by Hannah E. McConnell

Great expectations

Like many other PhD students I am sure, I found myself struggling to stay motivated over the doldrum summer months. Campus quietens and academic activities wind down, which is an issue if, like me, you get energy from spending time with people who are enthusiastic about their research. I just couldn’t muster much excitement about my PhD topic.
So I admit that by the time September came round I was glad to be going away to Earthwatch’s Science Camp, and I had high expectations for it. The only things I really knew about the event was that it was a six-day/five-night residential event at an education centre near Oxford, and that the content of those days would be about environment-related research. I had hopes that the event would generate fresh ideas and inspiration. Happily, I can report that I got these in spades!

Translating knowledge with integrity

The days at Science Camp were jam-packed with talks, workshops, activities and reflections, and always getting outside in nature as much as possible if the weather permitted. Each day was centred around a topic including: the role of science in addressing environmental challenges, engaging communities in research, using citizen science and communicating science.

Activities were crafted to be fun, to get us up and moving and interacting with one another, keeping us engaged and making us laugh, even though at times they might be powerful reminders about the current health of the planet and of the urgency that is required to take action. Time was devoted to thinking about environmental inequity, about our privilege as researchers, about valuing indigenous knowledge practices and decolonising research, as well as the importance of community-organised participation and finding solutions to challenges.
There were external speakers every day from a diverse range of organisations, from science journalists to citizen science co-ordinators, offering practical advice about how to engage communities and how to communicate our research. We went on local site visits, used flipcharts and watched TED talks, took part in online quizzes, tried out making videos for social media and even got to do some painting!

We were encouraged to think about the value of storytelling as a medium for conveying our own identity as researchers, as well as storytelling to translate and communicate participant voice and knowledge with integrity. We learned how innovative creative research methods, such as art, photography, and poetry, are not only accessible and low cost, but can be effective and powerful means of sharing participants’ personal stories which can have real positive impact.

The power of community is massive

One of the reasons I think Science Camp was so enjoyable and effective was because of the way it is set up as an immersive context. Hill End Education Centre is situated out in beautiful countryside near Oxford. Dormitories are set out across the site, surrounded by trees and tracks that take you off to unexpected sculptures of tiny mushroom circles. It’s a perfect setting to get better acquainted with green and tiny life forms that make up our natural world, from the gentle old oak trees on site to the gigantic hornets that came buzzing in from their nearby nest. At the beginning of the week, we were given the message that “the power of community is massive”, and so it proved to be. Right from the start we formed a community: sharing dorm rooms, living and eating together. There were over twenty of us; two facilitators as well as a mixture of early career researchers and PGRs originating from Australia, South America, Nigeria, India, Denmark, the UK, and Oman, providing a diversity of experience and knowledge that was incredibly rich.

The event was well organised, and the team worked tirelessly to look after us while we were there. Individual’s faith, prayer and meditation needs were accommodated for, and all food for the week was vegan or vegetarian. Blackberries, damsons and apples were foraged from the land to make huge fruit crumbles enough for everyone, and evenings were spent sitting around the campfire singing, telling stories or jokes, or playing quizzes or games. There was also enough time for solo reflection, naps, for wandering around the grounds and befriending the trees, or cosying up on sofas together enjoying wholesome chats. Some of us are already meeting up with one another after the event to attend conferences and explore potential future collaborations.
I started the week feeling a little lost, but I came away feeling renewed and reinspired. I feel more connected to the natural environment and am buzzing with ideas for my research. I feel very grateful to have had the opportunity and would absolutely recommend Science Camp to future PhD students working in environment-related research.

Photo credits: images from the event (with permission to use).

by Hooman Foroughmand Araabi 

The concept of place lies at the centre of urban design and planning. Traditionally, place has been defined as a specific part of space imbued with social meaning, memories and activities, often public in character and central to civic identity. Despite its centrality, however, the ways in which place is imagined, designed, and produced are frequently constrained by narrow assumptions about its intended users.

Historically, these assumptions have privileged a normative, often able upper-class male subject as the default user of space. While recent decades have seen critical expansions, such as the recognition of women’s spatial experiences and, more recently, questions of race and spatial justice, many identities and embodied realities remain absent from prevailing conceptions of who place is for. The well-intentioned assertion that “place is for everyone” often results in centring a statistically average, fictionalised user, thereby erasing the diverse realities of everyday urban life.

