case with an eye to whiteness-at-work underscores the necessity of acknowledging the power of the university to determine the culture of the partnership and taking necessary steps to disrupt the practices which serve to devalue local communities and their ways of being, knowing, and doing to address the issues they prioritize. Doing the internal, interpersonal, and institutional work to disrupt hegemonic whiteness is the justice-in-the-doing in place-based community engagement that may garner the racial equity to which we aspire.

Building and sustaining freelance careers in a small nation: the case of Cardiff’s film and television industries

ABSTRACT Often characterised as an occupational group of highly skilled, responsive, resilient and creative individuals, freelancers make a vital contribution to the strength and sustainability of film and television production. Freelancers are both intrinsically situated in the places they work through the interrelations of local authorities, cultural institutions and the labour market, and are themselves placemakers, contributing to the local milieu through building place-based communities to mitigate the inherently precarious nature of their careers. Based on in-depth interviews with freelancers and screen agencies in Cardiff, this paper explores the complex relationships between creative workers and their locality. It exams how freelancers negotiate precarious careers in a small nation through the support of local development agencies and government intervention. In doing so, this work builds on previous research concerning freelancer labour in Bristol, furthering the contention that place-based interventions and policy occupies an important role in nurturing diverse and resilient regional production sectors.

Salons 4: Sustainabilities

Abstract The “Sustainabilities” salons, organized by the Fellows of the American Folklore Society, drew together folklorists from the United States, Europe, and Asia, who were interested in frameworks for the study and stewardship of culture at the nexus of economy, ecology, nature, and the multi-species ethnographic and ontological turn. Conversations highlighted the continuing friction between public environmental policies grounded in Western instrumental, anthropocentric attitudes toward nature, and deeply relational values espoused by Indigenous and environmental justice communities, and by the growing numbers of climate refugees and host communities—urban and rural—with whom folklorists and heritage scholars are increasingly engaged. Exploring what is most needed from folklorists in a time of global environmental instability, participants identified ways to build on solid foundations developed over decades of public folklore's place-based community engagement.

The role of community events in preserving identity in the context of social change: An ethnographic analysis of the World Coal Carrying Championships

This article examines the role community events can play in negotiating forms of community and place identity against a backdrop of social, economic and urban change. Our contention is that in the context of globalisation and de-industrialisation, forms of working-class community may be expressed and recreated through maintaining traditions and practices established in place-based community events. The article is based on an ethnographic study of the World Coal Carrying Championships (WCCC) which involved undertaking in-depth interviews, volunteering, focus groups, observations and archival analysis. The findings show how the WCCC is invested with powerful symbols and invented traditions that are activated through the event. By reconstructing and remobilising shared pasts in the present, the WCCC permits community members to create an affective sense of community in the contemporary context, even in spite of the destabilising loss of other aspects of their industrial lives.

Social practices and placemaking: the case of the Bons Sons festival, in Portugal

PurposeThe study aims to understand the meaning of event-based and place-based community practices, as well as the resulting social impacts.Design/methodology/approachAn ethnomethodological approach was followed (participant observation and interviews were supplemented by secondary data), with the analysis being exploratory and interpretative.FindingsThe festival and the place reinforce the community’s social practices, which have impacts beyond the festival, benefiting individuals, the community and the place, becoming a means for valorisation and diffusion of the rural way of life, and placemaking.Research limitations/implicationsIn this study the authors focus on social practices in the context of an event and of a place (the village where the event occurs). The authors connect to theories of practice, which they apply in the analysis. The value of the study lies on the underlying mechanisms (how communities exercise social practices in the context of festivals, and what social impacts may lead to) rather than its context-dependent specific results.Practical implicationsNational and regional authorities can play a role in providing local communities with adequate tools to overcome the challenges they encounter. This can be done by issuing appropriate (events) plans and policies while giving room for the locals to voice their opinions.Social implicationsCommunity-based festivals are key social practices that can strategically impact placemaking, strengthening community bonding, forging connections with outsiders and promoting well-being practices that discourage rural depopulation.Originality/valueThere is a scarcity of research that deepens the understanding of the role of festivals in placemaking and their social impacts, particularly in the rural context. This study contributes to closing this gap by focussing on the social practices of a community-based festival in a village in the interior of Portugal.