Inclusion Against Oppression

The very notion of inclusion is contested. When framed as assimilation into a pre-existing norm, it assumes that bodies and behaviours can be moulded to fit dominant spatial paradigms, evoking the violent conformity of the Procrustean bed. Such a framing risks transforming inclusion into a subtle form of oppression. By contrast, when inclusion is reconceptualised as an expansion of design thinking to embrace a plurality of lived experiences, arguably the principle underlying the turn to inclusion at the beginning, it opens the possibility of genuine spatial justice. In June 2025, funded by AHRC IAA, a multidisciplinary team of urban designers, academics, third-sector practitioners, and disability advocates convened to explore how placemaking might better include individuals with disabilities. Grounded in principles of co-production, the initiative sought to generate tangible benefits for non-academic stakeholders. The event aimed not only to co-design solutions to pressing challenges but also to establish a shared plan for implementation. During this research event, we employed experiential kits to simulate different bodily conditions, such as restricted mobility or age-related impairments (Figures 1 and 2).

From Patchy Knowledge to Inclusive Practice

A central challenge persists: the legacy of placemaking shaped by limited assumptions has, in many cases, actively contributed to the disabling of particular populations. Designing for those at the “tails” of the normal distribution, those furthest from the statistical average, requires sustained attention to diversity in mobility, sensory experience, and cognitive engagement. Yet scholarship on disability and the built environment remains fragmented, disproportionately focused on transportation systems and interior architecture, with relatively little attention to the public realm and wider urban contexts.

This fragmentation is further compounded by the marginal presence of disability and inclusion within urban design curricula. The gap between academic knowledge and practice is both real and urgent, particularly in the context of an ageing population in the UK. Inclusive design can no longer be treated as a niche concern; it is a societal necessity.

Empathy as a Design Approach

Empathy constitutes a vital, though often overlooked, aspect of (urban) design. In our recent research event, the experiential kits used showcase their importance in advancing this debate. While such tools cannot replicate the lived experience of disability, they operate as powerful catalysts for reflective design thinking. They serve as reminders that placemaking is not merely about metrics or materials; it is fundamentally about care.

Empathy may begin with exposure, but it requires deepening through dialogue and collaboration. Creating opportunities for placemakers to share knowledge, challenge assumptions, and expand their ethical and emotional engagement is not simply desirable; it is essential. To design better places, we must cultivate greater care.

What Comes Next?

Collaboration across professional boundaries, combined with the cultivation of empathy as a design approach, may foster new ways of conceptualising inclusion in placemaking, approaches that more closely align with the genuine incorporation of bodies routinely disabled by the design of public space. Future research must investigate how professionals engage with disability and inclusion and explore how deeper forms of care can be nurtured within the field. Such work has the potential to move practice beyond the superficiality of “tick-box” approaches to accessibility, toward more substantive and effective forms of inclusive urban design.

Figure 1 displays Hooman engaging with the experiential kits.

by Reem Elnady

When I first began my PhD, I thought I was designing a study. What I did not realize was that the study would also reshape me—my methods, my assumptions, and my understanding of what it means to do feminist urban research. Working closely with Muslim refugee women in Bristol has continually challenged the idea of the researcher as expert and of methods as neutral tools. I have come to understand that feminist urban research is not simply about studying others, but about building knowledge together—knowledge that is situated, relational, and grounded in lived experience. As, my research explores the urban integration and everyday experiences of Muslim refugee women in Bristol, I approached this work from the understanding that knowledge begins from the standpoint of the marginalized. This standpoint is never singular or fixed as women are not a homogenous group. Their realities are subjective, complex, and shaped by daily experiences, social positions, and interactions with the urban environment.

From this perspective, research is not conducted about participants but with them. Their stories, insights, and embodied knowledge offer critical entry points to understanding how social and spatial structures shape refugee women’s everyday lives. To access this, I conducted a series of focus groups with women from diverse backgrounds—Arabic-speaking, Somali, Sudanese, Kurdish, and others. Each group brought with them unique languages, cultural norms, migration stories, and ways of engaging with the city. I approached these focus groups as collaborative spaces—not just data-gathering exercises, but dialogic encounters where knowledge is co-produced.