Mapping the Journey of (non-) Reporting in Response to Racism: A Change-oriented Approach to Reporting Barriers, Motives and Support Needs

ABSTRACT Governments and other agencies seeking to tackle racism have been calling for better empirical evidence, including complaint data based on reports by people who have experienced racism. This approach requires much of those who face racism, often while offering little effective support or redress for them. There is a need to understand reporting or not reporting experiences of racism as a result of a complex interplay between different factors – as a (non-) reporting journey, rather than as a singular moment of decision. Reporting is at risk of remaining an ineffective strategy for responding to racism where the reporting pathways and support services are not sufficiently aligned with the expectations and needs of those who experience racism. This article discusses the findings of three place-based community engagement and research projects across four local municipalities in Melbourne. The projects examined locally specific community perspectives and expectations in relation to reporting pathways and support services for those experiencing racism. The analysis of this community input resulted in anti-racism roadmaps specific for each local area, which were co-developed with local communities.

Prefiguring Alternative Organizing: Confronting marginalization through projective cultural adjustment and tempered autonomy

In this paper, we examine community collectives – place-based, community-led initiatives for sustainable livelihood, as an alternative to the top-down, efficiency-driven economic model. Drawing on the theoretical framework of prefigurative organizing, we examined the strategies employed by community members in confronting entrenched inequalities and overcoming marginalization as they envision and engage in inclusive futures. We conducted a comparative case study of two exemplary community collectives in India that exhibited differences in the degrees of internal and external marginalization. We identified two key cross-cutting themes of prefigurative organizing: projective cultural adjustment – whether a community leverages their traditional culture or breaks away from it, and tempered autonomy – negotiating autonomy without overtly challenging dominant groups, and exercising self-imposed restraints to make independent decisions. We show how these two themes manifested across three key processes of prefigurative organizing: prefiguring self-governance; commoning; and cultivating discursive spaces. These findings help us theorize that in communities where the degree of internal marginalization is high due to persisting social hierarchies, breaking away from past discriminatory practices, incorporating suspension of consent in the decision-making process, and introducing multiple constructive works are essential components of prefigurative organizing. In communities where the degree of external marginalization is high, building on the past, incorporating refusal in decision-making, and introducing unified constructive work are important components of prefigurative organizing. We suggest that prefigurative organizing against the dominant power structure, whether within community social hierarchies or external exploitative political-economic structures, is based on selective and strategic engagement without seeking an exit, as exit might not be an option for place-based communities. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this research for alternative organizing and grand challenges.

Place-based community events and resistance to territorial stigmatisation

PurposePlace-based community events fulfil important functions, internally and externally. They provide opportunities for people from diverse communities and cultures to encounter each other, to participate in pleasurable activities in convivial settings and to develop mutual understanding. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the value of such events as a means of resisting or challenging the deleterious effects of territorial stigmatisation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors explore two place-based community events in areas that have been subject to territorial stigmatisation: Govanhill in Glasgow, Scotland, and South Dunedin, New Zealand. They draw on in-depth case study methods including observation and interviews with key local actors and employ inductive analysis to identify themes across the datasets.FindingsThe demonstrate how neighbourhood events in both Glasgow and Dunedin actively seek to address some of the deleterious outcomes of territorial stigmatisation by emphasising strength and asset-based discourses about the areas they reflect and represent. In their planning and organisation, both events play an important mediating role in building and empowering community, fostering intercultural encounters with difference and strengthening mutuality within their defined places. They make use of public and semi-public spaces to attract diverse groups while also increasing the visibility of marginalised populations through larger showcase events.Research limitations/implicationsThe empirical element focuses only on two events, one in Glasgow, Scotland (UK), and the other in South Dunedin (New Zealand). Data generated were wholly qualitative and do not provide quantitative evidence of “change” to material circumstances in either case study community.Practical implicationsHelps organisers think about how they need to better understand their communities if they are to attract diverse participation, including how they programme public and semi-public spaces.Social implicationsPlace-based community events have significant value to neighbourhoods, and they need to be resourced effectively if they are to sustain the benefits they produce. These events provide an opportunity for diverse communities to encounter each other and celebrate what they share rather than what divides them.Originality/valueThis paper is the first to examine how place-based community events help resist narratives of territorial stigmatisation, which produce negative representations about people and their environments. The paper draws on ethnographic insights generated over time rather than a one-off snapshot which undermines some events research.