However, working across such diversity revealed the limitations of a one-size-fits-all method. Differences in language, literacy, familiarity with the city, and comfort with group discussion constantly required me to reflect and adapt my approach. Reflexivity, therefore, became not a methodological add-on, but a foundational practice embedded throughout the research process. As part of my inquiry, I employed a range of participatory methods to capture how women navigate and experience the city. Two methods—emotional mapping and cognitive mapping—proved particularly insightful in revealing the spatial and emotional dimensions of participants’ everyday urban lives.

Emotional mapping acknowledges that human experiences of space are not merely functional or physical; they are deeply emotional. Yet, emotions have historically been marginalized in urban studies and spatial analysis. Emotional geography challenges this marginalization by arguing that emotions are not only relevant to space, but they also actively shape spatial experiences.

In practice, I conducted emotional mapping exercises using printed maps of Bristol and stickers symbolizing various emotions—such as joy, fear, comfort, or discrimination. Women marked locations associated with feelings, sparking discussions around safety, belonging, racism, and isolation. These visual tools translated intangible experiences into shared, visible forms, making them accessible for collective reflection. However, the method also revealed a critical assumption: map literacy. While some participants were highly familiar with the city’s geography, others—despite years in Bristol—struggled with reading and interpreting maps. To address this, we adapted the method by incorporating photographs of key locations and encouraging storytelling and group discussion to support participation. Emotional mapping thus evolved into a hybrid tool—part perceptual, part emotional—that uncovered layers of urban experience often missed by conventional methods.

Cognitive mapping was used to explore participants’ mental representations of the city—specifically their daily journeys, patterns of navigation, and places of meaning. This method allowed women to visually and narratively express how they experienced and understood urban space, identifying landmarks of comfort or zones of exclusion. These maps revealed not only spatial knowledge but also the social, emotional, and cultural textures embedded in their everyday routines. For women with limited English, cognitive mapping offered a non-verbal way of expression. In some groups, especially where participants did not know each other personally, the activity stimulated rich dialogue, with younger participants often assisting older women in illustrating their maps. However, in groups where women knew each other well, cultural norms around privacy and modesty made sharing more difficult. Here, the method was less successful, as fears of judgment or exposure constrained openness.

These experiences affirmed the importance of methodological flexibility and sensitivity when working across diverse cultural and linguistic contexts. Each method offered powerful insights but also required ongoing adaptation and responsiveness. Some methods I anticipated would succeed fell flat; others unexpectedly sparked meaningful dialogue. The process reminded me that feminist urban research is not a linear application of tools but an iterative, relational practice of listening, learning and adjusting. Success lies not in perfect planning, but in a willingness to revise, pause, or even abandon a method when it no longer serves the participants. Reflexivity, in this context, is not a discrete phase but a continuous way of thinking, doing, and being throughout the research journey.

Reem Elnady is a Doctoral Researcher in the Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments.

by Yarden Woolf

Over the last two and a half years, I have been researching some of the greenspaces on campus as part of my PhD. Overall, my study explores the relationship between students’ experience in greenspaces, nature connectedness, and pro-environmental orientation. To understand this relationship, I deployed several methods, including observations, photo-elicitation interviews, and walking interviews (you can read my blog about walking interviews here: Walking interviews as a research method | Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments blog). These methods were deployed between March 2024 and February 2025, on different days and times, including weekends, to gather as much data as possible.

My study examined four greenspaces on Frenchay campus, chosen for their varying design elements, with some containing mostly vegetation and others dominated by hard landscapes. These greenspaces are: The Student Union Square, the Farmhouse, the Restorative Walled Garden, and Information Point Plaza. I will now present the main findings regarding each of these.

Student Union Square

Overall, most students that were seen in this greenspace were passing through, going to and from other buildings around it. Almost all of them were on foot, with just a few cycling and using a scooter. This finding suggests students use this greenspace mostly for necessary activities like commuting, particularly during autumn and winter. However, during spring and summer terms, students tend to use this space for individual and social activities as well. Interviews with students corroborated these findings. Specifically, students mentioned using this space mostly during sunny days and for activities organised by the Student Union (the Student Union Square is represented in the photo above).

The Farmhouse

Similarly to the Student Union Square, students were seen engaging in various activities. However, while in the Student Union Square the most observed activity was passing through, in the Farmhouse, this was the least observed activity. This finding can probably be attributed to the Farmhouse’s location, bordering Wallscourt Park Student Accommodation and the Restorative Walled Garden, and situated behind the School of Engineering. In each session, only a handful of students, if any, were seen crossing the grassy area towards Wallscourt Park or the Restorative Walled Garden, while most students were lingering and spending time in this greenspace, engaging in sunbathing, having lunch, socialising and playing sports. During a weekend observation session, students were seen in larger groups, with picnic supplies and loudspeakers. Group sports activities, like football and rugby, were also observed. During the interviews, several students mentioned enjoying this greenspace for leisure activities with friends.

Restorative Walled Garden

Some students were seen going in from one entrance and exiting from the other without spending time in the greenspace, but they were few compared to students lingering. During the weekend observation, only several students were seen using this space, some alone and some socialising with others. A few other students were also passing through. A possible explanation for this could be the location of the greenspace, as it is out of the way, hence, students are less likely to stumble upon it and are more likely to get to it on purpose. Several students spoke about this greenspace during the interviews, praising the Grounds Team for maintaining it well. They also mentioned enjoying it between breaks as a place for relaxation. However, students also discussed that other students and staff smoke in this greenspace, and this had a negative effect on their ability to enjoy it.

Information Point Plaza

During the observation sessions, this greenspace underwent a minor transformation with more seating amenities added to it. Despite this, most students that were observed in it were passing through on their way somewhere else. Like the Student Union Square, this greenspace is strategically located between areas and facilities that attract many students, like the Information Point where students can ask staff about general enquiries, UWE’s bus stops, and the main block which is home to UWE’s library. This is also the only greenspace out of the four that students did not mention during the interviews.

Final thoughts

From the findings, it emerges that students enjoy campus greenspaces, particularly those that incorporate substantial vegetation, like the Farmhouse and the Restorative Walled Garden. Many students also mentioned how campus greenspace improves their wellbeing and appreciated how well-maintained the campus is. However, some students said they were not aware of these greenspaces, which might suggest a need for signposting around campus.

To encourage students to use campus greenspaces, the university should also provide amenities, such as benches, chairs, bins, and sheltered areas. For larger groups, open places, such as lawns, are advisable.

Yarden Woolf is a PhD Researcher, Landscape architect and urban planner. She is UWE PGR Lead Rep and CATE CPGRC Student Representative

by Philippa Hughes, Danielle Sinnett and Jessica Lamond

Biodiversity loss is a global threat. Urban development is a major contributing factor to this crisis, future urban growth could destroy habitats for hundreds of species. However, new approaches to urban development could help halt, and even reverse, the loss of biodiversity and create urban spaces that are embedded in nature. As the global human population is increasingly urbanised, biodiversity in towns and cities can also safeguard access to nature and nurture human nature connections.

Research by UWE as part of the NERC/ESRC-funded BiUrbs project, has examined the factors that impact the delivery of biodiversity through urban development and redevelopment. The researchers synthesised evidence on goals, co-benefits, barriers and enablers related to biodiversity delivery through a literature review and workshops. They then assessed the importance of these for stakeholders in England. This assessment judged the relative importance of factors and the extent to which stakeholders agreed on this.

Their findings highlight an interplay between factors that stakeholders see as requirements for success. Strong policy frameworks with effective enforcement are seen as crucial. The UK’s new Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) regulations may provide an example of this approach, where developments are required to increase biodiversity on site through development, or mitigate any loss off-site. To achieve this, stakeholders feel the sector needs significant upskilling – from designers and planners to site managers and maintenance teams. This is in line with a 2023 RTPI study that found that 81% of public sector planners felt they required further support to implement BNG. Finally, the balance of economic incentives and disincentives must make biodiversity enhancement financially viable for developers. The research highlights that the factors are interconnected. Policy imperatives will only work if professionals have the skills to implement them, while financial incentives may encourage developers to go beyond minimum requirements.

When implemented effectively, biodiversity-friendly developments can deliver multiple benefits. Stakeholders were mostly positive about the possibility for biodiversity delivery to be effectively combined with other benefits of green infrastructure, such as managing flood risk and providing amenity space, and stressed the importance of good design in achieving these aims. Stakeholders were also enthusiastic about the current level of political and public support for biodiversity enhancement and nature-friendly development. Continuing public education on the processes and merits of biodiversity protection in urban areas could help sustain positive attitudes towards changing urban spaces.