Building and Broadening Place-Based Community Engagement: A Case Study

Building and Broadening Place-Based Community Engagement: A Case Study

Community organising in higher education: activist community-engaged learning in geography

ABSTRACT This paper highlights the transformative potential of place-based community organizing as a theory and practice of progressive social change and as a critical approach to the social purpose of community engagement in Higher Education Institutions. The aim is to expose power asymmetries and civic renewal “from below” through a focus on community engaged learning, specifically community organizing on the curriculum for geography undergraduates. The empirical focus is an English university, but the issues and observations are widespread. Around the world, students are coping with disruptions following a global pandemic, austerity, and loss of trust in local democracy – participating in climate emergency and racial justice movements. This paper advances community organising and community engaged learning as a mutually co-constitutive challenge to conventional notions of the student as a passive consumer of recruitment, learning, and individualised notions of civic responsibility. Methods of community organising are based on the theory that if you want change, you need power: change ultimately traces a motivational journey from anger to agitation and action. Empirical vignettes explore the transformative role of emotionally stirring “political theatre” and direct action, while exposing tensions that arise due to the transitory status of students in place and time.

‘A Space to Vent’: Cultivating Indigenous Queer Digital Communities Through Relations of Care and Support.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander gender and sexuality diverse peoples are harnessing digital spaces to transcend territorially defined place-based communities of the past, and create new, informal, digital identity communities. These communities are composed of relatively homogenous subjectivities and are centred on shared identities, histories, experiences, practices and resistances. Drawing from in-depth qualitative interviews with Aboriginal Queer women who are content creators and the theory of the Cultural Interface, this article explores how participants agentically cultivate identity communities and kin through TikTok, Instagram and Spotify. Additionally, it exposes the significance of Indigenous Queer digital communities and chosen families to participants experiences of Social and Emotional Wellbeing. Through their digital cultures of care and kin-making participants reveal how Social and Emotional Wellbeing is relationally practiced online and how they harness media technologies to continue and augment existing Indigenous practices and Queer approaches to family that thrive and survive on reciprocity, responsibility and love. In doing so, participants demonstrate how they embody oppositional intimacies, kinship groups and Indigenous LGBTIQ+ identities which transgress and challenge settler norms of intimacy, family, identity, gender and sexuality.

Urbino belonging: Exploring place-based community heritage with digital & participatory methods

ABSTRACT What we understand and choose as heritage is a question rooted in our individual and collective notions of identity and feelings of community. Critical heritage studies highlight the links between heritage and recognition, emotions, and the everyday lives of people and communities. We introduce a methodology for a digitally facilitated and participatory study of place-based community heritage. Inspired by Participatory Data Design and Photovoice methodologies, the Urban Belonging App enables participants to communicate phenomenological aspects of urban spaces by sharing, signifying, and evaluating pictures of familiar places in the city. A quali-quantitative analysis of the app’s data best exploits its multi-dimensionality: the characteristic of being both countable and measurable and semantically rich and relational. The case study illustrates how the methodology is used to study community heritage in an exploratory and descriptive way. Most valued and recognised heritage places, as well as less conventional understandings of heritage in Urbino, Italy, are identified. Two participants show how heritage differently embeds with everyday experiences, memories, and feelings of community. Its adaptability and ability to capture the contested and phenomenological nature of heritage and to operationalise complex definitions of community qualify the methodology to enable systematic research on bottom-up, situated heritage values.